New Zealand Herald music column

An excellent column that ran in yesterday’s New Zealand Herald:

Russell Baillie: Country convert
4:00AM Thursday Apr 16, 2009
By Russell Baillie

Russell Baillie

I remember seeing Lucinda Williams last time she was here. It was nearly 20 years ago. I had bought her 1988 self-titled album mainly because the idea of an American country singer on British post-punk label Rough Trade intrigued me.

I loved that record, all $16.50 worth of vinyl of it, and I still do. I’d even argue song-wise it’s never really been eclipsed by her bigger-selling Grammy-winning and largely consistently brilliant albums since.

Seeing that show was all part of an odd night though. First, I had to go to the Bon Jovi show at Western Springs for a photo caption job for a Sunday edition.

But after three songs and with You Give Love a Bad Name ringing in my ears it was off to Ponsonby’s Gluepot where Williams and then guitarist Gurf Morlix were playing to a couple of hundred folks – the surviving members of whom are sure to be at the Auckland Town Hall tomorrow night and reminding anyone within earshot about when they saw her last time, er, just like I have.

It was a low-key sort of affair. In her husky warble of a voice, Williams sang the songs off that album and some from her earlier obscure 1980 one, Happy Woman Blues, finished with Dylan’s Positively 4th Street and that was it.

Truth be told, I can’t remember much more than that, other than the feeling that exiting Bon Jovi to see Lucinda Williams was one of the wisest decisions of my career.

Looking back, that first album and show also started a shift in my thinking about music. It took something special to pierce my hand-me-down Anglophile indie rock snobbery and embrace that most parodied of pop music, country. But soon came the American alternative country movement which owed as much to the Beatles as Hank Williams. And Williams was no straight twang act, she continues to mix blues, gospel, and rock into her sound. And then there was her voice with its world-weary timbre.

But the reason Williams continues to rise above her genre – so much so that she’s never been exactly welcomed by the US country establishment – is her songs. Back in 2002 Time magazine named her the best songwriter in America. It’s hard to think who’s taken the title off her since.

True, last year’s upbeat Little Honey might not have had the emotional pull of its immediate precedessor 2007’s West, an album soaked in sadness after the death of her mother and a relationship break-up. But trace a line back through 2003’s World Without Tears, 2001’s Essence, 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, 1992’s Sweet Old World to 1988’s Lucinda Williams and you’ve got one of the great American songbooks.

All of human life is here in her songs – love, desire, despair, revenge, death and the bits in between.

They come affixed to tunes which variously lilt romantically (Something About What Happens When We Talk off Sweet Old World), throb with sexual ardour (Come On off West), deliver some of the best kiss-off lines in pop music (Changed the Locks off Lucinda Williams) or sound like what might happen if Keith Richards died and came back as a Louisiana-born woman, who could sing (Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Guitar Strings off World Without Tears).

There are a couple of dozen more great Lucinda Williams songs. You have to pity whoever will be compiling that best-of one day – or picking tomorrow night’s set list.

Yes, when she takes the stage at the Town Hall tomorrow night, I can bet there will be a few over-excited people like me in the audience wanting to hear our favourites.

Ones who think when it comes to American songwriters, that she’s basically God – in the same way that others worship at the altar of Dylan or Cohen.

Please take pity. Some of us have waited 20 years to see her again. We might get a bit emotional.