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I think the article is relatively even-handed and there are valid points; that said, there are comments that just had me shaking my head. I agree with the author’s assessment of Essence, mostly, and I don’t think “erratic” is such a bad way to describe WWT. That said, I completely disagree with the notion that Righteously is a bad song that never should’ve been released, and while I don’t think Atonement is a great song, there’s some good stuff there that I would hate not to have heard.
While West may be my least favorite Lucinda album, I also disagree with the criticism that it’s bad because of the length of the songs. I hate, hate, hate people who complain about lengthy songs in and of themselves. If it’s a good song, I want it to be long. If it’s a bad song, then two minutes is too long.
And I think the author is dead wrong about Little Honey. The fact that he characterizes it as “13 mostly sappy odes to Love” shows that he either didn’t listen closely or has a dramatically different definition of “sappy” than I do. Maybe Knowing or Tears of Joy are sappy, but there’s a lot more to Little Honey than that. Circles and X’s, If Wishes Were Horses, Jailhouse Tears, Well Well Well – are those sappy love songs? How about Real Love and Honey Bee? That a song is relatively positive about love does not make it a “sappy ode to love.”
That said…if I had to pick a decade as her weakest decade, yeah, I’d pick the ’00s over the ’80s or ’90s. But I feel (as many others do, I’m sure) that her very strongest material sets the bar so high that even if she never reaches it again, it doesn’t make her more recent work mediocre. There’s a lot to like from Essence onward, and when I’m pulling a CD off the shelf, I’m not concerned with ranking it in the context of everything else the artist has done. If it’s good, I want to hear it.
I was told afterward, that yes, the premiere of “Lafayette” on this leg of tour was for me(I’m trying to be humble here, really) for all the fan support as well as the back story with the article that ran in Sunday’s paper. I was told the band practiced the song together but not with Lu. If I have this correct (I just remembered) Lu was going to do solo acoustic but then opted to bring the band out. Beautiful rendition. Flawless. I was totally blown away by the gesture. A Grammy winning musician that doesn’t personally know a fan, reaches out to them with a song. Absolutely amazing and an event I will NEVER forget. Thank you TO for orchestrating, thank you Buick 6 for providing the beautiful instrumentation, and above all, thank you LU for reaching out to this fan with a song where it all began for me. I’m still in awe!
That is beyond cool…sounds like an experience to remember for a lifetime. It’s always nice to see a performance of a rarity, but to know that it was done especially for you? Amazing! How incredibly awesome that Lucinda does things like this. 🙂
After seeing I Just Wanted To See You So Bad and Happy Woman Blues in Madison last year, there aren’t too many songs that I haven’t seen but am just about dying to. That said, maybe I’ll change my handle to All I Want and see if I can figure out something I can do to make myself worthy. 😉
Sadly, someone other than me will have to make a report about the Green Bay show tonight…I won’t be there. 🙁 I’m just hoping I get to see a couple Lu shows this fall.
BTW, who’d have thought that I Just Wanted To See You So Bad/Happy Woman Blues would regularly open shows? Up until a little less than a year ago, I’d have done just about anything to hear one of those songs live…
I really hope that the article is mistaken about NY/LA being the venues for another set of album shows. Somewhere in the Midwest (I’m very partial to Chicago as it’s only a 3-hour drive away 🙂 ) would be a lot more logical and better for the many fans who missed out on the first set for geographic reasons.
Looks like I’ll be able to make the show, though I’ll have about a three-hour drive back home afterwards. I haven’t bought a ticket or tickets yet; not sure if my fiancee wants to come along, and in any case I wish I could find a way to get something better than 15 rows back. I might wait it out for a while…and if anybody ends up with an extra or two that are good seats, I’ll gladly buy them.
Wow, that’s incredible. Too bad about the seats, though…I tried and did a little better (Row M, 13th row) but not much. I’m terribly picky about being close to the stage at shows, so that’s disappointing, but I’ll try again. I’m not even sure I can make the show; I may be out of town that weekend, so I have to wait and see anyway. But $10 to see Lucinda? Incredible! (And the fee isn’t even $5 per ticket – it’s $2 per ticket, $3 per order. If you buy, say, 4 tickets, it’s only $11 in fees or $2.75 per ticket).
Somehow, Bob, I think parking at the casino (apparently near the Green Bay airport) will be considerably less than twenty bucks.
Yeah…as in free. 🙂 It is directly across from the airport; I’ve been there more than a few times and have seen other bands play free shows at the casino bar itself. I saw BR549 do a 3-night run there a few years back when I was going to college in Appleton about a 35-40 minute drive away. Anyway, when I saw she was playing there I knew it would be at the theater rather than the casino itself…but $10 is pretty darn close to free and more than worth it!
The casino isn’t bad, though it’s nothing special. Last time we were there they had about 1/4 of the machines taken out for remodeling or something; I’d imagine that’s already been fixed. It was just a bummer because we went on Saturday night which would have been crowded enough anyway.
Thanks very much for the update. Those special shows sound very interesting…I only hope they don’t end up being over the weekend of October 10th, because I’ll be getting married then! 🙂
I hesitate to add another post to this discussion because I’m still squeamish about speculations of this kind, but without minimizing the disease of alcoholism nor stating categorically that Lucinda does not have a problem (I can’t even come close to a statement like that, given that I’ve never even met her), I can’t help thinking that it’s pretty hard to judge whether or not a person has a substance abuse problem having only had limited contact with them.
Every year, I go on vacation with my girlfriend and her family for a week. We get a cabin in the woods and do a fair amount of drinking. If someone met me that week and knew nothing else about me (and assumed that my behavior during that week was customary for me), they’d see me drinking throughout most afternoons and evenings, and they’d also see me drunk more nights than not. I could see where someone would think I have a drinking problem if that’s all they knew of me; I’m pretty sure I don’t based on how much I drink the rest of the year (most days, not at all, and many of the days I do drink I have a drink or two) and how I respond to alcohol (sure, I like getting drunk every now and then, but I’ve never needed to). I’m not saying that no one on this forum knows Lu any better than they’d know me in this example, mind you, but this whole conversation makes me think of the comparison.
I know this is probably a cardinal sin but I’m already really bored of Little Honey.
😳 I hate to admit it, but I’m starting to feel the same way. I had a long drive to make Sunday night and put in Little Honey. I found myself listening only to Circles and X’s, Jailhouse Tears, and If Wishes Were Horses (twice) before putting in another CD. In fairness, I love Real Love and Honey Bee but those tracks are like singles I’ve heard on the radio a thousand times; no reflection on them, but if I don’t hear them for a few months I’ll be fine.
Thanks for posting. I think that quote is one of the best, if not the best, I’ve ever read when it comes to describing Lu’s unique style of songwriting.
Yes, that’s the verse I was thinking of. Come to think of it, the radio show I referred to was from 1985, not 1981. “He was a fool to pull that trigger / But he sure was a damn good poet” is a good enough closing couplet, but the verse just cements the song in specificity in a way that diminishes it, I think.
But, after the latest “twist” in the discussion, I feel compelled to point out that what Lu does in her personal life is her business. And furthermore, she does not deserve, in my honest opinion, such unfounded and rampant speculation about what she does or does not do off stage & outside the recording studio.
I concur. I don’t think any topic should be off-limits, necessarily, but I think on a site such as this one it’s appropriate to consider what the purpose of posting such speculation would be. If you want to comment on what you’ve noticed at shows, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if you’re privy to some kind of inside information that you can’t share, I think it does Lucinda a disservice to allude to it.
My two cents, based only on what I’ve witnessed at shows I’ve attended, is that I’ve seen shows where she was obviously a bit inebriated by the end of the show* and I’ve seen shows where she appeared sober at the end. At none of the shows I’ve seen have I ever thought that the quality of the performance suffered or that she was out of control. She apparently likes to drink; nothing wrong with that even during a show. And at the risk of engaging in some speculation of my own, I think it’s safe to say that she’s not always at ease performing onstage and a drink or two probably helps in that regard. I’d have no problem saying that her drinking was problematic from a performance standpoint if I saw it that way (I have some comical recordings of Bob Dylan circa 1991 that illustrate problem drinking in relation to performing), but I don’t.
I’ve never witnessed anything that implied she was under the influence of anything stronger than alcohol.
* Hopefully this anecdote won’t offend anyone…I remember the Madison show in ’06, for which I was lucky enough to be in the front row. She accidentally knocked her drink over at one point and the smell of alcohol was overpowering. My girlfriend nudged me and said “if the roadies drop a cigarette on that rug later, it’ll go up in flames.” 😀
I read somewhere that this song was written about a brother of Lucinda’s who killed himself.
You and/or the author of what you read might have been thinking of Little Angel, Little Brother, which is about Lucinda’s brother, but not about his death. Lucinda talked about the song – I think on one of the live albums from last year, but maybe it was someplace else – and how people always assumed her brother was dead because of the line about him being curled up in the backseat, parked outside a bar, and how she had to reassure them that no, he wasn’t dead, he was just drunk. 🙂
The more I think about it, the more I think Pineola is the best song Lucinda has ever written. Although it was written about Frank Stanford, there’s a universality to the song, too. I remember thinking of the verse about gathering at a friend’s house and sitting in a chair in the corner, unable to speak or even really think straight, when there was a death in my family (of completely different circumstances, mind you) several years ago. And there’s not a single wasted line in the song. From the beginning that shocks the listener in its directness (and the perfectly-placed crack of the drum like a gunshot after “Sonny shot himself”) to the little details that set the scene like the image of the sheets being taken from the bed, and from the image of the gravesite that I see in my mind’s eye every time I hear the song to the image she leaves us with of dust falling over his grave, I can’t think of a single thing that could improve the song.
It’s interesting; I have a recording of a radio show she did in 1981 where she performed Pineola with an extra verse at the end that she ended up dropping. There wasn’t anything particularly bad about the verse, but it was superfluous and I think the song is better off without it.
BTW, thanks for the link to the Wikipedia article. I didn’t know anything about Stanford previously beyond his suicide inspiring Pineola.
