Friday, May 9, 2008
With her gorgeously "flawed" voice, the genre-bending singer has exquisitely mapped out the South -- as well as her own heart.
Jan 11, 2000 | Lucinda Williams' music is something of a Baedeker's guide to the South. It's not just that the singer-songwriter, born in Lake Charles, La., shows her roots by bending the region's musical styles into a magnetic sound all her own. She's also a master of evoking the character of a place with the telling, everyday detail: "Cotton fields stretching miles and miles/Hank's voice on the radio." When she adds in the names of the cities she has known, as she does in song after song, even those who have never traveled below the Mason-Dixon line end up feeling they know Lafayette, Memphis and New Orleans.
Her fifth and most recent album, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," winner of a Grammy for best contemporary folk album in 1998, is as geographic as anything she's done. Enough cities are listed here to rival a road atlas of the South, yet the emotional journeys Williams describes resonate with people everywhere. The songs range in mood from regretful to defiant to nostalgic. But they share a conviction, or at least a flickering hope, that relief -- whether from a broken heart in "Joy" or from stifling domesticity in the title track -- is just an address change away. In "Jackson," recovery from a breakup is measured in miles: "Once I get to Baton Rouge, I won't cry a tear for you." The mournful "Greenville" urges a washed-up drunk to leave town. And a man finds heaven on earth in "Lake Charles."
For all the implied locomotion, "Car Wheels" sure moved slowly from recording studio to CD store: Six years passed between this album and her previous one, "Sweet Old World." As impatient fans wondered when they'd hear from her again, Williams grappled with a series of challenges. First, Chameleon, her label for "Sweet Old World," went under. She was then on the American label until it, too, dissolved and she moved to Mercury. There were also delays in the studio. Williams recorded "Car Wheels" from scratch twice and worked with producers in Nashville, New Orleans and Los Angeles before achieving the sound she wanted. (Ironically, she was searching for a "less produced" feel.)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the painstaking process alienated some of her collaborators, including her longtime guitarist, Gurf Morlix, who had co-produced "Sweet Old World." Alt-country icon Steve Earle, who plays guitar on a few tracks and whose company, twangtrust, is listed as a co-producer on the final product, described the experience as "the least amount of fun I've had working on a record."
Earle is neither the first nor the last to question Williams' unwillingness to settle for "good enough." The songwriter fought her way out of a contract with RCA in 1990 when the company wanted to release what she considered a substandard recording. Refusing to compromise, she moved to the much smaller Chameleon label, where she had more artistic control. And during the long wait for "Car Wheels, " the press often portrayed her as a nutty perfectionist. Today, Williams has a pat response for those who second-guess her methods: "You can't praise the work and criticize the process," she has said in more than one interview.
Certainly the ends justify the means in the case of "Car Wheels," her breakout album. Williams' earlier work consistently won raves from critics and fellow musicians but was just as consistently overlooked by disc jockeys and the public. "Lucinda Williams should be at the very center of country music. She is an example of the best of what country at least says it is," Emmylou Harris said in 1995. "But, for some reason, she's completely out of the loop. And I feel strongly that that's country music's loss." Williams won a Grammy in 1992 for Mary Chapin Carpenter's version of her song "Passionate Kisses." And Patty Loveless took "The Night's Too Long" into the top 20 in 1990. But Williams didn't really get her due until "Car Wheels," which made best-of-the-year lists around the country (and won the prestigious Village Voice critics poll) in 1998 and went gold last summer (meaning 500,000 copies had been shipped) and had sold more than 420,000 copies by the end of December.
The album's success might owe something to the current music scene, which is more hospitable to genre-bending than it was when Williams first started out over two decades ago. For years, her brilliant blend of blues, country, folk and rock slipped through the cracks in the music industry. Record execs just didn't know how to categorize her. In the late '80s, she made a demo tape for CBS Records in Los Angeles. They said it was "too country" for them and sent it to CBS Nashville, where -- guess what? -- it was judged "too rock 'n' roll."
Or it could simply be that America was finally ready for a literary songwriter of Williams' caliber. She lingers on traditional country motifs -- heartbreak, honky-tonking, homesickness -- but gives them a modern twist that transcends geographic and genre borders. And despite the distilled pain and longing that darken her lyrics, there is never a sense of defeat. Whether addressing the suicide of a friend in "Sweet Old World" or a long-gone lover in "Still I Long For Your Kiss," Williams makes clear that she retains a spark of hope and will battle on.
Even when singing the blues, she is an optimist. She described the songs on her first album, "Ramblin' on My Mind," a 1979 collection of covers of blues and Cajun classics, as "blues as metaphor" or "blues as a sort of two-way mirror which, regardless of the hardships reflected, also reveals something better on the other side," according to John Morthland's liner notes.
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