Press Review

Listen to a nearly 10-minute cover of JJ Cale’s “Magnolia” from Williams’ forthcoming double album, premiering on Billboard.com:



By Gary Graff September 12, 2014

Lucinda Williams has raised some eyebrows by coming up with her first-ever double album, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, due Sept. 30. The kicker? There’s more where that came from.

“We recorded enough stuff for three albums, actually,” Williams tells Billboard. “They weren’t all my songs. We cut a JJ Cale song, ‘Blond Hair and Blue Eyes.’ We recorded Bruce Springsteen’s’Factory.’ There’s a lot of tracks that were done with Bill Frisell. Then I had some older songs that hadn’t been put on anything yet. So it was a combination of things.”

Listen to a nearly 10-minute cover of JJ Cale’s “Magnolia” from Williams’ forthcoming double album, premiering on Billboard.com:

LISTEN TO THE COVER & READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

Lucinda Williams Discusses the Music That Inspired Her New Double Album


BY WILL HERMES | September 4, 2014

Lucinda Williams’ new LP, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, is a generous, old-fashioned double album. It covers a lot of stylistic territory – blues, folk, country soul, jam-rock – with a lot of musicians, including journeyman jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, Louisiana swamp groove master Tony Joe White and longtime Elvis Costello cohort Pete Thomas. After years of label drama, it marks the roots-music pioneer’s first release on her own Highway 20, and, surprisingly, it’s her first musical collaboration with her father, lauded Arkansas poet Miller Williams, who read at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration.

The title of the album comes from “Compassion,” a signature poem that Williams’ daughter adapted in the song of the same name. “That’s something that I’ve wanted to do for years: to take one of his poems and make a song out of it,” says Williams, 61, from her homebase in Los Angeles. “But it’s very challenging, you know? Because they’re two separate animals, poems and songs. I told my dad about it, and he goes, ‘You’re going to make me famous!’ He’s always teasing me about that. He goes, ‘You used to be known as my daughter. Now I’m known as Lucinda Williams’ father.'”

So, 20 songs: How’d you end up recording so much stuff?
I was on a writing binge, and we just kind of got on a roll. We actually ended up recording enough for three albums. So we decided, “What the hell, let’s break the rules and do a double album.” Now we have more creative control, because we have our own label. And when you’ve got a body of work that fits together, it’s nice to be able to put it all out there. We have a third group of songs finished that will come out on a separate album later.

That’s great. How do you account for the writing binge?
Just changes in life. Getting older and wiser as a songwriter, getting more proficient, I guess. The first big change in my life was when my mother died in 2004. And it kind of started then.

There are a lot of extended guitar passages on these recordings – some really gorgeous stuff.
I don’t like to fade at the end of things. The main thing was just to try to get the feel. There were a lot of discussions about, “Is this too long?” The consensus was kind of like, “Don’t worry about it.”

I like the cover of JJ Cale’s “Magnolia,” which really goes out there.
Yeah, that was with Bill Frisell. The whole other album that’s in the can is pretty much all Bill Frisell with my rhythm section guys, Butch Norton and David Sutton, who tour with me.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT ROLLINGSTONE.COM

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