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Posts
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1 Buttercup
2 Pineola
3 Drunken Angel
4 Crescent City
5 Born to Be Loved
6 Blessed
7 Convince Me
8 Essence
9 Real Live Bleeding Fingers…
10 Righteously
11 Changed the Locks
12 Honeybee
13 I Live My Life
14 Joy
15 Get Right With God [with material interpolated near the end: “STAND ON THE ROCK”]Thanks, Stoger!!
http://www.nola.com/jazzfest/index.ssf/2011/05/lucinda_williams_pushed_her_mu.html
Lucinda Williams pushed her music to a boil at the New Orleans Jazz Fest
Published: Thursday, May 05, 2011, 6:25 PM
Updated: Thursday, May 05, 2011, 6:53 PM
By Brett Anderson, The Times-Picayune NOLA.com“This is a song I wrote about living in New Orleans,” Lucinda Williams announced from New Orleans Jazz Fest’s Acura Stage Thursday afternoon, before her band lit into “Crescent City.” It was the fourth song of the set, the first culled from the singer’s rich catalog of songs about the South. If you’re the type of listener who focuses on lyrics, “Crescent City”‘s jaunty content (first line: “Everyone’s had a few”) probably came as a bit of a relief.
It immediately followed two songs – “Pineola” and “Drunken Angel” – drawn from Williams’ less voluminous but still rich catalog of tender songs about loved ones whose lives ended in senseless death. The third – “Buttercup,” the lead track from her latest release, “Blessed” – was built on what could be the Lake Charles-born songwriter’s Holy Trinity: a romance gone south and a rough melody, both expanded on by guitar uprisings that have the effect of filling in the blanks the words leave open.
It was a fitting introduction to Williams’ world even if her show took some time to reach full stride. Its intensity shifted just shy of its mid-point with “Essence,” a humid blues drawn from Williams’ rich catalog of vivid songs about sex. (Second line: “Come on and let me taste your stuff.”) Dressed in black and wearing dark shades under Rod Stewart’s “Blonds Have More Fun” haircut, the singer’s slurred delivery carried as much longing and exhaustion as it did ecstasy (“I am waiting here for more/I’m waiting by your door”), and her three piece band was bucking with extra force.
By the time the set reached full boil with “Changed the Locks,” one of the most defiant responses to a break-up ever set to music, and “Honey Bee,” a fiercely delivered piece of carnal blues-rock, it was abundantly clear why the “Treme” crew had chosen Williams’s set as the backdrop to film footage of the characters Davis and Annie making out.
Williams, whose shows often convey extra intimacy with between-song repartee, wasn’t particularly chatty on Thursday afternoon, but her music communicated plenty with its sturdy distillations of blues, rock and folk.
Her band stripped Fats Domino’s “I Lived My Life” bare, leaving guitarist Blake Mills to sketch out the contours of the absent piano. The snare beat that drummer Butch Norton tapped to open “Get Right With God,” the show’s finale, wouldn’t have been out of place at a New Orleans street parade, and it gained muscle as the song progressed. When it was over, all that was left was for Williams to wish the audience “peace and love” before she turned to walk off.
Brett Anderson can be reached at 504.826.3353. Follow him at twitter.com/BrettAndersonTP.
I do too, Lafayette, but I’m too much the grammarian to let the slight misquote of “Crescent City’s” opening line and the added consonant to the Fats title rest. You lose a whole syllable going from “everybody” to “everyone” (though they are synonymous really), and the great rhythm established off the bat would be completely whacked by the line delivered as the blogger said. And isn’t the whole point of the Fats song/title to live in the present, not the past? Oh well, what point carping over pronouns and verb tenses? The blogger evoked the scene well, though that “Stand on the Rock” sequence needs to be forefronted, imho (correct cyberspeak, Mr. Tracy?).
@stoger wrote:
You lose a whole syllable going from “everybody” to “everyone” (though they are synonymous really), and the great rhythm established off the bat would be completely whacked by the line delivered as the blogger said.
And, if I may jump on the “nit-pick bandwagon” as it were (not being judgmental here, stoger), in my mind “everybody” is a bit more “Southern” than “everyone”. The “body” in “everybody” is just more evocative of the South to my ear, IMHO (confirming your “cyberspeak”, stoger). As in, “A body would have to get up very early in the morning to sneak a mispoken Lu ‘fact’ past that stoger”. 😉
Tom
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