CF : You produced your last album. Do you think this was necessary to maintain the integrity of your music? I admit that it would have been easier just to go on making straight country records but I've said so many times that I don't want to be told who I am. I don't think anybody does - I don't care who you are. So I think I kind of rebelled a little bit with this record. Although that rebellion extended to recording in the Bahamas, the album was still made within the country music community. It was produced by my longtime friends, Tony Brown and James Stroud. These guys are my warriors. They're not gonna allow me to conform. As for the musicians, who include Stewart Smith (whose sensuous electric guitar work complements the sultry vocals turned "Learning to Live with Love Again" into something of an erotic masterpiece), Paul Franklin, Aubrey Haynie, Matt Rollings, etc, they have all thanked me. The Nashville musicians dug it. They actually loved working with me because I take them somewhere different.

CF : How did it feel to be on stage with your mother again for the Power to Change Tour? Since 1991, you've been running a solo career. Lately, you've been singing and performing with your mom again as The Judds. Do you think there could be a conflict between these two aspects of your career? It was wonderful and it was sad. It provided some of the happiest days of my life as well as some of the darkest. Keep in mind that I was raised by a woman who allowed me to be me. She said don't be defined by that culture outside, be defined within. It's sad, but you know what, I keep on keepin' on. I don't give up. I refuse to go home and feel beaten down. I am weary, I will admit. This year has been a real hard year for me. I've been on the road pretty much the whole year, and I've been fighting every fire I can. I just want to be allowed to spread my wings and fly over to these different genres of music and see what happens when I land. So, I've spent the year selling "Wynonna" and saying don't forget about The Judds either!

So, picture this. My mother comes up on an elevator, dressed in a sort of fairy Godmother, Queen of everything gown. And she wears this crown. She has a sceptre and she has a little basket of fairy dust. There are children in the front row and, you know, who want fairy dust, and it's hilarious. And she does the fairy dust thing because it makes dreams come true. Well, Gracie has now begun to help her with that, and Gracie's got responsibility and she realizes that these dreams will come true and she takes it very seriously - as you know girls do. These two little spirits are walking around, sprinkling fairy dust, while I'm trying to be serious and sing.

I used to see my mother as the woman who would be a problem to me in her old age, and did nothing but spend her life trying to figure out a way to diagnose me. Now I see this woman who barely was able to raise these two children, who are very high spirited and not your normal, average children we were so creative and so high spirited, oh my gosh. And you know, what I really believe with all my heart is that I have been able to survive in this stinking music business that's so confusing and so, just sometimes, terrifying, as well as exhilarating, and the only thing that keeps me sane at times is knowing my greatest identity is being a child of God and my mother. Something remarkable happened in 1991 at the end of The Judds, just as it did for me this year. I was reborn. In death, there is life and in the death of the Judds came the life of Wynonna. And I found a side of me just aching and begging to scream and stomp and just sing through my toenails! You might think that, having established my individuality, I would find the dynamic of the duo had changed when I re-entered it at the end of last year. Well, yes and no. Mostly no. I have spent nine years individuating. So what have I done? I've worked hard to be my own person and now, all of a sudden, I find myself, you know an hour before show time, Mom will come over to the bus and she'll say 'You know, I need to talk to you about you being late the other night to the show. I think it's unprofessional.' And I just look at her with my head sort of cocked to one side and I all of a sudden feel like I'm 18 again. She challenges me daily to be calm and rational! She knows what buttons to push, of course. She knows that she can send me to the moon quicker than anyone else on the planet. When we were on the road before, it was always very well. A lot of fire, a lot of temper, a lot of passion. The Judd women have always been full of passion. I mean, you say the 'can't' - we have a saying, Can't died in the poorhouse!' But if Mom is still the same Mom she was in the old days, at least Ashley and I have grown into an acceptance of her. I guess in my twenties, when Mom would come up to me and say, 'Are you gonna eat that? That's, like, the second piece of cake you've had to eat today and you need to lose some weight,' now I sort of expect her to say it and I've learned how to grin and bear it and how to have a sense of humor. You know what I do? I laugh. That's my armor. When I get up in the morning, I put on my armor and my armor is, 'I'm very compassionate now because I've watched my mother go to hell and back several times.' She almost died, for crying out loud. I definitely have a sense that she's here and she's a miracle, so there's a lot of letting go of that other silly crap that used to drive me crazy about her. But I do find myself having to share, that's the hardest part, whether it's a dressing room or I have to be patient and wait on her sometimes. I suppose I am illustrating another universal law, not the one Mom used to discipline us with: it's that nobody can drive you nuts like your mother can. And just for a little shake of irony, you will then become her. I see myself becoming my mother and I go, 'Oh, my gosh!' But there's so much good about her - but there are those things where I don't want to be like her. I don't want to be as crazy as she is at times, yet I know what makes her crazy, why she's crazy, and I'm just grateful I didn't have to go down the road she did. I really wish that everyone would have come to see us live. Most people don't even know really who I am. I don't rely on a lot of the bells and whistles. I rely on audience rapport, which is very vulnerable. If the audience is not with it and they're not really giving back, I can feel it. It's like being on a date and the guy is not talking a lot and you sort of feel like you're talking to yourself. I really rely on the audience. Combing these two worlds in a live show is exhausting and, yet, re-building in so many ways. It was a miracle indeed that we pulled it off. You have no idea. I will remember it with only pride though, and it's something that I can pass down to my kids. I just loved the concept of being with my family at the start of the millennium. And then I remembered, oh yeah, I like being a solo artist too. That's where my ambition goes through the roof.

CF : Do you plan on equally splitting your time between your solo career and The Judds or will you and your mom join only for very occasional events so that you can keep most of your time and energy for your solo career? There are no plans to continue with The Judds in its current state. It was a once in a millennium kind of thing. I am back to focusing on the music I always dreamed of making. CF : This is your first solo tour in Europe. Why did you wait such a long time before touring Europe? That's a good question that I can't answer. Quite frankly, I've been so busy over here trying to keep up that I haven't really given it much thought. It wasn't until recently that I even knew that there was a need. Maybe I'm naïve, a small-town girl, but I really didn't understand that there was a desire for me to go over. I remember coming over with Mom and feeling extremely optimistic and thinking, 'Wow, I'd love to come over here more often.' To do that, it takes a lot of planning. I don't think a lot of the people, and I'm talking about the labels, booking agencies and all those people around me, the suits, they kept me so busy over here, that nobody ever really mentioned to me that there was even an option. I was so caught up in doing my thing here, I didn't realize that there was a bigger world out there!

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