At the start of their powerful self-titled debut, the Highwomen—four leading women, banded together from distant corners of the country-music universe—go for the genre’s androgenic throat. “I was a Highwoman/And a mother from my youth,” sings Brandi Carlile, who helped recruit the quartet after fellow singer Amanda Shires realized how few women rank as modern country stars. It is a rewrite of “Highwayman,” of course, a composite sketch of the fabled spirit of valiant men. Written by country hit machine Jimmy Webb, the tune gave the collective of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings their collective name, The Highwaymen, in the mid-’80s.

For some, rewriting “Highwayman” may be an act of sacrilege, tantamount to, say, riffing on “The Star-Spangled Banner” or goofing on “Stairway to Heaven.” But Shires and Carlile rewrote it with Webb’s blessing, turning its four macho verses into remembrances from persecuted women—a Honduran immigrant, a Salem witch, a Freedom Rider, a pioneer preacher—and testimonials to their immortal temerity. “We are the Highwomen/We sing a story still untold,” everyone sings in the chorus, fashioning a mission statement into magnetic harmony. “We carry the sons you can only hold.” It is at once better than its classic original and a brilliant gambit, at once illustrating the genre’s gender gap and rushing to fill it once and for all.

The membership of the Highwomen is a marvel alone, an effort to reach across the aisles of country and then out of them. Maren Morris is the quartet’s exuberant star, having channeled the magnetism of early hits like “My Church” into a city-slick, chart-climbing bauble with Zedd and a second album, Girl, that unapologetically offers her up as a stadium-sized star if the world will have her. Carlile, meanwhile, is the adult-contemporary crossover dissident, as whip-smart as she is poignant. She has inched her way towards the spotlight over the years, and on last year’s enormous By The Way, I Forgive You, it found her. Shires has deep country bona fides; a fiddle-playing mystic, she sings like Emmylou Harris and writes like Van Morrison. And Hemby is one of her generation's Jimmy Webbs, a prolific hitmaker who co-wrote Kacey Musgraves’ “Butterflies” and Lady Gaga’s A Star Is Born standards. The Highwomen’s collective résumé quietly says that a woman’s place in country music is, well, anywhere.

These dozen songs pull all those perspectives toward the center. Country music has tended to reduce women to stereotypes, like the doe-eyed lover or the vengeful ex-lover or the sassy sex symbol. But The Highwomen contains and welcomes multitudes, reflected by “Crowded Table,” an ode to the value of intersectionality and solidarity that calls back to the folk revivalism of Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. (To that end, Yola, a black, English-born country-soul singer sings the title track's early verse about being a Freedom Rider, hurtling over a half-dozen expectations at once.)

During “Old Soul,” Morris gracefully embodies a woman who has given herself over to domestic duties and reasonable responsibilities but daydreams about escaping into the life of a “wild child for a day.” Playful and political, the irrepressible “Redesigning Women” alternately invokes Paula Deen and Rosie the Riveter, or the impulse to buy too many shoes and rear a generation sparking a social revolution. Motherhood is both deeply meaningful (tenderly voiced by Hemby on the swaying “My Only Child”) and sporadically annoying (as on “My Name Can’t Be Mama,” a modern honky-tonk ringer fit for Dolly Parton).

Love looks different here than the standard country conception, too. During “Loose Change,” Morris sings about a dude who doesn’t appreciate her value and her quest to leave him romantically bankrupt; Carlile and Shires arrive in the chorus, a unified posse you’d be a fool to fuck with. But the album’s centerpiece and wrecking ball is “If She Ever Leaves Me,” written by Shires with her husband and the band’s guitarist, Jason Isbell, for Carlile, who married another woman before it was even legal stateside. It is, on the surface, a sardonic kiss-off for a man hitting on her wife, a piece of you’re-not-her-type perfection anchored by the quip, “That’s too much cologne/She likes perfume.” The song’s real power, though, is its vulnerability, expressed through Carlile’s confession that she’s not the best partner, but she’s trying all the time. The Highwomen is a safe space for all kinds of honesty.

The Highwomen have expressed a rebellious kinship with their predecessors in The Highwaymen. “Wanting to do things their own way is what we’re sort of trying to mime,” Shires told The New York Times of the connection. But in the ’80s, The Highwaymen were aging outlaw gods, banding together after the initial glow of their own careers had dimmed; between the awkward drum machines and a Bob Seger cover, you could hear them fumbling with questions of relevance and senescence. The Highwomen, however, are now at the height of their respective powers and part of a larger cultural push, as vital as any four stars might be. The Highwaymen have often been called country’s best supergroup, but the Highwomen are better. They do here what the men never could—stretch the notions of what country can and must become.

Correction: An original version of this review misidentified the singer of a line in the title track.

Buy: Rough Trade

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