Lucinda Williams

"Drunken Angel" is just one of the best rock 'n' roll casualty songs ever written. Work in her pronunciation of the word "derelict" and a perfect arrangement that finds the middle ground between Stones-y slop and alt country warmth, and you could listen to this one 10 times in a row and never get bored. There's a reason critics fall over themselves to praise this woman.

Sometimes it seems Lucinda Williams is too good for this world. Since cutting her teeth on
an acoustic blues collection for the Folkways label in 1979, she has released just four
albums of originals in eighteen years, each for a different label. The first – 1980's Happy
Woman Blues, also for Folkways – is merely wonderful. The other three – Lucinda Williams
(1988, Rough Trade, then Chameleon, then Koch), Sweet Old World (1992, Cham... 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+)