Plays of Our Lives: "Lucinda Williams" (1988) and "Sweet Old World" (1992)

On the singer's 71st birthday, David Cantwell on his favorite Lucinda Williams albums

The first I heard of Lucinda Williams was when Robert Christgau, in his Nov. 22, 1988 “Consumer Guide” column, judged the singer-songwriter’s self-titled Rough Trade album to be an “A-”. “She can make a winner out of any song that spurns the cliches she’s too avid and sensible to resort to…,” Christgau wagered. “[S]he seems just an inch’s compromise away from a hit. But that inch is why her rock and roll traditionalism still sounds fresh.” I made a mental note.  

I first actually heard Lucinda Williams almost immediately—which, in the pre-streaming world, is how we referred to a week or two later. Paul, my high school best friend and former college roommate, was home for Thanksgiving, and after dinner together, we wound up just talking and wandering around Penny Lane, a long-gone Kansas City record store. “Your birthday’s coming up. Let me buy you an album,” he said, and when I started to object, he said, “No, I want to.” By coincidence, we were at that moment standing in front of an end-cap display that included a bin full of Lucinda Williams’ Lucinda Williams. “Okay. I’ll take this one,” I said, grabbing a copy. “I read it’s good in The Voice. Thank you.”

Before the year was out, I’d reviewed the album for Kansas City’s new alternative weekly, The Pitch (nee Pitch Weekly, nee The Penny Pitch), where I’d only recently begun contributing. Lucinda Williams was only my third professional review, my first-ever rave and also, I’m sorry to say, my first use of a facile authenticity claim: “Williams is the real thing.”

How about I just call her an artist? Pushing four decades now, Williams’ music, initiated by Paul’s small kindness, has been a gift. Williams’ work—1988’s Lucinda Williams and 1992’s Sweet Old World, foremost for me—proved key to my figuring out, as a young critic, what I most valued in music: fun, for starters, and especially pain transformed into fun, melancholy riding shotgun with joy; smart lyrics, sure, but great voices even more; records over songs; and so on. Along with my first and second pro reviews (on John Hiatt’s Slow Turning and Cowboy Junkies’ The Trinity Session), that Lucinda Williams piece also saw me catching a wave, turning an affinity into a critical specialty and the writing opportunities I’d never have enjoyed if I’d succeeded as the generalist I’d still prefer to be. In 1988, after all, what wasn’t yet dubbed “alternative country” was dead ahead—as Williams has said for years, her self-titled album was turned down repeatedly by rock labels for being too country and by country labels for being too rock. And alt-country’s bigger-tent successor, “Americana,” was just beyond, with Williams in many respects still standing as its flagship artist.

Today, January 26, is Lucinda Williams’ birthday. She’s 71 and, knock on wood, in a good place. She’s been happily married to her manager, Tom Overby, for fifteen years this fall. Last year, she published a memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, and also released her fifteenth official studio album, Stories from a Rock N Roll Heart. In addition, between 2020 and 2022, she put out a half-dozen unofficial and unfussed-over cover-song albums (tributes to Petty, Dylan and the Stones; collections of both classic soul songs and Nashville Sound hits; plus a Christmas set) as part of her “Lu’s Jukebox” series. She’s making new music the way she wants to make it—and at a faster clip than at any point in her career.

Granted, she still hasn’t fully recovered from a 2020 stroke. She can’t play guitar right now but that remains a goal. When I saw her live here in the fall, at Kansas City’s Uptown Theater, she required assistance entering and exiting the stage and asked for help up from her chair when, halfway through the show, she decided she wanted to finish the set standing. She told a lot of long stories that night, all reruns from the memoir. That helped her rest up a little bit between songs, but it’s clear she’s also in a reflective mood these days and feeling grateful. She had a full house and a rock and roll band. She sounded like Lucinda Williams.  

How does she sound? Southern, for starters. You can hear small-town Louisiana and Mississippi, where she mostly grew up, in her drawl, and I hear Boston Mountains Ozarks in there too. (Her poet dad Miller Williams got a job teaching in Fayetteville, Arkansas when she was still a teen.) Her voice is not big but feels loud; its intimate yet demands attention. Starting with Essence in 2001, and increasingly so ever since, she’s emphasized rustier, deeper tones in her vocals. Her once bright drawling vibrato has been more of a quavering, studied moan for a good while now, the emotional equivalent of a stage whisper. And she’s become far more likely to foreground a mood, sometimes angry or sexy but bittersweet even then, and to downplay the authorial distance that enunciation afforded her on her earlier story-song masterpieces.

As a songwriter, Williams has a reputation for ruthlessly excising all cliches from her lyrics. As we’ve seen, Christgau praised the tendency in his 1988 “Consumer Guide” capsule (to be fair, he later revised that “A-” to a straight “A”) and zeroed in on the trait again in a 1992 Voice essay, “Lucinda Williams’ Reasonable Demands.” Critics Jewly Hight (in her Right by Your Roots: Americana Women and Their Songs) and Bill Friskics-Warren (in a 1998 cover story for No Depression) are right to stress the same point. This doesn’t mean that even her best songs are cliché free. That ham-fisted “your rugged good looks” in “Little Angel, Little Brother” has been making me cringe since the first time I played Sweet Old World. All those “angels” in her catalog are a form of cliche too. The most moving of them, “Little Angel, Little Brother” and “Drunken Angel” (from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road) work because of her empathy and her melodies and despite that cloying way of framing characters who, her memoir reminds, are flesh-and-blood human beings, respectively her younger brother Robert and late songwriter Blaze Foley.

Sometimes even her characters are cliches. “The Night’s Too Long,” from Lucinda Williams, is about Sylvia, a Texas girl looking for a boy “who wears a leather jacket and likes his livin’ rough” and drinking Corona. If Sylvia is distinctive—and she surely is, in the way we all are—it’s not in any way the song reveals. I remember another roommate musing at the time, “Is Lucinda kind of making fun of Sylvia?” Yet what Williams’ warm vocal, and the recording’s E-Street organ, stress to us, I think, is that even presented as stereotype, Sylvia deserves all the things she needs, our love included. Sylvia’s small, ordinary rebellions against accepting a small, ordinary life are worth a song and worth living, and probably not so different from our own. “There’s a Sylvia in every town” is how she introduces the song in her notes to the album’s 2014 reissue.

I think it’s not so much Williams’ lack of cliche that resonates for me as it is a related emphasis on unflowery specifics in her songwriting, her embrace of the particular. She wants “pens that won’t run out of ink and cool quiet and time to think” and she wants “passionate kisses.” In “Sidewalks of the City,” she has “bars with empty stages” rhyme with “chairs are placed on top of tables.” The lonely heart in “Six Blocks Away” (another Springsteen sounding cut) has “got a regular job, and it pays the rent, at a donut shop on Third and Tenth.” “I see you now at the piano, your back a slow curve” is one favorite of mine, “June bug versus hurricane” another. Her “car wheels on a gravel road” is such a simple phrase—yet one so evocative she knows to repeat it eighteen times. Williams’ word choices are common, her images beyond plain, but her songs are resplendent.

Side B of Lucinda Williams starts with a four-track run that’s as powerful as any I know, musically and lyrically. Taken together, it hits like a universal declaration of basic human needs, emotional needs front and center. “Passionate Kisses,” of course, but also “Am I Too Blue” (you have a right to be depressed), “Crescent City” (…to community and home) and “Side of the Road” (…to leave your community, as needed, without losing it).

Amazingly, Sweet Old World includes a four-song set of its own that I find every bit as perfect—and more harrowing. These songs address basic emotional needs as well but with an eye on the grim consequences when they go unmet. “He Never Got Enough Love,” about a boy who’s dad tells him he’ll never amount to anything; and “Sweet Old World,” about a suicide; and “Little Angel, Little Brother,” about missing someone who’s gone; and “Pineola,” another suicide—these songs have come to define for me Williams at her best, or at least what I find most compelling about her work. In the world according to Lucinda, every good thing comes with its accompanying pain, and everything you love has been lost or will be. This is what marks her for me as more of an old-school country singer than a blues artist or even the rock and roller she now most often self identifies as.

Don’t Tell Anybody… opens with a cozy memory of fixing gin & tonics for her father as a girl, then transitions to her mother’s alcoholism—and that characteristic bent towards melancholy is as pervasive throughout her book as it has been in her career. She reveals in her memoir some of the real-life inspirations for her songs: “Pineola” is about her friend Frank, who killed himself. “Sweet Old World” is about Frank and another friend, John, who also killed himself. “Lake Charles,” on Car Wheels…, is about her friend Clyde. It’s interesting to learn these origins, but I must confess that the more paragraphs she devoted in her memoir to their backstories, the more I resented it, just a little. Like learning how a magic trick is done, I find this info can rob the art of some of its mystery. It can limit the songs’ potentially universal power when we pin its meaning down so precisely.

But I also know that life sometimes winds up limiting certain songs for all of us, whether we like it or not. When I’ve heard Lucinda singing these past several years, I’ve often thought of sweet old Paul, who died in 2014, and of his long-ago gift. And, sometimes, when I hear Williams singing “Sonny shot himself…” or “See what you lost when you left this world,” I need to turn it off or turn away. Those songs, for me, have shrunk to that one hurt.

But not every time I hear them. Other times they pull me in tight, then push me out again into the world. Williams titled one of her songs “He Never Got Enough Love.” The message I take from so much of her work is that none of us ever do. - DC

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