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A few years ago, the actor and musician Rita Wilson said that she’d grown tired of playing “warm, kind, nurturing mothers and wives”. Movies tended to cast her as emotional cheerleaders, dealers of hard truths, or supportive BFFs – to her future real-life husband Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle, or to Michelle Pfeiffer in The Story of Us, or to Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated. I get not wanting to be typecast, but as I find for myself while sat having coffee with her in the bright, airy restaurant of a Mayfair hotel, Wilson is just really good at this kind of thing. For today, it seems, I am Meryl Streep.
“Are you a musician?” she asks me suddenly. Nothing serious, I tell her. Just a bit of piano. She leans forward animatedly: “You shouldn’t say that, OK? ‘Nothing serious.’ Those are the things we say to ourselves that actually block us from doing the thing we want!”
Wilson knows this more than most. She’s had a glittering Hollywood career, from blockbuster romcoms to zeitgeisty TV shows like Lena Dunham’s Girls (as the overly critical nightmare of a mother to Allison Williams’s Marnie, she reliably stole scenes). With Hanks – aka “America’s dad” – she forms the quintessential Hollywood power couple, sharing sons Chet and Truman, and Colin and Elizabeth from Hanks’s first marriage. They produce movies together, too, including Mamma Mia! and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Yet it wasn’t until 2012 that she recognised what she really wanted, which was to make music.
“The music business in particular can be quite ageist,” she points out. “I came to music and songwriting in my fifties, and it was terrifying to do that. Everything is exposed: who you are, who you’ve been, who people think you are…”
A friend asked her a long time ago, “What would you like to do?” Wilson said she wanted to be a songwriter, like her friend, but couldn’t be – she didn’t play an instrument, didn’t read music. “Neither do I,” her friend said, who asked her if she had anything to say. “Yes,” Wilson replied. It changed everything. “She opened that door to songwriting. She totally empowered me. I’m so grateful to her. And [a man] would never [say he’s not talented enough].”
I wish they would, sometimes, I say, and she throws her head back laughing. “Men are just so much bolder about that,” she says, adding with a grin: “And thank God for them, because they'll go off and hunt down a beast for you. But it’s very true [that we have to] allow ourselves permission to have the dream and say, ‘F*** it. I’m doing it.’”
So she did. We’re here today to talk about Wilson’s sixth album, Sound of a Woman, a deeply personal record created with the Grammy-winning Nashville producer Dave Cobb – behind hit albums from Chris Stapleton and Brandi Carlile – and hit songwriter Amy Wadge. The title track, which opens the record, is sweeping and cinematic, with gliding strings and dramatic shimmers of percussion. Wilson is a lovely songwriter; there’s something of Carlile or Shania Twain in her sincere style of storytelling, although I tell her one standout lyric (“I couldn’t make a masterpiece out of your mistakes”) also reminds me of Taylor Swift.
The album was born from a conversation Wilson had with Wadge over lunch. “We were talking about what it’s like being a woman in our business, and just in general,” she recalls. I imagine the writing sessions were a blast – Wilson is warm and wickedly fun. She’s on the cusp of 70, and looks fantastic. You can see the life she’s lived in her face, in the laughter lines around her eyes that crinkle whenever she smiles (a lot). “There was a wider conversation about the idea of being different women over the course of our lifetime,” she says, “because who we are as young women is so different from who we are now.”
Given the nature of her fame, it was a surprise to read in her album biography that she didn’t feel she’d found her voice until very recently. “I’ve lived a very public life for a really long time,” she says, growing more serious for a moment, “and I’m an extremely private person. It’s served me well for a really long time, but it doesn’t fit any more. It’s something I’ve outgrown.”
She thinks it’s something to do with raising children, the fierce desire to protect their privacy. “You’re trying to make sure they can grow up in a world where they’re able to be themselves, without the burden that comes with being a public figure.”
Just look at Chet, who for a few years seemed to be working out who he was in a very public way. There was the “blaccent” in 2020, in which he appeared to mimic Jamaican patois in a video congratulating his dad for his latest Oscar nomination. And then the infamous “White Boy Summer” of 2021, which had people scratching their heads over whether he was being ironic or not. He’s been quieter recently, though, sharing what looks like a bit of an Eat Pray Love journey around Europe, and acting and making music like his parents.
Wilson laughs when I bring up his holiday Instagram posts: “Oh my God, he’s a character! He’s so eccentric.” She smiles fondly. “You know what? He is the person I could never have been at that age… he’s just out there being himself, take it or leave it. I love that.” Chet seems to have pivoted away from his rap aspirations and is now leaning into country, as half of a duo called Something Out West. “He has a great voice,” Wilson says – indeed, her son harmonises with her on the country-influenced “Heart He Handed Down”, from her 2018 album, Bigger Picture. “I always said to him, ‘Why [rap]? But he always loved rap and hip-hop, particularly the Nineties.”
The late film critic Roger Ebert once wrote of Wilson’s husband that his central triumph was the ability to convince us that his characters think the same way we do, behave the same way we would. “Hanks must be a fundamentally good person to play such roles,” he said. I feel Wilson is the same.
It comes through in her songwriting, particularly on “Better For Her”, a lushly textured ballad inspired by a woman she heard about, whose husband left her only to (finally) get his act together the moment he met someone new. Her nuanced views on relationships transpire again in “Marriage”, a “how’d we get here” jaunt about expectations versus reality, and getting through things together, putting in the work. Being in one of the world’s most famous and, surely, most beloved couples, Wilson gets asked all the time what their secret is.
“My joke answer is always, ‘Not getting divorced!’” she says. She wanted to write something about a long-term relationship: “You never hear about them, because it’s more interesting to hear about the tumult, the sadness and the scandals. But [me and Amy] really wanted to tell the different phases of this great adventure, the wedding, the house, the kids… being in your forties and wondering, ‘Who am I? Where is my voice? How do I find this person?’ And then you jump to your sixties and you’re like, ‘Wow, we’re still here, we made it!’”
You never hear about long-term relationships in music, because it’s more interesting to hear about the tumult, the sadness and the scandals
She’s been thinking a lot, too, about her multigenerational family: her father, who escaped a labour camp in Bulgaria and made a life for himself in New York, and her mother, who was raised in Greece on the Albanian border. Her song, “Your Mother”, glides across elegant strings and tenderly picked guitars, is a tribute of sorts to Dorothy Wilson: “She was my best friend, and I was able to ask her so many things. But also, it’s that thing that your mother is always with you, even if she’s passed away – you still hear her voice, the advice.” The album closes with the upbeat “No Matter What”, which celebrates the friends and loved ones who have her back, in good times and bad.
“I wouldn’t have been able to write this album even 10 years ago,” Wilson says. “It’s very much of the time that I’m in right now – I wanted to end the album on this really uplifting moment. And I have been so grateful for my friendships, particularly my girlfriends. They’re just amazing. You have to be able to have this beautiful community of people in your life, these deep friendships.”
And as my time with Wilson runs over, and she asks about my family and my work and earnestly insists that I should never sell myself short, I become briefly convinced that I’m one of them. Like I said, she’s really good at this kind of thing.
‘Sound of a Woman’, the new album from Rita Wilson, is out on 1 May
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