"Little Honey" Reviews

Can’t help you on that one, folks. I agree that the sources should be included. I’m sure I-Job will elucidate.

Farber sez:

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/2008/10/03/2008-10-03_lucinda_williams_finds_a_little_honey.html

I went to high school w/ Jimmy; he wouldn’t remember me. 😯

From No Depression:

How Lucinda Williams Got Her Joy Back
http://nodepression.com/articles.aspx?id=1771

I know Lefty posted this review on another thread, but it’s worth reading and is one of the most insightful Little Honey and Lucinda reviews you’re likely to come across.

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2008/10/lucinda-williams-little-honey.html

LUCINDA WILLIAMS
“Little Honey”
(Lost Highway)

There are flashes of uncharacteristic joy on “Little Honey,” Lucinda Williams’s ninth studio album; they’re notable because for the better part of her 30-year career she’s managed to avoid this feeling. Ms. Williams’s voice is a broken, collapsed sigh and, in the last decade especially, she has used it to masterly effect, extracting a battered beauty from songs about disappointment, frustration and sometimes even sneering anger.

In 1998 the sublime “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” made her something more than a name-drop for roots-music aficionados. “Little Honey” is the least coherent of her albums since then, less potent and focused than “Car Wheels” or last year’s desperately melancholy “West.”

When she’s hurting, she can still sear. “Circles and X’s,” written in 1985 and the best song here, is starkly eloquent. “There’s nothing more for us to regret,” Ms. Williams sings to the lover walking out the door. “The fire needs more logs.” And on the mellow, galloping duet “Jailhouse Tears,” she practically spits out her words, sharp darts aimed at her nogoodnik boyfriend, played by an enthusiastic Elvis Costello.

Too often here, though, Ms.Williams gets bogged down turning her magnifying glass back on music making. The overlong “Rarity” bemoans industry politics, slowly; “Little Rock Star,” reportedly inspired by the lives of Pete Doherty, Amy Winehouse and others, is needling (a counterintuitive cover of AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top” takes shape, though, once Ms. Williams decides it’s all right to have fun).

As for Ms. Williams’s emergent happiness, it has infected her lyrics but not, it turns out, how she delivers them. “Real Love,” the album opener, is as plain (and, to be frank, artless) a statement of devotion as she’s recorded, but with her rasp, it almost sounds like a taunt, as if she hopes her last guy is listening in, stewing. The match is better on “Honey Bee,” a salacious rocker with a wry sense of humor.

On “Knowing” Ms. Williams sings of love catching her by surprise, but there’s ambiguity in the lines, most of which begin, “I didn’t know.” As sentiments expressed in the present, they’re quietly insightful assertions of love. But Ms. Williams sings them heavily, as if she is already looking backwards: it sounds a lot like an elegy. And heard that way, it makes perfect sense.

JON CARAMANICA, NY TIMES

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2008/10/catching-up-with-lucinda-williams.html
lisa

I picked up Little Honey as soon as Borders opened and have been listening to it all day and night. It is a great album that has a little bit of everything but most of all it shows the range of Lu’s voice – from hard core rocker on songs like Honey Bee and Real Love to a beautiful love song voice on Plan to Marry. Jailhouse Tears with Elvis Costello is great and a lot of fun to listen to, a song I bet she had a lot of fun making. I loved West for the songs it offered and the look into Lu’s psyche and I love this album for the way it rocks but also shows so many sides of Lu, probably more then any of her other albums. If you don’t have it yet go and get it , you won’t be sorry! 😀