Lucinda Williams – Chimes of freedom
Lucinda has always done things her way, going back to when, as Mary Gordon wrote of Jane Austen, looking for a sentence that fit her, she worried A&R reps with the notion that songs which shun the prevailing verse-chorus model could work. (She was right, and no, it wasn’t too much to ask). West, however, is more far-reaching in its contraventions. Made with producer Hal Willner and a band of genre-bending musicians, most of them members of what he good-humoredly calls his posse, the album is easily Lucinda’s most freewheeling and expansive to date.
“I wanted to make a mature but hip album and it seemed like the right combination,” she said, referring to working with Willner, whose capacious vita includes producing compilation tributes to Kurt Weill and Nino Rota as well as single-artist albums by Marianne Faithfull and Hole.
“Hal and I did a couple of projects together before we started the record to test the waters,” Lucinda went on. “I did the Talladega Nights thing [a version of John Hartford’s “Gentle On My Mind” that played over the closing credits of the Will Ferrell movie] and then that Sea Chantey project [Rogue’s Gallery] he was doing.”
Work on West had actually begun before Lucinda’s fiance Tom Overby, a record collector and audiophile who works for an international distribution arm of Universal Music, suggested she ask Willner to oversee the project. “I’d gone in prior to that, in March of 2005,” she said. “I was writing a lot of songs and I went in and demoed them and they ended up being more like rough mixes than demos.
“What Hal did was basically strip everything down. He took the demos apart and put ’em back together again. He loves to experiment. It’s kind of ironic. Usually everybody gets on me when we’re recording. They say, ‘Come on, Lu, let it go. You gotta do the next song.’ And I’m going, ‘Wait, what about this?’ Hal, he’s more like me. He’s always going, ‘Well maybe we should try a French horn on this song.’
“I’ve finally found somebody that I had to worry about taking too long,” she laughed.
“So anyway, we didn’t sit down and create brand new basic tracks. We used what we’d already put down, the vocals were recorded so well. They were all scratch vocals, so we kept those.”
Willner told me that he was shocked when he got the call to produce the record. He was speaking with me by phone from his Manhattan apartment the day before Thanksgiving. The city had blocked off his street to blow up the balloons for the Macy’s Parade and he was running late.
“I mean I don’t have a platinum track record,” he said, accounting for his surprise and citing, among other projects, the spoken-word records he did with William S. Burroughs and Stay Awake, the Disney tribute album for which he persuaded Tom Waits to sing “Heigh Ho” from Snow White. “I’ve made successful records, records that were moneymakers, but today in the record business, when everything seems to be based on fear and everyone’s job at the big labels is keeping their job, somebody usually stops the phone call before it gets to me.”
It’s hardly surprising that Willner’s reputation as a member of the cultural vanguard would precede him. “I choose a lot of people from the quote-unquote avant garde scene, but people our age,” he went on to say of the musicians he recruits for his projects. “You think about it, we all grew up loving the same stuff. We all grew up on rock ‘n’ roll and country and whatever, folk. And then basic jazz. The people I work with, instead of becoming studio players, they took a left turn into experimental music. But they can play rock ‘n’ roll at the drop of a hat.”
Along with Lucinda’s guitarist Doug Pettibone and Essence collaborators Jim Keltner (drums) and Tony Garnier (bass), Willner brought in guitarist Bill Frisell, violinist Jenny Scheinman, and keyboardist Bob Burger. Frisell’s prodigious resume is widely known and admired. Scheinman, besides fronting her own group, has worked with everyone from Carla Bozulich to Norah Jones, while Burger, whose inspired playing is all over Lucinda’s album, albeit discreetly, and typically at the edges of the frame, is maybe best known for his work in Tin Hat Trio. Garnier and Keltner, the latter among the finest drummers alive, are longtime associates of Willner.
“We brought these people in and things immediately clicked,” Willner said. “Lucinda was really happy. Which isn’t to say that we didn’t go through the things you inevitably go through on a record of really personal material. You’ve got to step lightly sometimes. You have to work very closely to capture the emotion. With an artist as gifted as Lucinda, it’s a matter of framing the material. You know, a painting looks different in a brown frame than it does in green frame.
“I’m not a musician or an engineer,” Willner went on. “I mean I can play a bit, but when I started out working with [producer] Joel Dorn, I got to see John Hammond and Nesuhi Ertegun work and realized that that kind of [noninterventionist] production style was epic. Most of the producers that I know basically join the band, but I keep my hands out of it. I did some samples, but Lucinda was cool with that. Her musical knowledge is huge. I mean she loves the Thievery Corporation. I try to listen to everything, and I’m into a lot of electronica, but…”
Among Lucinda’s favorite recordings in this vein are Fat Possum’s hip-hop treatments of country blues singers R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. “I love that kind of thing,” she said. “There’s this guy, Conrad Praetzel, who does that kind of stuff. He’s out in Colorado. What he does is really amazing, kind of like Moby. He takes old, old blues and folk songs and does these different beats of his own. It still keeps that traditional feeling but it pushes it into this almost dreamlike place. So, anyway, I was talking to Hal about doing that and he was all for it.”
None of which is to suggest that West, while atmospheric, even to the point of being otherworldly and almost Enoesque in spots, sounds like Fat Possum’s New Beats From The Delta compilation. Or, for that matter, like a Bjork or Tricky record (although one can certainly hope). Keltner’s backbeats still anchor the proceedings, and the elegiac title track is sure to take its place in Lucinda’s oeuvre alongside willowy ballads such as “Greenville” and “Sweet Old World”. Nevertheless, expansive is the word that keeps coming to mind, both emotionally, where the mood ranges from empathy to longing to scorn, and sonically, where the arrangements go from small and concrete to sweeping and abstract.