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Lucinda Williams Plots Protest Songs EP
September 16, 2008 , 11:55 AM ET
Michael D. Ayers, Billboard MagazineAlongside her ninth studio record, “Little Honey” (Oct. 14, Lost Highway) and a hefty fall tour, Lucinda Williams will on Oct. 28 release a digital-only EP of protest songs, Billboard.com can reveal.
“Lu in 08,” which is timed to hit a week before the U.S. presidential election, sports four live tracks, three of which are covers: Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” and the Thievery Corporation/Wayne Coyne collaboration “Marching the Hate Machines Into the Sun.”
The fourth cut is the Williams original “Bone of Contention,” which was originally intended for inclusion on “Little Honey.” “It’s a pretty powerful protest song,” Williams tells Billboard.com. “The track didn’t come out the way I wanted it to [in the studio]. We went out to do some shows, and I played the song live by myself at Summerfest [in Milwaukee]. It just came out killer.”
Williams begins a fall outing Sept. 25 in Asheville, N.C., in support of “Little Honey,” material from which has already garnered a positive reaction on the road.
“We play ‘Real Love’ and then ‘Tears of Joy’ and by the time we get to ‘Little Rock Star,’ people are just smitten,” Williams enthuses. “And that’s what you want to see happen. That’s what’s playing live should do.”
Wow, when it rains, it POURS!! I’ve been wanting to hear her cut of “Masters of War” for a long time.
GREAT NEWS!!! Keep stuff like that coming. Thanks Tom, and everyone else involved in releasing these gems.
Awesome – more new stuff. Keep it comin’!!! 😉
Any news on where it can be downloaded from? Also, at what bit rate? PLEASE make it 256 kbps or higher (or at least, make that an option) for those of us who are (admittedly) overly picky about sound quality!
Tom
@ParkerCA wrote:
Is itunes 256 kbps?
No. And yes. 😉
Most of the songs on the iTunes Music Store are 128 kbps. Some of the songs on iTMS are called “iTunes Plus” songs that are 256 kbps. When you are looking at an album that is iTunes Plus, it will say so underneath the album title & price. Also, individual songs will have a ‘+’ icon off to the left in the list view.
IMHO, for casual listening, etc., (like on a iPod or other digital music player), 128 kbps is just ‘OK’. But, I also stream music wirelessly from my iMac to my home stereo system, and I can really tell a difference for most songs between 128 kbps vs. 256 kbps. The latter sound much richer & fuller.
Amazon MP3 downloads, on the other hand, are all 256 kbps (at least every one I have looked at or downloaded has been). I’m hoping Apple eventually converts all their catalog to 256 – I’d rather buy from them (I am a big Apple supporter – and a stockholder 😉 ). The downside to 256 kbps is that the files are twice as large as 128 kbps files. But, with disk space getting cheaper, and portable device capacity growing by leaps and bounds w/ each new generation of devices, that is becoming less & less of an issue.
Tom
There’s something happenin’ here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Tellin’ me I got to beware
I think its time we stop children what’s that sound
everybody look what’s going downI love that Stephen Stills song from when he and his friends Richie Furay and Dewey Martin were part of the Buffalo Springfield. I can’t wait to hear Lucinda’s cover of that classic protest song.
tntracy – I respect your humble opinion that 128 kbps is substandard music. I’d rather listen to vinyl on my old Technics direct drive. My ears agree that 256 kbps is what is required to reproduce CD quality audio, that’s what my settings are on iTunes. I don’t buy much download music because of that. Thanks for the tip on the higher bitrate of Amazon MP3s, and iTunes Plus. I’ll try them and see how they sound.
Nowadays Clancy can’t even sing
@stevarino wrote:
I don’t buy much download music because of that. Thanks for the tip on the higher bitrate of Amazon MP3s, and iTunes Plus. I’ll try them and see how they sound.
Yeah, check it out. I think you’ll be pleased. I consider myself picky as hell, and I’m happy with what I have downloaded @ 256 kbps. Unless I am really desperate to get a particular song, I refuse to buy 128 kbps music. And, above all, I still prefer owning the CD if possible, even though almost everything I listen to now is off of iTunes on my iPod or Mac. That’s so that, when those 2 & 4 terabyte drives are commonplace, I can go back & re-rip & re-encode all my stuff in iTunes at an even higher bitrate (or just copy the *.aiff files directly off of the CD to my hard drive & skip the encoding altogether).
Tom
P.S. Keep in mind that a lot of the 256 kbps songs you’ll download off of Amazon where encoded using VBR MP3 encoding (VBR = variable bit rate – where lower bit rates are used in quieter or simpler parts of a song because the higher rate is not “needed”), so the bit rate shown in iTunes for these will be an average at some number less than 256 – but you’ll know they’re VBR ’cause iTunes tells you. They sound good, too.
…Sorry if you already know all this… ;o)
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