07.06.06

Lucinda Williams makes us cry in a good way

Posted in back catalogue, lucinda williams, some albums we done liked others we ain't - July 6th, 2006 at 1:44 pm by Cricket

So there’s all this new music to tell everyone about. I have stacks of it next to me, just waiting for me to take time out of my busy schedule to listen to it. But what about music you might have missed? There’s so much out there–you just can’t always find what’s good. I try I fill in the gaps for my friends, and y’all are my friends right?

Lucinda Williams is a good ol’ Southern girl, by way of Louisiana and Mississippi. I can believe she isn’t a Madonna-sized star, though sure that’s my own fangirl prejudice talking. But that fact is that I have heard people say they’ve maybe heard a song or two by her and weren’t so impressed. This breaks my heart, so I’m going to offer the best I can: a review of my personal favorite album, World Without Tears. I will do my best to be even-handed, but I’m sure you’ve already come to expect the usual dissolution into giddy, hysterical squeeing when I talk about something I really like.

Emmylou Harris apparently said about Miss Lucinda, “She is an example of the best of what country at least says it is. But, for some reason, she’s completely out of the loop. And I feel strongly that that’s country music’s loss.” Which really is true of most of the bands we talk about here, but obviously so true about Lucinda Williams that even Emmylou can see it.

Lucinda is tattooed and pretty damn hot. Added bonus. She’s like the kind of a badass rockstar chick who seems smart and interesting and still able to kick your ass. Exactly what I had hope to be when I grew up. Sadly, I have no musical talent, so I’ll have to stick to pimping those who do to y’all. [The lack of talent doesn't stop a lot of people.--Mimi]

The entire World Without Tears album, despite the title, makes me want to weep. It’s as though all the suffering that lost love can cause is heaped into this little collection of songs. All the same, it hurts so good, like crying at the end of a perfect movie, or the tears of making up with your best friend after a fight.

The first song on the album “Fruits of Labor,” drags you through the sweet smelling dark, floating on Lucinda’s voice. It’s like chilling on the porch on a dark spring night, with the lavender drifting up in heady dream clouds around you. You just ease into it thorough this song, soaking in the richness of her voice.

The punch of her music doesn’t really kick in until “Righteously.”

When you run your hand
All up and run it back down my leg
Get excited and bite my neck
Get me all worked up like that

…sung with her throaty delivery, it’s enough to send the chills she sings about right up my spine. The guy in this song is clearly kind of an asshole, yet she makes you understand that he clearly must do something with his hands or mouth that makes his nastiness completely worth it, at least for a night. The guitar playing here rips through the kind of spine tingling throb a good lover can give you. Yeah, I kind of need a cigarette after listening to this.

Sometimes I spend a few days alone in the house. Puttering, writing, cleaning, procrastinating. I don’t go out or call anyone and get sort of lost in a haze. The smallest of tasks, like preparing food, becomes a story I tell myself. Indeed, on days like this, everything takes on a vague, outside myself kind f feeling, where I relive strange moments in my life or create new possible futures in my head. “Ventura,” the third track, sounds likes it’s singing those days to me. The small things tied to larger, hazy daydreams.

Lucinda comes rocking back out of the daydream in “Bleeding Fingers.” For a few minutes while listening to this, you are that badass rockstar girl. The excitement, the pain, the grittiness and glamour of it all come through here. Her voice even carries the scratched stretch of too many long nights, too much fun. It’s clear that this is certainly more a folk-rock album than alt.country, but it plays so well, I end wishing all rock music was like this.

There’s a slow, nearly bluesy bit of steel running through “Overtime” that conveys the loneliness of aching for a permanently departed lover. It’s a rainy day in the song, trapped inside, looking out for more, feeling almost satisfied to be longing, but not quite because it feels like it won’t end. You feel that sense of being totally derailed by someone’s absence.

“Those Three Days” is like the jolt of being torn out of love at first sight, like that immediate connection that you feel sometimes is just suddenly severed. Your whole body aches with loss of something you barely had and yet it’s so intense it might burn you to a cinder. All you want is more, to snatch back those seconds in which you felt whole, but there’s nothing left to grab at. I can’t imagine this song without Lucinda’s voice pulling that extra bit of pain through it. The song, it hurts, for five minutes you suffer, but it holds so much of the memory of what was good that it’s worth it for the beauty of it. For the idea that you might be able to grasp the good part again. I can’t hear this song without singing it in my head for days after. I wake up hearing it, as if my brain has been playing it all night in my sleep. It sticks to you, but comfortably so, with no greasy residue just a tight sting that you can’t quite let go of.

Lucinda grates over your soul emotionally and vocally in “Atonement.” It’s almost hard to listen to, just this side of discordant, clashing, digging out the suffering that a bad religious experience can leave you with. It’s a church of a wrathful God here, bringing brimstone to sinners, and, looking at it sideways, it’s almost an accusation at the participants it for letting suffering become the center of worship instead of God’s love.

I don’t like “Sweet Side.” Musically, it’s good, and I sometimes find myself grooving along to it when I’m only half paying attention, but lyrically it sounds too much like every excuse I’ve ever made for incredibly shitty boyfriends. “I still love you, baby, ’cause I know you/Don’t mean to do the cruel things you do.” Yeah, Lucinda, but I don’t think that makes him any less of an asshole. The best part of this song is that reminds me that I’m better person than I used to be and I’d sooner throw rocks at a guy like that than date him.

The sweetness of “Minneapolis” completely takes away the dirty feeling left by the previous track. You can hear a sort of vibrato in her voice throughout this, like even singing it hurts as much as her lover leaving did. She paints a picture of cold empty rooms that you can only escape into bitter cold a snow. A clean sharp metaphor for loneliness permeates the song.

“People Talking” covers the rough assault of outside forces–other people–on your relationship, the dim hurt that clouds your happiness when it feels like other people are trying to destroy it. Of course, if she’s singing about the jerk from “Sweet Side,” then the people talking might have been right–who knows?

Sometimes I feel like the shiny polish that TV puts on American life gets mistaken for what the real world is like. Suburban people drive around in the sterile bubble of their SUVs, isolating themselves from the darker harder parts of the world. Don’t mistake me–while I hate the idea of that, I also don’t go in for the glamorization of the seedy, grimy underside of American life. But I do think we all need reminders of it. Especially those of us living in and on the edges of the middle class. I love how this song puts it out there for so many different sides of what can go wrong in our culture. Steve Earle also has a knack for this as well. We should all be working to raise each other up all the time instead of pointing fingers and scapegoating. Yeah, my horse is pretty damn high. You gonna knock me off of it? Maybe Lucinda already did, singing–

I ain’t got no hot water and they shut off the heat
Can you loan me some money for something to eat
Been out here on this corner for about a week
Tryin’ hard to stand on my own two feet.

The title track on this album is the sort of luxuriating-in-suffering that I’ve been doing through this whole review. Life should be about every kind of experience–it should have balance, light and dark, hurt and love. I do really believe that we wouldn’t how know to enjoy the sun if it didn’t get dark at night.

If we lived in a world without tears
How would bruises find
The face to lie upon
How would scars find skin
To etch themselves into
How would broken find the bones.

It is gruesome, sinister, pulls you down, but really would we know what joy was if we didn’t suffer? Um, I might be getting too philosophical for my own good with this one. Musically, it rolls sweetly, almost cradling you as she swings through the darker lyrics.

She ends this torturous, emotional furnace of an album, with “Word Fell,” the album seemingly ending like relationship in the song, slipping away into the night. Taking part of you with it, holding a piece of your soul. But her voice seems to promise you’ll get it back, remind you that there is still beauty in the world.

Yeah, wow, it’s a completely depressing album now that I’ve looked at the songs individually0–but taken all together, it feels like being cleansed in the aftermath of a storm. Those days when you realize you won’t make it to the house in time, so you slow down and let the rain wash over you. You get home soggy and cold, but the hot bath and the tea wouldn’t be the same obscene pleasure if you hadn’t weathered the rougher parts.

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road and World Without Tears are equally good, though different, albums. Both should make a fine start for you venturing into Lucinda’s voice. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road won’t rip you down and build you up in the way World Without Tears does, but I’d be satisfied if you got either one and loved it even a little.

Lucinda Williams is touring Europe this fall, so if you’re there, go see her. If you aren’t there, then you can sit around with me wishing she’d make a new album soon. Until then, we can sit on the floor and drink whiskey and listen to Lucinda together.

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