"Blessed" Reviews

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Lucinda Williams – Blessed
By: Stormy Lewis
Last Updated: March 14, 2011 4:03 PM

One of the many things that have been lost in this era of digital music is truly great album covers. In an era when artists have a small square measuring less than an inch, albums are increasingly represented by a close up of an artists face. On her new album, Lucinda Williams does even the album art her way, with a randomly selected choice of enigmatic photos about blessings. In one a little girl and her brother invite you into their muddy meadow to play. In another a mother and her child beam out their joy from the hood of an ancient Ford. In another a man stands with his chest raised proud, leaning against his can, in front of a moving truck. Each holds a sign with Blessed scrawled on it. Whether its the Chinese tailor posing in front of his machines or the Hispanic girl with her overdressed pug on The Walk of Stars, each holds the sign like it is the title card to their own private movie. The affect is warm, inviting and very uniquely American. It reflects something unifying and honest about the our country and the people that live within it. Everyone in the pictures it laying claim to the part of their story that is being told on the album, and inviting the audience to find their own stories as well.

“You talk about the junk you did like you were talking about climbing trees,” Williams snarls on the lead single “Buttercup.” Dealing with an ex addicting to about anything that gets his adrenaline up, she walks away with an exhausted “You want my forgiveness and that I’ll give to you, but you got yourself into this mess and there’s nothing I can do.” “I Don’t Know How Your Living,” is a fitting follow up, a quite ballad about the sheer exhaustion of dealing with the maintenance of an addict. Inspired by the breakup of her last rock and roll relationship and her new marriage to a healthy and functional man, much of the album feels like a good by to the cliched rock and roll lifestyle and the people who populate it. On some of the most touching tracks, that farewell is literal and very final. “Copenhagen” is a wistful and tender tribute to her former manager. Lucinda Williams was a long time friend of Vic Chestnut, and “Seeing Black” is writing questioning his decision to kill himself. “How could I have been so blind, I didn’t know you had changed your mind,” she ponders mournfully. Much like Sweet Old World, Blessed to touched by the losses in Williams’ life over the past few years.

As with her past album, Blessed couples ruminations of death with musings on life and the messed up, broken people who people it. The title track is a beautiful ballad which pulls blessing from figures that could be pulled either from the Bible or from a busy, modern street. “Born to Be Loved,” which comes across like an affirmation for the world, if mirrored by the pleading of “Convince Me.” Perhaps the quietest song on the album is “Sweet Love,” a love song which is as warm and cozy as a childhood blanket. “Kiss Like Your Kiss” is another light and sultry ballad, coming in somewhere between “Still I Long For Your Kiss” and “Like A Rose.” While they have been much rarer on her recent work, Lucinda Williams is no stranger to a really good love song. Blessed finds her back in her element with warm, bubbling and earthy affection towards her beloved. Awakening, however, is the song that most perfectly sums up the theme of Blessed. “I will not mourn my losses, I will not mourn the dead,” she asserts, “I will have no bosses, I will not bow my head.”

Lucinda Williams has always understood the pain that underlays joy. She has always understood that one way or another relationships always end. She could fill an entire cd with eulogies she has written to friends that have died. This is the cost of living a life that tends to attract those who are damaged and those who are addicted to damage. Blessed is the first album where Lucinda Williams finally stop to assess the cost of that life, and it is only Lucinda Williams who could title such an assessment Blessed. Certainly there are things that she finds it necessary to jettison, but that does not rob those relationships of their blessings. This is an album which truly understands that you have to dig through the rubble to find the joy, because we all have lives that are more potch than opals. And, Lucinda Williams is truly a songwriter who tells the stories for all of us.