West

The object of cultish adoration for years, singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams was universally hailed as a major talent by both critics and fellow musicians, but it took quite some time for her to parlay that respect into a measure of attention from the general public. Part of the reason was her legendary perfectionism: Williams released records only infrequently, often taking years to hone both the material and the recordings thereof. Plus, her early catalog was issued on smaller labels that agreed to her insistence on creative control but didn't have the resources or staying power to fully promote her music. Yet her meticulous attention to detail and staunch adherence to her own vision were exactly what helped build her reputation. When Williams was at her best (and she often was), even her simplest songs were rich in literary detail, from her poetic imagery to her flawed, conflicted characters. Her singing voice, whose limitations she readily acknowledged, nonetheless developed into an evocative instrument that seemed entirely appropriate to her material. So if some critics described Williams as "the female Bob Dylan," they may have been oversimplifying things (Townes Van Zandt might be more apt), but the parallels were certainly too strong to ignore.

Williams was born in Lake Charles, LA, on January 26, 1953. Her father was Miller Williams, a literature professor and published poet who passed on not only his love of language, but also of Delta blues and Hank Williams. The family moved frequently, as Miller took teaching posts at colleges around Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas, and even Mexico City and Santiago, Chile. Meanwhile, Lucinda discovered folk music (especially Joan Baez) through her mother and was galvanized into trying her own hand at singing and writing songs after hearing Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. Immersed in a college environment, she was also exposed to '60s rock and more challenging singer/songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. She started performing folk songs publicly in New Orleans and during the family's sojourn in Mexico City. In 1969, she was ejected from high school for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and she spent a year working her way through a reading list supplied by her father before leaving home.

Williams performed around New Orleans as a folk artist who mixed covers with traditional-styled originals. In 1974, she relocated to Austin, TX, and became part of that city's burgeoning roots-music scene; she later split time between Austin and Houston, and then moved to New York. A demo tape got her the chance to record for the Smithsonian's Folkways label, and she went to Jackson, MS, to lay down her first album at the Malaco studios. Ramblin' on My Mind (later retitled simply Ramblin') was released in 1979 and featured a selection of traditional blues, country, folk, and Cajun songs. Williams returned to Houston to record the follow-up, 1980's Happy Woman Blues. As her first album of original compositions, it was an important step forward, and although it was much more bound by the dictates of tradition than her genre-hopping later work, her talent was already in evidence.

However, it would be some time before that talent was fully realized. Williams flitted between Austin and Houston during the early '80s, then moved to Los Angeles in 1984, where she started to attract some major-label interest. CBS signed her to a development deal in the mid-'80s but wound up passing since neither its rock nor its country divisions knew how to market her; around the same time, a short-lived marriage to drummer Greg Sowders dissolved. Williams eventually caught on with an unlikely partner -- the British indie label Rough Trade, which was historically better known for its punk output. The simply titled Lucinda Williams> was released in 1988, and although it didn't make any waves in the mainstream, it received glowing reviews from those who did hear it. With help from guitarist/co-producer Gurf Morlix, Williams' sound had evolved into a seamless blend of country, blues, folk, and rock; while it made perfect sense to roots-music enthusiasts, it didn't fit into the rigid tastes of radio programmers. But it was clear that she had found her songwriting voice -- the album brimmed with confidence, and so did its assertive female characters, who seemed to answer only to their own passions.

Many critics hailed Lucinda Williams as a major statement by a major new talent. Rough Trade issued a couple of EPs that featured live performances and material from Lucinda Williams, and Patty Loveless covered "The Night's Too Long" for a Top 20 country hit. However, it would be four years before Williams completed her official follow-up. She signed with RCA for a time but left when she felt that the label was pressuring her to release material she didn't deem ready for public consumption. Instead, she went to the small Elektra-distributed label Chameleon, which finally released Sweet Old World in 1992. A folkier outing than Lucinda Williams, Sweet Old World was an unflinching meditation on death, loss, and regret. Even its upbeat moments were colored by songs like the title track and "Pineola," two stunning, heartbreaking accounts of a family friend's suicide (poet Frank Stanford, not, as many listeners assumed, Williams' own brother). Needless to say, the record won rave reviews once again, and Williams toured Australia with Rosanne Cash and Mary Chapin Carpenter.

On that tour, Carpenter decided to record "Passionate Kisses," the key track and statement of purpose from Lucinda Williams. It shot into the country Top Five in 1993 and won its writer a Grammy for Country Song of the Year. Other artists soon started mining Williams' back catalog for material: avowed fan Emmylou Harris recorded "Crescent City" on 1993's Cowgirl's Prayer and cut "Sweet Old World" for her 1995 alternative country landmark Wrecking Ball; plus, Tom Petty covered "Changed the Locks" for 1996's movie-related She's the One. As the buzz around Williams grew, so did anticipation for her next album. With Chameleon having gone under, she signed with Rick Rubin's American Recordings label and began sessions with Morlix again co-producing. Dissatisfied with the results, Williams' rigorous retouchings led to Morlix's departure from the project and her backing band. In 1995, she moved into Harris' neighborhood in Nashville and through Harris hired Steve Earle and his production partner Ray Kennedy. At first, she was so enamored with their work that she re-recorded the entire album from scratch. When it was finished, she decided that the results sounded too produced, and took the record to Los Angeles, where she enlisted Roy Bittan (onetime E Street Band keyboardist) to co-produce a series of overdub sessions that bordered on obsessive. During the long wait for the album, the media began to pay more attention to Williams; some of the coverage was fairly unflattering, painting her as a neurotic control freak, but she always countered that it was unfair to criticize the process if the results were worthwhile.

Rubin mixed the final tracks, but the album was further delayed when he entered into negotiations to sell the American label. Mercury stepped in to purchase the rights to the album, which was finally released in 1998 under the title Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Boasting a bright, contemporary roots rock sound with strong country and blues flavors, not to mention major-label promotional power, the album won universal acclaim, making many critics' year-end Top Ten lists and winning The Village Voice's prestigious Pazz & Jop survey. It also won Williams a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album (despite being the least folk-oriented record in her catalog) and became her first to go gold, proving to doubters that she was not just a songwriter, but a full-fledged recording artist in her own right. After a merger shakeup at Mercury, Williams wound up on the Universal-distributed roots imprint Lost Highway. She was the subject of an extensive, widely acclaimed profile in The New Yorker in 2000, written by Bill Buford, who was nominated for a National Magazine Award for his work; however, Williams and some of her supporters took issue with some of his more objective-minded analysis.

Williams delivered her next album, Essence, in 2001, after a relatively scant wait of just three years. An introspective collection, it often found Williams taking a simpler, more minimalistic lyrical approach and was greeted with rapturous reviews in most quarters. The track "Get Right With God" won Williams her third Grammy, this time for Best Female Rock Vocal, which further consolidated her credibility as a singer, not just a songwriter. Paring down the time between album releases even further, Williams returned in 2003 with World Without Tears, which became her highest-charting effort to date when it debuted in the Top 20. 2005 saw the release of two live recordings, one (Live @ The Fillmore) for Lost Highway and the other (Live from Austin, TX) for New West. West arrived in 2007.

The title of West reflects the change in Lucinda Williams' life as she moved to Los Angeles. It also reflects what had been left behind. Williams is nothing if not a purely confessional songwriter. She continually walks in the shadowlands to bring out what is both most personal yet universal in her work, to communicate to listeners directly and without compromise. If Essence and World Without Tears took chances and stated different sides of the songwriter and her world, West jumps off the ledge into the sky of freedom, where anything can be said without worry of consequence and where anything can be said in any way she wishes. It's entirely appropriate that West was released on the day before Valentine's Day 2007, for it's a record about the heart, about its volumes of brokenness, about its acceptance of its state, and how, with the scars still visible to the bearer, it opens wider and becomes the font of love itself. But the journey is a dark one. First there's the music and the production. Williams chose Hal Willner to produce West. Williams, who'd been writing a lot, demoed some songs before she brought in Willner. He stripped down the demos but kept the scratch vocals. From there, the pair created the rest of the album together, never re-recording Williams' initial vocals. The vocals were accompanied by her guitar playing; Willner wanted her inherent phrasing and rhythmic flow. Willner also brought his own crew to play with Williams. This collaboration —as unlikely as it might seem on the surface —results in something utterly different and yet unmistakably Lucinda Williams. West is a warm, inviting, yet very dark record about grief, the loss of love, anger at a lover who cannot deliver, and embracing the possibility of change. In other words, it's not without its redemptive moments. Williams has put all of her qualities on display at once with an unbridled and unbowed sense of adventure here on her eighth album. She, her bandmates, and Willner have come up with exactly what pop music needs: a real work of art based in contemporary forms and feelings. West is Lucinda Williams' magnum opus thus far, an album that will no doubt attract more than a few new fans, and will give old ones, if they are open enough, a recording to relish. West is flawless; it is actually destined to become a classic.

— Thom Jurek

Like many genres, country music prizes the personal. Listeners want the impression that an artist sings from experience, that she lives the life she sings about in her songs. Whether it's actually true or not is beside the point. There's no doubt that Lucinda Williams writes what she knows: On two exceptional albums (Lucinda Williams and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road), one really good one (Sweet Old World), and two decent late-career installments (Essence and World Without Tears), she's chronicled her personal romantic ups and downs, the uncertainties that haunt her, and her own Southernness even when regional differences are breaking down. With her divisive vocals and incisive lyrics, it's easy—maybe too easy—to regard the singer as indistinguishable from her songs' characters. But she asks for it. Despite her reputation for being lonesome, orn'ry, and mean, the ease with which she expresses herself in country songwriting fueled her legend even when she took nearly a decade between albums.

With her dreary, deeply disappointing new album, West, which was inspired by the death of her mother and yet another bad break-up, Williams might be getting a little too personal. These songs aren't just about her; they sound like they're written specifically for her, with a larger audience only a dim concern. She employs structural quirks—eccentric repetitions and digressions, purposefully monotone melodies, talking-blues (read: bad rap) delivery, unjustified song lengths—like defense mechanisms, keeping listeners from digging too deeply into her songs or identifying too strongly with her. This time she seems to be writing to keep people out, fortressing herself against audience expectations. That evasiveness could be interesting, but here it simply leads to shoddy songwriting and lazily bland music.

Consider "Are You Alright?", whose status as the album's lead-off track and first single suggests it's the most accessible song on West. In the span of five minutes, Williams repeats the title 22 times (that's roughly half the lyrics), which seems a little gutsy, if not outright testy. At first it works: the repetition is hypnotic, like a worrisome thought that won't leave your brain, and the bridge, which contains the album's strongest melodic passage, complements that foreboding nicely. As the song proceeds, it becomes clear she isn't building on that repetition, so it becomes a little grating. Nevertheless, "Are You Alright?" proves to be one of the better tracks on West, although you'd probably skip it if it were on any other album.

On West as on her two previous albums, Williams seems to be trying to free herself from the verse-chorus-verse prison, to find new ways to assemble the same song parts. That's admirable in itself, but here her alternatives don't work. After a passable chorus, "Mama You Sweet" digresses into a lengthy tangent tracking the course of pain through a body. Ambiguity is the point: Is the pain her mother's illness or her own grief? Yet it's described so indulgently it sounds goth. On "Wrap My Head Around That", Williams works herself into lyrical knots with her scrawled spoken-word delivery, and she draws out the lite-jazz groove for nine unnecessary minutes.

Elsewhere, West is not so much frustrating as just plain bad. "Fancy Funeral" warns against honoring the dead too much, and in its description of an overly lush ceremony, the old Lucinda emerges, but the song's concerns are so pecuniary that buyer's remorse overshadows any actual grief. In the past, Williams has shown a propensity for blatant moon-june-spoon rhymes, which have worked on previous songs (on title track from Essence, for example, the simplicity of the rhyme scheme feeds the song's overwhelming lust). On West, however, it sounds careless. Here's a verse from "Come On", a bilious kiss-off that descends into dumb double entendres:

"Come On" at least tries to churn up some rock momentum and give Lucinda a platform to rage against the men who wrong her. The song still fizzles, but the effort is appreciated. But every track seems to sulk along at the same midtempo pace, with the same formless AOR pap that drains the music of melody and all regional specificity. This is "roots" music in only the most general sense. Marked by tasteful percussion and ketchupy guitar lines, the production (by Williams and Hal Willner) nods to folk, blues, country, and decades-old rock and roll without actually incorporating any of these styles into the arrangements. If once Williams held these sounds dear enough to meld her personal lyrics to their traditional frameworks, on West she discards them for a generic mush.

Worst of all, the heartbreak that has been a defining theme in her music sounds newly tedious, the romantic conflicts manufactured. Partly her lyrics are to blame: they incorporate too many common nouns and too few proper ones, and the concrete imagery has given way to vague self-help clichés (the title of "Learning How to Live" says it all) and outright nonsense (on the laughable "What If", she asks, in all seriousness, "What if cats walked on water/And birds had bank accounts?"). On West Williams breaks the first rule of any sort of creative writing: Show, don't tell. She spends so much time rambling about her pain that she never bothers even to try to make us feel it.

— Stephen M. Deusner, Pitchfork