Lucinda Williams – World Without Tears
Though she has a rare cackle for a laugh, and sparkler eyes, it is almost impossible to imagine Lucinda Williams sustaining any kind of joy, even whatever is to be found in West Memphis.
Williams turned 50 on January 26. If the text of her seventh album is to be believed — and there is no reason to doubt it — her wounds remain fresh, renewing, rigorously examined, and perhaps self-inflicted. Her pain, and the suffering around her, is phrased with the eloquence of experience (if not, perhaps, maturity). Hers remains the quintessential voice of loss, and longing. And lust.
Bruce Springsteen once said, “I eat loneliness,” and it is terrifying to depend upon that diet for inspiration.
A good life — those brief years when one manages to live with no more discomfort than that offered by stupid drivers, snobby waitresses and late-arriving plumbers — is a dull thing to write about.
That, at least, is not Lucinda’s problem. One of the reasons she has been written about extensively outside the music press is that her private life is often filled with unintentionally intended chaos. It is part of her persona, part of what makes her a star. If she weren’t quirky, or difficult (as they say), if she spoke with rounded vowels and obeyed the clock…even so, it’s all one hell of a price to pay.
Confessional songwriters invite, among their fans, the illusion of familiarity, and make available to their critics the private details of their lives. It is useful to remember that this, too, is a mask, and that we all hide behind the face we put on to face the world.
Like all serious artists, Lucinda Williams lies. Emotional truth is not the same as factual accuracy. The poet who killed himself in “Pineola”, for example, was Catholic, not Pentecostal — which we know largely because she took to introducing the song in concert with that caveat. (Lies with corrective footnotes; she is a professor’s daughter.)
Though she spent a number of years in Austin, and in Nashville — of course Louisiana, briefly New York, and Los Angeles where she now once again rents — Williams is hardly a country songwriter. She is, instead, what she announced herself to be with 1978’s Ramblin’ and 1980’s Happy Woman Blues: a blues singer, at least in the subject, structure and intensity of her songs. And a talented songwriter, one whose work has largely revolved around themes suggested by those first two album titles.
The blues resonate in the way she finds and rides the central riff to her best songs, they echo in her vocal phrasing, they find succor and sustenance in the generous spaces she leaves for guitar solos. (And it bears noting how many terrific guitarists have joined her onstage, sometimes as many as three at once.)
Throughout her career, Williams has been seen in conjunction with, and in opposition to, powerful male figures: her father, the poet Miller Williams; longtime guitarist, producer and collaborator Gurf Morlix; a succession of ill-fated poets and musician boyfriends; pained producers and label execs; and, onstage, that daunting, oft-changing assemblage of guitar slingers. Indeed, when, she lived down the street from Emmylou Harris in Nashville, their friendship seemed notable because Williams was rarely seen in the company of women. Odd, for her songs are deeply, powerfully feminine.
Coupled with the back-story to Sweet Old World and Car Wheels On A Gravel Road — that is, repeated attempts to recut the record she wanted to make, broken friendships, shifting label deals — Williams’ creative process and theoretical fragility (both as a woman and as an artist) have threatened to be more carefully examined than the music she produces. The art she makes. It is worth noting, once more, that she was absolutely right about those two records.
Maybe all that was bad luck. Maybe she finally figured out how to tell the other people in the studio what she wanted. Perhaps she learned to compromise against perfection, though that seems doubtful.
Regardless, Essence was a kind of breakthrough. The album sounded at ease with itself, and though the credits (“produced by Charlie Sexton and Lucinda Williams, basic tracks produced by Bo Ramsey, co-produced by Tom Tucker”) hint at the usual turmoil, it was completed in near-record time. For Lucinda; there’s that caveat, hanging.
It was not her best work. Only the title track and “Get Right With God” broke through the record’s monochromatic sound. Mind you, it was a good sound, but it wore out long before the record was over, and apparently came only in one tempo. It does, however, seem to have pointed Williams in a direction that works.
World Without Tears, the accompanying notes insist, was recorded live in the studio, with only a handful of overdubs. This is the kind of thing about which labels sometimes fib, but it doesn’t matter, for the record sounds just like she and her newest ensemble (a trio, with no holdovers from the last album) were of one mind, playing together in a studio. That counts for plenty. Better, they work through a variety of moods and tempos. (Well, they’re mostly blue moods, but there are plenty of hues to work with.)
The point to all this is, like her newly evolved recording process, simple: Lucinda Williams has made another powerful, deeply personal record. It offers the carefully complex language of her best work, coupled with sharply played guitar riffs, a handful of new cadences, terrific vocal performances (filled with nuance and, again, at ease) and songs that bear up under repeated play.
While Essence offered a frustrating lyrical simplicity (sorry, but “heavy blankets, heavy blankets, heavy blankets/cover lonely girls” ought not to be the most memorable line on an album), most of the thirteen songs on World Without Tears are filled with taut, carefully worked images, such as the opening stanza to “Ventura”:
Decide I’m gonna make myself
A little something to eat
Get a can down off the shelf
Maybe a little something sweet
Nothing showy there, but it sure does catch the moment. As does the opening to “World Without Tears”:
If we lived in a world without tears
How would bruises find
A face to lie upon
How would scars find skin
To etch themselves into
How would broken find the bones
This is as physical a record as Williams has made. Child abuse centers several tracks, specific (presumably) to a lover in “Sweet Side”, generalized by the twelfth song that gives the album its title. One cut earlier, “American Dream” speaks to the violence of poverty and broken dreams — hardly a new topic, but it’s well said — and ends with the repeated line, “Everything is wrong.”
Much of the album’s physicality is frankly, vividly carnal, nowhere more so than on the second track, “Righteously”. The album’s centerpiece, “Those Three Days”, pulls many of those themes together, matching one of her best lines — “Did you love me forever [and she pauses just a beat here] just for those three days?” — with one of her most memorable melodies.
But the center of the album’s physicality is its sound. World Without Tears is dotted with moments of furious rock (“Atonement”, especially), reminiscent in guitar sound and jam structure of the best of Cream, then careening the next moment to a hip-hop cadence (“Sweet Side”) that probably aims for Patti Smith. Williams sings as hard, and, alternately, with as much subtlety, as she ever has, as if she’s applied every studio microphone technique acquired over those long, tedious sessions.
It is, in short, what Williams works so hard to produce: passionate, potentially popular art, work that might endure. Still, one wonders at its apparent price. Nobody should hurt this much, this often, and with such vitality. And in public.
And so there is one more theme that underpins World Without Tears. “All my life/I have tried to get along,” she sings in “People Talkin'”. “All I ever hear now/Is gossip and waggin’ tongues…Life is full of misery and pain/Somebody called you a dirty name/Keep on walkin'”. Or, as she sings in the opening “Fruits Of My Labor”: “Baby, sweet baby, if it’s all the same/Take the glory any day over the fame.”