Keeping The Faith

04/22/1998 3:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Michael McCall

After a nearly three-year break, Faith Hill returns to country music a different person. Since her last album, It Matters To Me she's turned 30, married country star Tim McGraw, and given birth to her first child, Gracie (now one year old.)

But that's not all that's changed for her. In the mid-1990s, she was country music's unchallenged queen of the prom. Bearing the beaming smile and uncomplicated optimism of a debutante, Hill paraded onto the country music scene with great fanfare and even greater success.

She quickly set a couple of new records: Her first single, 1994's "Wild One," became the first debut country music single to spend four weeks at No. 1; she also became the first female country performer to have her two introductory albums sell more than two million copies apiece.

But that was before the emergence of Shania Twain, LeAnn Rimes and Deana Carter. During Hill's time off, the newcomers have re-written the record book when it comes to women in country music.

Hill has no doubt sensed the changing landscape and felt the challenge. How she reacts comes across on her third album, Faith, and it says loads about how the native of Star, Mississippi, has matured as an artist.

Rather than try to dance better than Shania or burn through a torch song with more power than LeAnn, Hill instead draws on the grounding, deepening experiences of her personal life to create an album with more depth and substance than her earlier work.

The youthful energy is still there: On songs like the current hit single, "This Kiss," or the propulsive pop of "The Hard Way," she shows she still has the light-hearted verve that initially drew fans to her. But the way Hill unearths the wisdom in Gretchen Peters' worldly-wise "The Secret of Life" and the way she opens up and pleads during the gospel-tinged country soul of Sheryl Crow's "Somebody Stand By Me" reveals a new dimension of her talent.

Rather than trying to struggle to maintain her youthful appeal of old, Hill shows how much she's grown up on Faith. Maturity becomes her.