Lucinda Williams

Supposedly, Williams recorded parts of Car Wheels again and again -- trying to get the tunes of screwed up love, growing up with "Loretta singin' on the radio" and long Southern drives just right. Eight years later, the brilliance of her original sessions still shines, but it's the bonus material that displays her most endearing charms. The somber wail of an alternate take of "Still I Long for Your Kiss" has a desperate, inconsolable edge, and the four live add-ons from WXPN's "World Cafe" are trashy, ragged and utterly heartrending. In other words, they're just right.

It took Lucinda Williams six years and three producers to make her best album, an amazing
record that sounds like it was casually banged out in a particularly creative weekend. It's
steeped in Southern life, from song titles like "Lake Charles" to the country accents of the
music to the accumulation of small details that make Williams' songs feel as vivid as diary
entries. Although there must be plenty of outtakes and alternate versions from t... More >

Williams hasn't just perfected a style, she's mastered a subject. She doesn't just write realistically and music traditionally, she describes and evokes Southerners for whom realism and traditionalism are epistemological givens. She writes for them, too--not exclusively, she hopes, but in the first instance. They are her people and her neighbors, with damn few media-savvy professionals among them. So reassuring shows of hip come no more naturally to her finely worked, cannily roughed up songs than pop universality. Situated in a subculture far removed from both Manhattan and Alternia, these indelible melodies and well-turned lyrics constitute a dazzling proof of the viability of her world and a robust argument for its values. Emotion makes you smirk? Local color has no place in your global mall? Well, you have Lucinda Williams to answer to. Because this is where she establishes herself as the most accomplished record-maker of the age. (Grade - A+)