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Lucinda Williams Premiere: ‘East Side of Town’ From Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone


By Tom Finkel Thu., Sep. 4 2014

Lucinda Williams will release a double album, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, September 30, on her very own label, Highway 20 Records.
She borrowed the title from a line in a poem by her father, Miller Williams, called “Compassion,” which she adapted into the lyrics of the first track. Another cover — if you can call “Compassion” a cover — a version of the late J.J. Cale’s “Magnolia” that clocks in just shy of 10 minutes, closes the 20-song collection. Other than that, the material is all original.

And the album is — how to put this? — the best work of Lucinda Williams’s career.

See also: Lucinda Williams Brings Her 1988 Breakthrough Disc Back to Life

Williams spoke with the Voice about the recording sessions in a post we published earlier this year. At that time, she described the atmosphere in the studio as “a Tony Joe White, Bobbie Gentry, ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ kind of thing. We were debating whether we should do a double CD or put two separate ones out at the same time. What we’re gonna do, I think, is put them out about six months apart and kind of separate the songs so it’s, like, the rock one and the non-rock one.”

On that last count, she changed her mind.

Tony Joe White actually plays guitar on two cuts. Bill Frisell appears on a couple as well (including “Magnolia”). Elvis Costello’s rhythm section — Davey Faragher on bass, Pete Thomas on drums — splits time with Williams’s own David Sutton and Butch Norton. The legendary Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan is featured prominently.

Back in January, Williams characterized the studio sound as “country-soul.” The country is there, all right, but it’s indisputably Williams country. And the soul often edges on r&b. The songwriting is Williams at her rawest: straight, no filter. The majority of the songs are narrowly focused and personal, though the cut she shares here with the Voice is one of a handful of exceptions.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE

Lucinda Williams draws from where the spirit meets the bone


Mark Hinson, Tallahassee Democrat May 22, 2014

Lucinda Williams once chased Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks.

We’re not talking metaphorical literary peacocks, either.

When Williams was kindergarten age in the late ‘50s, she and her father, the poet Miller Williams, drove from Macon, Ga., to Milledgeville, Ga., to visit the great Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor as invited guests.

“She had a strict daily schedule when she was writing,” Williams said last week during a free-flowing, hour-long phone chat from the Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter’s home in California. “She wasn’t ready to receive guests when we got there so we sat on the porch until she finished writing. I chased her peacocks all around the yard. My father loves to tell that story.”

About 10 years later, Williams picked up a few books written by O’Connor. She was floored by O’Connor’s darkly humorous vision of a South populated with drunks, false prophets, deformed outsiders, religious zealots, polite killers and lost souls.

“Her stuff influenced and inspired me,” Williams, 61, said in her distinctively raspy voice. “I read all of it. I just devoured it. I related to it. It just seemed so real to me. I had seen these people. They were real people to me. … My song ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ is straight from Flannery O’Connor.”

Then Williams began to whisper-sing the lyrics: “You will fall from grace/ You may never see his face/ He was out of heaven/ Something wicked this way comes.”

Well, her two grandfathers were Southern Methodist ministers, so she comes about it honestly. No wonder her next album, due for a release in September, is titled “Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Longreads Member Pick, shares a first-time-ever memoir by Lucinda Williams from Radio Silence, a San Francisco-based magazine of literature and rock & roll.

Lucinda Williams, with Benjamin Hedin | Radio Silence | March 2014 | 11 minutes (2,690 words)

Lucinda Williams recently turned sixty-one, and on the whole she feels pretty good about it. “I was so young, so sweet and tender,” she says when shown a photograph of herself at thirty-five. “I wish I still looked like that. But as an artist I’m better. My voice is better than it’s ever been; my range is better than it’s ever been.” This is quite a statement, considering that for the past twenty years Williams has been regarded as one of America’s finest living songwriters. Of her eleven studio and live albums there are a handful—Sweet Old World (1992), Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998), Little Honey (2008)—that offer little if any room for improvement. We don’t normally think of the seventh decade as being kind to popular musicians, but Williams is convinced she is in the middle of a sustained period of creativity and achievement. Lucinda Williams (1988), her third record, long out of print and sought after by collectors, was reissued in January, and she recently founded her own label. Later this year she plans to release a double album of new material.