02.13.07

Ludicrously over the top, even for me

Posted in cricket spazzes, lucinda williams, some albums we done liked others we ain't - February 13th, 2007 at 11:04 pm by Cricket

It’s no secret that I unrelentingly adore Lucinda Williams. She can pretty much do no wrong as far as I’m concerned. But then, I used to feel the same way about Allison Moorer and her last album left me feeling pretty uninspired, so the anticipation for the new Lucinda album has been killing me. The relief I feel over how much I love it is very nearly a physical sensation.

West is Miss Lucinda’s eighth studio album in over 25 years. Despite my extreme love for music and how much I always have to say about it, I don’t actually read very much about it. I avoid interviews and articles about my favorite musicians because I find they sometimes lessen my enjoyment of the music. [Or turn out to be Scientologists.—Mimi] [And because most critics are haters.—Daisy] I sometimes can’t resist reading about Lucinda Williams, though, because there just isn’t enough of her. So, from what little I’ve read, I gather this long wait between albums has something to do with a rather exceptional level of perfectionism on her part when she writes and records. Which suits me fine if it means every album continues to be better than the last one. Indeed, if I were to rank her releases in order of my favorites it would nearly match the release order (I’d transpose Essence and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road). I started to write that West wasn’t yet my very favorite because it’s too new, but that’s a lie. It won me over completely on the first listen and every subsequent play has revealed it to be more layered, deep and cutting than any of her previous albums. [Oh, god, you are killing me already. Her voice is sort of annoying.—Mimi]

What’s different about West? The sound here is more melodic and refined than any of her previous albums. It’s still sort of bluesy folk-rock, but it’s very nearly ethereal, has a graceful, feathery feel that her past were lacking. And it’s a lack I never noticed until I had West for comparison. Although Williams has always worked with excellent musicians, I feel like her past albums have been predominately about her lyrics and her vocal delivery. On this album the arrangement, the musicianship and the production finally, completely come up the level of her words and voice. [Who produced this? It sounds like Daniel Lanois. Hal Willner—okay, this dude made an album of William S Burroughs? Uh, okay, no joke comes immediately to mind, but I know there’s one there.—Mimi]

I think that “Fancy Funeral” will be the stand out track here for most people. There’s pervasive sense of loss throughout the album, not her usual lost love, but truly deep loss. Lucinda lost her mother before writing this album and the unfathomable pain of that shines through. “Fancy Funeral” turns that upside down, it comes across more as a wake than funeral. A celebration of life, of remembering the importance small things about someone you lost, rather than dwelling on your own sorrow. The guitar work here is not background but an additional voice that continues the reminder of how we can be uplifted, even in sorrow. [This song is beautiful and tragic. I feel really miserable now, why are you making me listen to this?—Mimi] [Because Cric’s so emo?—Daisy]

The lyrics of the aptly titled “Words” are some of Lucinda’s poetic best. They flow together in rhythmic perfection without losing any of the strength of the story and emotion they convey. “My words choose knowledge over politics.” This feels almost like a love song to lyrics, poetry and fiction. As a writer, I love finding something in this album that I can swooningly over-identify with that isn’t about broken hearts or loss. [Did iTunes screw up the order of the album or something? This is not following the order the songs are in for me. Man, iTunes sucks, I swear. I really wish she could sing, that would help. What is the percussion on this, it sounds like plastic beads in a cup.—Mimi] [No, I think I had my iPod on shuffle when I listened to this to review it.—Cric]

Which isn’t to say I don’t love the songs about broken hearts and loss, as I’m sure is clear to regular readers. I revel in such songs, and Lucinda does them better than anyone else. “Where Is My Love?” is one of these songs, though it comes across more dreamily questioning and weightless than her usual soul-shredding break up songs. And, again, I can’t emphasize enough how the production here really underscores, highlights, and perfects the song, taking it far beyond the basic goodness I expect from a Lucinda Williams song. [Hey, Cricket, how do you feel about Lucinda Williams? I’m sort of unclear about that. Did you know that Roman women had no first name of their own but were just known by a feminized version of their father’s name? Weird, I know.—Mimi]

She veers into the political with “What If.” The song is about the world changing, turning upside down. It spans relationships, families, twists into something bordering on silliness in the absurdity of the “what if” world. But the lines “and prisoners were free” and the opening “if the president wore pink/or if a prostitute was queen” really cleanly show how the things we take for granted about our positions in the world really are already upside down absurdities. [Why a prostitute? The sentiment here is interesting, but I don’t really get her, I think. Oh, wait, this song is just silly, dogs became kings?—Mimi]

The title and closing track “West” makes me ridiculously homesick. I love Tennessee, it is my home, at least right now, but the line “Come out west and see” feels like it’s being called out to me by all my friends and family, by the mountains and the Pacific Ocean. The whole song is a lonely, warm spring day. Something you wish you could share with someone, but in and of itself is a luxurious enjoyment, like laying in the sun on rocks as waves crash below you and birds call to each other high in the sky. The twangy guitar here pushes toward the Hawaiian end of the spectrum, deepening the sense of being on the far side of the Rocky Mountains after having passed through the high desert and high peaks of those mountains. [This song is pretty good. “The beating of their wings echoes the beating of my heart.” is a great lyric.—Mimi]

“Rescue” is the story of a woman who has gained a sense of her own self worth and can reflect objectively that only she can save herself from herself. “What can he do, but ties some ribbons in your hair/and show you that he’ll always care.” I have always thought that Lucinda was exactly the kind of woman I wanted to grow up to be [Oh, dear.—Mimi] and her being as completely open and revealing about how she’s grown and changed in life has amplified my respect for her and desire to emulate her. It goes beyond sharing her pain and loss, her bad decisions and bad romances, and touches on something even more personal. “He can’t change you/Change the summers of your beauty/The thunderstorms within your purity.” If only me and all the other girls like me could have figured that out when we were twenty-two, the world might be a very, very different place. I’ve shown some very strong self-restraint by not quoting this entire song.

The lyrics in “Everything Has Changed” fill me with an ache that is usually reserved for funerals and suddenly empty hospital rooms. I cried the first time I listened to it. I’ve lost two friends in the past year and other close friends of mine suffered really tragic personal losses. This song, every time I listen to it, fills me with a very immediate sense of grief, makes me acutely remember everyone I’ve lost and exactly how it felt. It digs inside me and pulls up the most terrifying childhood fears of my parents’ mortality. And even with all that, the song is calming, when it’s over I feel like I’ve been holding my breath the whole time, and the rush of oxygen has cleansed me, like having a really cathartic crying jag.

The slide guitar, strings, and Hammond organ on “Unsuffer Me” drag you down into the dark, empty loneliness of the lyrics and pin you there until the song is over. I realize, re-reading that, that I’m not making the song sound good. It’s beautiful, not just technically, but in the sense that it creates a genuine emotional experience in the same way good movies and books do, enveloping you entirely until it releases you at the end. [Her voice is sort of excruciating. Maybe I should just go back to randomly quoting facts about Rome here.—Mimi] [Ahaha! Mimi cracks me up! Both snotty and informative!—Daisy]

The vibrant, raw sexuality of “Righteously” (off “World Without Tears) is apparent in “Come On”, though the crude longing has been replaced with a sense of querulous discontent. It’s a very satisfying kiss-off song. “You can’t light my fire/So fuck off/You didn’t even make…Come on.” Heh. The simplicity of telling the bad lover to fuck off borders of self-indulgent, but the song rocks it in exactly the right way to make my heart swell with giddy, vengeful glee. I think all future break-ups will be sound-tracked with this song rather than any mopey song about wishing someone back. [I like this. Really, who doesn’t love vengeful fuck-offs done right?—Daisy]

I can’t bring myself to write about “Mama You Sweet.” I’ll just say it makes me want to call my mom and tell her I love her and apologize for every childhood wrongdoing and every adult decision I’ve ever made that might upset her. [As if the power of Mom-guilt alone isn’t enough. I feel guilty just reading this.—Daisy]

There’s a solid cohesiveness to the entire album. When I close my eyes and listen to the music, push past the lyrics, I see blues skies, pine trees and high, wispy clouds behind my eyelids. Despite the ragged anguish in so many of the songs, there’s an overall atmospheric buoyancy to West that makes me feel like maybe I’m stronger than I realized, like Lucinda is telling us that the worst can be overcome, even when it isn’t in the lyrics, it’s the music and the sound behind the lyrics.

In my more sentimental moments “Are You Alright?” is a song I want to send to everyone who has broken up with me by just never calling again. (In my less sentimental moments I want to send those guys pretty packages full of hundreds of crickets that will jump out when the box is opened and plague the bastards like locusts for weeks as they try and get them out of all the corners of their houses.) Mostly, this song makes me miss friends from college and other people I’ve loved but simply lost touch with. “Are you sleeping through the night/Do you have someone to hold you tight/Do you have someone to hang out with.” Yeah, baby, I do. I hope you do too.

“Learning How to Live” carries the same themes as the rest of the album, though it walks a line between being about the loss of her mother or the loss of a lover. I imagine it covers both, covers loss itself and regaining who you really are after you’ve tied your self-identity and happiness to another person and suddenly find them gone.

“Wrap My Head Around That” is a funky talking blues bit that I suspect only hardcore Lu fans will love. I am assuming most devout fans are like me in that it isn’t just her voice, her lyrics, and Doug Pettibone’s guitar playing, but also her rockin’ attitude that makes her so well loved. She is so raw and revealing in what she puts out there, and if you can really, really relate to it then you just want more more more. More of the connection, the sense of understanding, of finding a heart like yours inside the music. “Wrap My Head Around That” puts you more inside, I think, because it is purely her doing something she wants to do, just to enjoy words and rhythms just for the sake of them.

Oddly, after that huge spillage of own issues and emotions tied to Lucinda’s songs, I can’t exactly recommend this album. [Wait, what? I see you’re off your medication again. Despite what you might think, a centurion did not command one hundred soldiers, but in fact eighty.—Mimi] I can’t simply say, “well, if you liked her previous works, this is better,” as I know her work is actually fairly wide ranging and I find even among her fans that people either really love or really hate certain of her songs. I don’t know if this is because her work is so explicitly emotionally revealing that it turns some people off, or if her style is something like The Magnetic Fields that some folks can recognize as good but still don’t like. I love West. For me it was therapy tied into the kind of slow mellow music that sometimes is just exactly perfect. But I’m aware of just how completely personal my response to this album was and your mileage may vary. [At least I’m not at Bastogne—I guess I should have said Cannae.—Mimi]

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What other people are saying about West:
The 9513
An Aquarium Drunkard
Billy Blog

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