Susan Gibson knows all about blessings. Roundabout 28 years ago, she wrote herself a wish that grew up and went off on its own to become one of the biggest country songs of all time. Smiling at its success from afar, Gibson went on to happily live her own best life, free to hit the open road with a van full of happy dogs and a heart full of songs to share with attentive audiences across the country — and all the room in the world to “make the big mistakes” that a wide-eyed dreamer kinda gal could ever ask for. All that said, though, Gibson is not a lives-in-la-la-land kinda dreamer. Blessed as she’s been, the award-winning songwriter also knows all too well that in the real world, sometimes there’s just no avoiding “the hard stuff.” Mind, not the kind she consciously swore off way back on Valentine’s Day, 2010; after nine years of humble sobriety, it’s easy enough, relatively speaking, for her to resist the temptation of a bottle of wine at a friend’s table or politely decline the occasional unasked-for drink sent to the stage by a fan. But positive life choices and willpower alone offer no proof or protection against the kind of knock-you-on-your-butt shots that life itself can serve up on the regular. The best you can do, she’s learned, is take each hit as it comes, get back up again, and try to find your wits and center of gravity before the next wallop lands. Because as sure as hearts break, van transmissions fail, and loved ones (both two- and four-legged) pass on, you can always count on another one coming. That’s the kind of stuff that Gibson writes and sings about on The Hard Stuff: the stuff that hurts. So why then do so many of her songs on the album — the follow-up to her 2015 EP Remember Who You Are and first full-length collection of new material since 2011’s TightRope — have the effect of leaving the listener feeling not depressed and beaten down, but wiser, lighter, and ultimately uplifted? The production, by the talented Andre Moran of Austin band the Belle Sounds, plays a pretty big part in that. Rife with bursts of pop elan, splashes of funk (horns!) and even a flirty hint of jazz, it’s a bright, technicolor palette delightfully unbeholden — by Gibson’s own “no limits” request — to the minimalist constraints of her usually solo acoustic live shows. And because this is still a Susan Gibson record, there’s certainly the banjo factor to consider, too. Although she usually defaults to acoustic guitar for her songs, the banjo has been Gibson’s kinda/sorta “signature” instrument going all the way back to her salad days in the Groobees, the Americana band she joined shortly after coming back home to Amarillo, Texas from college in the mid-90s. To this day, she still takes one with her to every gig (with requisite banjo jokes in tow, naturally), even though she might only reach for it for a song or two — usually those where she feels the audience (not to mention herself) could use a life preserver to counter the undertow of a partic...
