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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
On "Essence," her new album, a fragile genius delivers an emotional mess of a masterpiece.
May 31, 2001 | God love the 48-year-old artist who continues to push herself to extremes. Whatever descriptions apply to Lucinda Williams' previous albums, the aptly titled "Essence" (due June 5 on Universal's new Lost Highway imprint) is even more so -- darker, leaner, rawer, sexier, sadder, more twisted through its depths of desire and obsession. It's a nervy progression, almost necessarily uneven because of the risks it takes, balancing a grace that soars toward aching perfection with an intimacy that elicits a squirmy discomfort.
With 1998's "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," the uncompromising artist earned some commercial acceptance, scoring a gold record and winning a Grammy, while eliciting the sort of critical rapture once reserved for Williams' pantheon of inspirations (Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Hank Williams and Muddy Waters). The more radical "Essence" is likely to prove a tougher sell. It could well be her masterpiece, but it's an emotional mess of a masterpiece, one that finds her poking around in a psychosexual murk where other artists might be scared to get their hands dirty, singing to the world what most folks would be scared to whisper to themselves.
Take the title cut (also the album's first single and centerpiece), the boldest anthem she's ever recorded. Not merely because she sounds more like PJ Harvey than Emmylou Harris, over the rhythmic insistence of a sensual throb. And not merely because of lyrical explicitness such as "You're my drug, come on and let me taste your stuff," and "Please come find me and help me get fucked up."
No, the shock of "Essence" is that an artist so widely heralded as strong-willed, a fiercely feminist icon, should allow herself to sound so abjectly needy, so desperate in the throes of knee-knocking heat, so incomplete without a man. (I am woman, hear me pant.) The emotional investment she gives lines like "Kiss me hard/Let me wonder who's in charge" takes the sentiment so far beyond the pale of political correctness that she makes Pat Benatar's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" sound like a love tap, while the bridge's bare-boned directness incongruously echoes Dr. Seuss. ("I am waiting here for more/I am waiting by your door ... /I am waiting in my car/I am waiting at this bar.")
Yet Williams is nobody's video love doll. "Essence" is less a song about seducing an object of desire than a song about lust's voracious hunger, an arousal so strong it all but obliterates that object. The aftermath of such ravaged urgency inevitably elicits one of those bittersweet songs so characteristic of Lucinda Williams, songs of leaving or being left, as the magnetism of mad abandon simply can't sustain itself. It's a song that strips away every last layer of protective bark from an impulse that will not be denied.
What "Tonight's the Night" was for Neil Young, "Broken English" for Marianne Faithfull -- maybe even "In Utero" for Nirvana -- "Essence" is for Williams. It isn't a pretty picture, but the power of her artistry has never proceeded from pretty. Throughout her career, she's been told that she could reap considerable dividends if she would tone down this and tidy up that. If she'd apply some eyeliner to the chorus and a little more polish to the arrangement, she could enjoy the sort of success with her songs that others have.
From Patty Loveless with "The Night's Too Long" and Mary Chapin Carpenter with "Passionate Kisses," through subsequent covers by Tom Petty ("Changed the Locks") and Emmylou Harris ("Crescent City"), other more mainstream artists have embraced her songs and smoothed them out. Even among some listeners who respond to her songwriting, there are those who resist her rough-hewn delivery -- the barbed wire with which she laces her hooks -- just as there were those who could appreciate early Bob Dylan only when sung by the likes of Joan Baez or Peter, Paul and Mary.
Few artists put such a tough core around such emotional fragility. Through each of her previously troubled recording projects, Williams has been as protective of her output as a lioness with her cubs, battling with record labels, producers, musicians, boyfriends (and bassists, so often a twofer slot in Williams' bands) in her single-minded devotion to the sanctity of her work. Yet the work itself reflects a vulnerability that few artists risk; the skin of her songs is so transparent that you can see right through to the singer's troubled heart. You start to question whether the greatest song is with the hurt that inspired it.
