Lucinda — Forlorn But Still Movin’ On
At this juncture, several desultory albums down a different rutted byway, it’s hard to grab a hold of the anticipation that preceded Lucinda Williams’ long awaited Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.
She’d unwittingly become Americana’s darling in absentia. We love/loved her eponymously named Lucinda Williams and Sweet Old World. We’d gloried in how she could take the simplest lines, “I just want to see you so bad,” and turn them into an ode to the sweetest ache of longing. We marveled at her turns of phrase and her pinpoint observations, “I see you there at the piano/ Your back a slow curve/ Playing Ray Charles and Fats Domino/ While I sang all the words.”
While we never knew for sure these songs were all imperatively personal, we expected as much and loved the songsmith all the more for baring her considerably addled soul.
When desolate in the face of yet another breakup, she wanted “to change the name of this town/ so you can’t follow me down,” and we screamed “Yes!.”
Car Wheels was her commercial breakthrough. Perhaps an artistic one also. She spent years honing those songs, polishing them to an astonishing deep hue.
But the sad, sad truth is that its been downhill since. Williams is mired in forlorn. West, her latest release, is for the most part downright maudlin. The production is of course impeccable. The instrumentation suitably eerie. She has praised Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind as a major influence of her recent works and it shows.
Unfortunately she falls prey to laconic.
Rare is the dude who wouldn’t, given the chance, leap at the opportunity to wrap Ms. Lucinda in his warm and tender love. Given her track record among the lovelorn it would have little chance of working work out. But she’d sure enough sing about it on her next CD.
Her songs used to extol “the lines around your eyes.” Now she’s inclined to vent regret with seminal sadness and more than a little sting.
Yet, yet, yet . . . all that said, she remains capable of songwriting that transcends all but the masters. On West, it comes twelve cuts in. “Words” is beautifully wrought. She melds emotion and process with a sense of perspective that’s long been missing from her work.
The title cut is actually fraught with hope. “Come out west and see,” she asks but doesn’t implore. The woman keeps getting knocked about. Though she’s wary of having been “loved forever for just those three days,” she’s willing to have another go.
If any of her work is even faintly personal — we expect it to have been so — she is lonely on the bus. Forlorn to the point of maudlin. Yet she’s a survivor, willing to give it one more go, willing to take a chance with another ne’er-wo-well who she knows will break her already patched heart.
And her fans will hop in the metal firecracker, put on ZZ Top, turn ‘em up real loud, and heed her beck and call. Ms. Lucinda aches too much. And whines too much. But she doesn’t break. She survives. And we’ll stay for the ride down whatever road she chooses.
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