"Nothing lifts a heavy heart like some elbow grease and a funnybone"—(from the title track of her most recent album release, The Hard Stuff). Even when Gibson's not laughing at herself, her refreshingly clear-eyed perspectives on matters of life, love, work, and loss illuminate the whole album with a spirit-charging current of resiliency which she's had all along,

even at the very beginning, when she wrote a little song in college called "Wide Open Spaces" that grew to become (with a little help from the Dixie Chicks) one of the biggest country songs of all time. Turns out, all she had to do to rediscover it and get herself back on the road to embracing both life and art was to heed the best advice her father ever gave her "Check the oil!"