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With the new album apparently just completed, thought this was interesting perspective — a 1997 NYTimes Magazine article about the difficult process of bringing out Car Wheels. Of course, Lucinda became almost prolific after Car Wheels was finally out! Old Lu, new Lu, we love her no matter what. 8)
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F06EFD81739F937A2575AC0A961958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
from the article: Paradoxically, Williams is being a perfectionist to insure that her album doesn’t come out too perfect. ”I just have this horrible fear of being overproduced,” she explains in the studio kitchen. ”Just listen to the radio or watch MTV. All the edge is taken off. I’m trying to keep the edge on.
I’m doing a Google news search on Dylan this morning and this appeared out of the ether…
Rambling Woman Blues
Lucinda Williams Breaks Her Silence With The Rootsy `Car Wheels’NEWSWEEK, Jul 6, 1998
Updated: 2:26 PM ET Jan 14, 2008IF YOU’RE A CULT SINGER-SONGWRITER with a reputation for being slightly nutty and extremely skittish about success, here’s a good anecdote not to tell. It’s the one about how Lucinda Williams never made it to the 1994 Grammys, when her song “”Passionate Kisses” was up for an award. Williams, whooping it up in Nashville’s posh Sunset Grill, has just given her friend Dub Cornett the OK to tell the tale. Cornett hesitates. This is a crucial time for Williams: she’s about to release her first album in six years, “”Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” and the Grammy story is not entirely flattering. But Williams, 45, wearing a satiny pink sleeveless top and black jeans, swigging her second or third glass of $60-a-bottle red wine, is in no mood for pretensions. “”Hell, yeah!” she hollers to a reporter. “”Get it all down.”
So Cornett begins. “”The day before the show we missed, what, two or three flights,” he recounts. “”We had one more shot to get to New York. The flight left at 8:30 a.m. I showed up at Lu’s apartment, and she was still in her pajamas. We loafed around and finally I said, “Lu, are we going to the damn Grammys or not?’ She starts with the “Well, I don’t know. . .’ I went to the refrigerator, got a beer out and got ready to pull the tab. I said, “Are we going–yes or no?’ “We-e-e-l-l . . .’ Kyoosh! I popped it open. And that’s where we stayed.” Williams is laughing. “”We had sort of a pajama party,” she says. “”Remember? Sat there on the bed and drank beer at 8 o’clock in the morning.” “”We didn’t even watch the Grammys,” Cornett says. “”We didn’t know you’d won until someone called and said, “You won a Grammy!’ ”
OK, OK. She is a little nutty. She is skittish about success. Guess what? After one listen to the stunning “”Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” you won’t care one whit. Like Bob Dylan’s “”Time Out of Mind,” “”Car Wheels” is poised to be an exhilarating midcareer breakthrough. Spin just dubbed it “”album of the year,” Rolling Stone has hailed it “”a country-soul masterpiece” and we totally agree. Raw and raucous in places, whisperingly tender in others, “”Car Wheels” brings together classic Americana influences–Howlin’ Wolf blues, Hank Williams country, Woody Guthrie folk–and filters them through Williams’s bittersweet feminine mystique. Her songwriting is deceptively simple, full of familiar images of heartache and loss; yet her most basic phrases resonate to unexpected depths. “”Car Wheels” isn’t really pop: its rough edges are intact, and the rousing lead track, “”Right in Time,” has a verse in which a woman lies alone on her bed, stares at the ceiling and moans in a decidedly R-rated fashion. Still, Williams’s label, Mercury, has hopes for a hit. “”I think it could be her time,” says Mercury chairman Danny Goldberg. “”Bonnie Raitt, Tracy Chapman, Shawn Colvin–a number of artists have had major success with unorthodox records, just by sheer emotion and talent.”
Williams has invested herself dearly in “”Car Wheels.” It’s her first album since “”Sweet Old World” in 1992, and only her fifth since her 1979 debut, “”Ramblin’ on My Mind.” The new record took three years, three sets of producers and two labels to come to fruition. Williams began work in 1995 with her longtime collaborator Gurf Morlix, then brought in producers Steve Earle and Ray Kennedy when she decided Earle’s album “”I Feel Alright” sounded better than hers. Morlix decamped. “”Too many bulls in the pen,” says Williams. Then she and Earle butted heads (they’ve since patched it up). When Earle went on tour, she headed to L.A. to work with Bruce Springsteen’s pianist, Roy Bittan. By the time they wrapped, her label, American, was in upheaval; Mercury swooped in and bought the record. Her reputation as a neurotic perfectionist was out of the bag. “”I like to work until I get it right, sort of a trial-and-error thing,” she says, weary of defending herself. “”How can you be critical of the process if you like the end result?”
Besides, she’s never taken a short, direct path in her life. Her father, Miller Williams, is a poet and professor (he read at Clinton’s second Inauguration) who moved the family around as he searched for better teaching positions. “”I was born in Lake Charles, La., and we lived there for about a year,” says Lucinda. “”Then I lived in Baton Rouge. Then when I was 4 we were in–wait a minute, wait a minute! We were in Vicksburg, Miss., when I was 2, because my brother was born there. Then Jackson, Miss., when I was 4.” We haven’t even gotten to Macon, Atlanta and Santiago, Chile, yet. Lucinda’s youthful journeying crops up in the title track to “”Car Wheels,” written from the perspective of a 5-year-old watching the world through a car window. “”The first time I heard her sing that song, I said, “Honey, I’m sorry’,” says her father. “”She was uprooted a lot, and this had both an unsettling and a maturing effect on her. I think it gave her perceptions of the world a much richer texture than if she had grown up in a father-knows-best atmosphere, in a little town with picket fences.”
Even as an adult, Williams’s life has been one long ramble: New Orleans; Nashville; Austin, Texas; L.A.; Austin again; Nashville again. Along the way she played coffeehouses and honed her songwriting, releasing two Folkways albums in 1979 and 1980, then a third for the punk indie Rough Trade in 1988. Her rootsy sound has always been difficult to pigeonhole, but it’s her reverence for rock idealists from Dylan to Neil Young that has driven her to ever more exacting standards in her own work.
One afternoon, Williams sits in the living room of her Nashville home, a fat stack of papers on her lap. Here she has most every lyric she’s written in the past 20-odd years: page upon page of lines scribbled and scratched out, different-colored inks correcting each other, rhyme schemes jotted in the margins. She holds up a wrinkled yellowed sheet. “”Here’s an early song I quit doing ’cause it wasn’t good enough,” she says. Then she gathers up no fewer than 25 drafts of the new tune “”Drunken Angel”: “”Yeah, that just took forever.” Williams deserves some sort of award for the incredible effort of bringing these songs to life. For her sake, we hope it isn’t a Grammy. But if it is, we’ll don our pajamas, crack open a beer and drink to her.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/93049
From Jun 11, 2001…the “Essence” era…
Lucinda Straight Up
Honky-Tonk Heartbreaker Lucinda Williams Discovers That Less Is More When It Comes To Ripping Us Apart
by Lorraine Ali, NEWSWEEK
Updated: 8:58 PM ET Dec 17, 2007It bothers me that people think I’m so difficult,” says Lucinda Williams, the singer-songwriter revered for her Marlboro-stained voice, vivid storytelling and stubborn unwillingness to just take things as they come. She refuses to fit in, instead carving out a niche somewhere between the converging worlds of rock, country and folk. She also refuses to settle for anything that seems less than perfect, releasing only five records in 22 years, going through band members and record labels like disposable razors and walking out of various photo and video shoots simply because “it didn’t feel right.”
But anything less tumultuous would be disappointing. The 48-year-old’s embattled persona and tough, weary demeanor is behind some of the most heart-wrenching, raw and beautiful songs in recent memory. Her last album, 1998’s “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” gave hope to those numbed by Nashville’s modern, slick offerings and tired of rock’s current creative sag. It was a breakthrough for a woman who had struggled for 15 years to live off her uncompromised art. Williams ended up topping critics’ lists, selling 500,000 copies and even winning a Grammy.
All that, and the Louisiana native still finds it difficult to promote herself, let alone her new album, “Essence.” “At a photo shoot this morning, they had me in a blouse, unbuttoned, with no bra on. I would never wear my shirt like that,” says Williams, who, left to her own druthers, prefers a Harley-Davidson leather jacket, faded jeans and black motorcycle boots on her sinewy frame. “I was real unhappy. They kept asking, ‘Baby, what do you need? What do you want?’ and I felt like screaming, ‘I just want to be myself!’ “
“Essence” is pure Lucinda, even though she wrote the album in one year, and recorded it in 14 days–a sheer miracle compared with the six years it took to make “Car Wheels,” and the previous 15 years devoted to just two albums of original material. She mixes her narrative style, rich with images of broken beer bottles, shattered hopes and bleeding hearts, with emotionally charged haikus. Williams sings about lonely girls by simply repeating lines like “pretty hairdos, pretty hairdos” or “heavy blankets, heavy blankets” atop subtle washes of ambient pop. She repeats these spare lines like a mantra in a weary, wilting voice that cuts to the core. Though she now largely concentrates on communicating fleeting feelings rather than entire tales, “Essence” still feels like Williams at her best. It gently extracts the listener’s feelings with the grace of a master pickpocket, and lays wide open the deepest of pains. “So you think I rip people’s hearts out in a very Southern, genteel kind of way?” she asks, laughing, then affects a Scarlett O’Hara voice. ” ‘Excuse me, ma’am, may I just rip your heart out now?’ ” she says in a long, sweet drawl. “I love that. The best of poetry and fiction does that. That’s the best I can hope for, because this album was an experiment in breaking from long narratives and feeling comfortable with simplicity.”
Williams says she doesn’t just listen to “narrative, introspective, singer-songwriter stuff” but was inspired by the more eclectic likes of Sade, Dusty Springfield and Roxy Music. “I loved letting the music do more, letting the groove just breathe. To me, it’s sorta like the transition Bob Dylan made from his early, really heavy narrative stuff to what he did on ‘Time Out of Mind.’ The Nashville paper said: ‘What’s this? He’s not saying anything.’ I think it’s a beautiful album in its simplicity. Sure, it’s not ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ but he’s already made a grand statement in these masterpieces. Jeez, give the guy a break.”
There is an agitation and ire that surrounds Williams in person. It’s as if life’s an itchy wool jacket that she’ll never feel comfortable wearing. The tousle-haired singer is embattled about bad art, societal complacency and what a struggle it is to find a good pair of shoes these days. Yet she dearly embraces life’s small victories–like her suspension from high school for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance (a one-woman Vietnam protest). She ended up returning with the power of the ACLU behind her. “I grew up with that whole thing about follow your heart, do what you want to do,” says Williams in her sleepy, Louisiana drawl. “It was an era of protest songs, where you stood for what you believed in. I was, and still am, idealistic. My dad always instilled in me a sense of wonder–a sense of childlike awe. If you lose that, you’re dead.”
Having poet Miller Williams for a father also helped fuel her wanderlust. The college professor and friend of writer Charles Bukowski constantly resettled with his daughter–Louisiana, Chile, Mexico City and Arkansas. Back in the States, she dropped out of college her freshman year and began playing in a New Orleans club for tips. It was a risky life she embarked on, but for Williams there was really no other option. “I never questioned it,” she says. “It’s just what I had to do.”
Stability is hardly a key element when it comes to Williams and her music. It instead seems an unobtainable goal, something she treats with longing and disdain. “When was the last time you met a stable artist who didn’t have some kind of neurosis?” asks Williams, who is digging in her bag for a tube of red lipstick. “Artists are supposed to be a little eccentric. It’s just everybody’s so conservative now. What happened to the rebellious nature of music and art? Van Gogh and those guys back then were temperamental and moody, but so what? Now, some of these artists might as well be working at Wal-Mart: ‘Hi, I’m a musician. How can I help you?’ What happened to passion? Conviction? My friend says it would have been worse to have been born in van Gogh’s time. People died so young and all. I say yeah, but at least they lived before they died.”
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/79060
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