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No apologies, PDL. You know how it is with a new album – first you fall for one song, then you listen some more, then you love another one better. Then a third one mesmerizes you. I’ll have to listen to it for about two weeks straight before I’ve taken it in enough to be able to decide. 🙂
I think we all can agree, though, that Blessed is magical.
My dream is to have an all Blessed show, and have that available as a video download. I would pay good money to have a video album to play on the big tv. 😀 How cool would that be, especially if it included the backstories of the songs. 🙂
Hi Blake –
Welcome! I heard you did really well at the Bardot show, and I look forward to meeting you later this tour. So far for the 2nd leg, I will be going to Atlanta, Lafayette, New Orleans Jazz Fest, and NOLA House of Blues. I’m sure there’ll be more, as more shows are announced.
I think you may be the first band member to post to the forum, way cool. Please practice extra on Seeing Black, Copenhagan, and Blessed. I think a lot of fans will be yelling out for those. 😉 😀
You have great timing in joining the band when this amazing album is coming out. I hope you have fun!
Good recap of Dakota # 1. Click on link to see pics. 🙂
http://blogs.citypages.com/gimmenoise/2011/02/lucinda_william_1.php
Last Night
Lucinda Williams at Dakota Jazz Club, 2/20/11
By Andrea Swensson, Mon., Feb. 21 2011 @ 1:09AMSnowstorms be damned. While over a foot of snow came wafting down from the clouds last night, the Dakota Jazz Club was dry and packed for the first of three sold-out solo performances by Lucinda Williams.
“You guys are great,” laughed owner Lowell Pickett, introducing the performers for the evening. “For every person who gave up their seat for tonight’s show because of the snow, we had two more dying to take their place.”
As the orange flicker of snowplow lights flashed across the back wall of the Dakota’s expansive main floor, young Shreveport, Louisiana native Dylan LeBlanc warmed the crowd with a set of sparse, somber alt-country ballads. It was LeBlanc’s second time playing in the Cities, his first appearance taking place only a few weeks prior when he opened for Lissie at the Cedar Cultural Center, and it was clear from his shy stage presence and reserved mumbling between songs that the 20-year-old Rough Trade signee is still adjusting to life as a performer. Nonetheless, his voice had an otherworldly quality to it that caught the audience’s attention, and his songs had an underlying eeriness to them that was reminiscent of a solo performance by Ryan Adams or, as my date suggested, maybe Robin Pecknold of the Fleet Foxes.
After a brief break, Lucinda Williams emerged with such unassuming fanfare that it took a minute for the crowd to quiet down. “Y’all can keep on talkin’ and drinkin’ if you want,” deadpanned Williams. “I don’t mind.”
And just like that, the crowd was hers.
Williams took advantage of the rare solo performance to talk at length with the audience, setting up almost every song with some back story or context. At one point, while setting up “Metal Firecracker,” she told the whole sordid tale of her love affair and breakup with the former bass player who inspired the song. “I may as well just start saying all this stuff,” she said, shaking her head mid-saga. “It’s either that, or save it for my memoirs.”
Armed with only an acoustic guitar and a three-ring binder full of lyrics, Williams wielded her voice like a weapon, cutting through the air and allowing it to fill the entire room, then reigning it back in when it was almost too much to bear. The flawless sound system only served to further accentuate every scoff and crack in her vocal delivery, like punctuation marks at the ends of her lines of lyrics about heartbreak and desire.
Lucinda’s set was heavy on new material from her soon-to-be-released album, Blessed (“It’s Blessed, not Bless-ed,” she stressed), but with a whopping 20 songs in her main set and another four in the encore, it gave her plenty of time to pluck out songs from throughout her lengthy career. Actually, she managed to squeeze in seven of the 13 tracks from her first commercially successful album, 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, compared to just five from Blessed.
For the encore, she brought out Minnesota native (and current Austin, Texas resident) Randy Weeks, who wrote “Can’t Let Go” from Car Wheels, and his moaning and chugging electric guitar accompaniments quickened the pace and made for an energized conclusion to a night of pensive and soul-baring songcraft.
Personal bias: I’d never seen Lucinda live, but I’ve been a fan of her music for at least a decade.
The crowd: Prim and proper, a stark contrast to Williams’ gritty tales.
Overheard in the crowd: The clinking of wine glasses and silverware as people finished their dinners during the performance; some heartfelt but off-tempo clapping during “Can’t Let Go.”
Random notebook dump: “My band is starting to get worried.” — Williams, talking about how much she has enjoyed playing solo for a change.
For more photos: See our complete slideshow by Tony Nelson.Set List:
Greenville
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
Pineola
Memphis Pearl
Port Arthur (tribute to Janis Joplin)
Lake Charles
Crescent City
I Don’t Know How You’re Living
Ugly Truth
Somebody Somewhere (Don’t Know What He’s Missing Tonight) (Loretta Lynn, written by Lola Jean Dillon)
Metal Firecracker
Concrete and Barbed Wire
Buttercup
Kiss Like Your Kiss
Lonely Girls
Blue
Side of the Road
Born to Be Loved
Blessed
HoneybeeEncore (with Randy Weeks on electric guitar):
Something About What Happens When We Talk
Can’t Let Go
Changed the Locks
JoyI just received an email from Stuart’s that a patron notified them that they couldn’t use their front row seats, and wanted to auction them off as a fundraiser. Bidding starts at face value, which is either $105 or $110 for the two tickets.
http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/music/116577933.html
Sweet, sad songs perfect on snowy eve
REVIEW: Lucinda Williams was suitably intimate at her solo gig at the Dakota Jazz Club.By JON BREAM, popmusic.com
Lucinda Williams
“Wow this is really intimate,” Lucinda Williams said as she took the tiny stage Sunday night at the sold-out Dakota Jazz Club for a rare solo acoustic singer-songwriter gig.
It turned out to be a wonderfully intimate performance. Williams was relaxed, friendly, confessional and uncompromising. It was exactly what her devoted fans had pined for under the circumstances.
Rock’s poet laureate of pain presented 105 minutes of deeply enriching sad songs — short stories, really — on a snowy winter’s night. The three-time Grammy winner demonstrated why Time magazine called her America’s best songwriter in 2002. She is a songwriter’s songwriter, with a poet’s sensibility, a journalist’s attention to detail and a novelist’s storytelling skills.
This being an intimate evening, Williams, 58, was fairly talkative, often explaining the backstory of her songs. She separated the facts from fiction before singing “Pineola,” the tale of a poet who committed suicide. She confessed that “Memphis Pearl” was an imagined story about a woman she saw Dumpster diving in Los Angeles, and that the unrecorded “Port Arthur” was about Janis Joplin.
And she blabbed all about the ex-lover who inspired “Metal Firecracker.” It might have been TMI for the uninitiated but for her fans this was like sitting in her living room being serenaded by a master of sweet, sad songs.
Williams previewed six songs from her 10th studio album, “Blessed,” due out on March 1. “Buttercup” was one of her typical scolding-of-a-bad-boy tunes. “Born to Be Loved” was a meditation on mankind’s hard-luck people that could easily be interpreted as a love song. There’s no doubt that Williams, who married Minnesotan Tom Overby in 2009 onstage at First Avenue, now has a wider range of emotions in her repertoire. Has a hymn ever sounded as dreamy as “Kiss Like Your Kiss” (which she dedicated to Overby)? Best of all may have been “Ugly Truth,” with its sweet, gentle country melody and her voice so controlled but infused with quiet, graceful conviction.
On this, the second of 10 solo shows before she starts a tour with her band on March 4, Williams was in strikingly good voice. Her lazy Louisiana drawl sounded less gravelly, less weathered and, frankly, prettier than usual.
Near the end of her main set, Williams seemed to run out of steam, as she blew the lyrics on the wordy “Blessed” and had to start over. By then, even hard-core fans might have been wishing for a guitar sideman, who could accent and punctuate her songs the way Doug Pettibone had at their 2006 duo show at the O’Shaughnessy in St. Paul.
Those wishes were answered during the encore when Williams brought out her old buddy, Minnesota-bred guitarist Randy Weeks of Austin, Texas. His slide guitar enlivened the jaunty “Can’t Let Go,” the scathing, twangy “Change the Locks” and the scorching “Joy.” They ranked with “Blue,” her elegant ballad about loneliness, as the night’s highlights.
There is no word if Weeks will be joining Williams for her Dakota concerts on Monday and Tuesday. But she does promise a new set list each night.
Interesting NPR piece – “Where To Buy Music To Get More Cents On The Dollar To The Musician”
Say your favorite band is putting out a new album and you’ve decided to buy it. You want to make sure that when you do, the band gets as much of your money as possible. Where do you shop? Best Buy? Your local record store? iTunes?
It used to be so simple. An album would come out, you’d pay a store some amount of money in exchange for it, and the band would get some of that money.
Well, actually, not quite that simple. Here’s how it worked: a band would record an album for a record label, which would make many many duplicate copies of that album. At that point the album became like any other physical good. The label would pay a distributor to get these goods into stores; the stores that agreed to stock the album would pay a wholesale price for it. At that point, the store could sell it for as much as it wanted to, based on a variety of factors — how important the sale of recorded music was to its continued existence; whether the store wanted to use the lure of a cheap compact disc to get you in the doors so they could sell you expensive appliances. The record label would pay the musicians a portion of the wholesale price of each album sold, usually the same regardless of retail location (as a result, gold and platinum sales designations are based on number of copies shipped and not sold, but that’s another story).
Of course, today, the Internet (as it does with just about everything) has made the business of being a fan who just wants to buy an album much more complicated.
“In general, you want to make sure your album is everywhere,” says Dawn Barger, the manager of bands that include indie heavyweights The Antlers and The National. “You want it in the indie stores, you want it on iTunes, you want it on Amazon. And if you can get it in the chain stores, that’s good because a lot of places, that’s the only place to get a physical record these days.”
It’s important not to leave any outlet out, Barger says, because you don’t want to frustrate a potential customer who prefers a specific kind of store. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a difference. Let’s review your choices.
Streaming
Often today, you don’t have to pay anything to listen to a new album, and sometimes you can even do it without breaking the law. Between sites like YouTube, which host non-sanctioned user-uploaded streams; Rdio, where you pay a subscription fee to have access to a selection of cloud-based streaming albums; and sites like NPR Music (hi, guys!), where streams of many full albums are available for limited amounts of time, you can listen to an album without paying a dime.
So it doesn’t count as a purchase, but that doesn’t mean the musicians walk away from the exchange empty-handed. These websites pay for the right to broadcast that music (as do radio stations), often in tiny amounts per song/per listener, to organizations like SoundExchange, which in turn pay royalty rates to the musicians. According to a 2009 settlement between the National Association of Broadcasters and SoundExchange, that royalty rate for 2011 is $0.0017 per song.
More money (still in tiny increments that, in the best-case scenario, accrue over time) goes to the songwriter(s) whose work is streamed, via organizations like ASCAP and BMI, but the specific amount of money that songwriter receives is a percentage of the licensing fees paid by the streaming site in proportion to how often her song is performed, and how many people were listening.
Digital Music Stores
“On the digital side, most people tend to make between 60 and 75 cents [per song] for a sale off of iTunes,” Barger says. “That money doesn’t all flow back to the band, but that’s generally what the label earns from iTunes.”
Why the range in wholesale price? Barger says that unlike physical distribution, contracts with digital stores are negotiated separately by each label. And from there, it’s kind of impossible to know just how much money a band will get if you buy their album via an a la carte (as opposed to subscription) download service, because the each band’s contract with its label is different, and renegotiated every year or two. The two parties might split the revenues 50/50, or the musicians might get a percentage of each sale.
Brick And Mortar Record Stores
So you’ve made the choice to leave your house, walk into a physical record store and use your dollars to vote for a band. How much money does your effort buy? Not necessarily much more than what that band might get from the sale of a digital album.
To get albums into record stores, most labels partner with distributors. Bob Morelli, the President of RED Music, an independent distributor owned by Sony Music, describes the relationship between a distributors and a store as similar to the one between a label and a musician. Each album has a set wholesale price – somewhere between five and seven dollars, according to Dawn Barger – that each and every store that wants to stock the album will pay (as with digital sales, the musicians get a portion of that wholesale price that depends on their contract with the label). The distributor’s job is to figure out which stores the album will sell in, and then to convince as many of those stores as it can to stock it, to make it “as ubiquitous as possible,” Morelli says.
In order to achieve that ubiquity, some records bring in a little less money.
“If you have a discounted album in a physical retail setting, generally, not always but generally, the record label has paid for that,” Barger says. “Price and positioning, listening stations, weekly circulars — all of these things can be charged back to the record label to position the record better in the store.”
Sometimes those discounts trade in higher sales for a lower per-album return to the band. When the National’s last album, 2010’s High Violet, came out, the band’s label paid more for placement than it had with the band’s previous album, 2008’s Boxer. Nearly a year later, even though sales for High Violet are stronger, Barger says, “At this point in the album cycle, we’ve actually earned more per album from Boxer than we have from High Violet, due to the spend over time.”
Directly From The Band
While the many layers of complex contracts, discounts and placement programs can make it tough to know exactly how much of your dollar a band gets from a retail outlet, there’s one reassuring certainty. When you buy your album directly from the band, it actually sees significantly more money.
That’s because in this scenario – say, when you buy it from a band at a show – the musicians function as the retail store. Which means they pay the wholesale cost for the album, and you pay the retail to them. “So they’re purchasing from the label and the money that goes back to the label is paid back to them in their royalty share,” Barger explains. “But all of the markup that would normally go to the retail store goes to the band when you purchase it at a show.”
Even if you subtract a fee from the venue, that can mean an extra five or six dollars per sale. Which can add up.
Plus, there’s a bonus. The San Francisco-based musician John Vanderslice calls sales via digital or brick and mortar outlets “essential” but “unknowable transaction
to me.” Handing over a copy of an LP to a fan at a show, though, is his favorite “It’s a totally exciting and very pure thrill that will never die with me. Like half of the fun of playing a live show for me is going to the merch table and talking to people and signing stuff. … It feels really great to hand-deliver that to a fan.”Seriously, doesn’t it get more incredible with each listen?!!
I’m upping the Grammy ante to include Album of the Year; music doesn’t get any better than this. 😀
Blessed in its entirety!!!
http://www.npr.org/2011/02/20/133840259/first-listen-lucinda-williams-blessed?sc=fb&cc=fp
Aaaarrgghh, I had planned on getting to sleep early tonight… that is not going to happen now! 😀 😯
This album is unbelievable. xoxoxo
LWJ wrote: Such a great song West Words.
Minneapolis is a song Lu doesn’t do very often and it is one I’ve been unable to find a video of, so let’s listen to it from NPR, scroll down to WWT.It is one of my favorites, and pure poetry!
“Open up this wound again
Let my blood flow red and thin
Into the glistening
Into the whiteness
Into the melting snow
Of Minneapolis”I remember at the NYC shows last year, there was a young musician (Hi Ben, if you are part of the forum) who LOVED Lu, and REALLY loved that song. He yelled out for it every night. On the third night she took an exceptionally long break before the encore, and sure enough, she played Minneapolis for him. The kid was beside himself, it was a beautiful thing. 🙂
And that is the magic of “The Book”. At any given show, it is possible that any song could emerge, whether or not it was planned for. 🙂
I just got a google alert that other Minneapolis shows were cancelled tonight because of the snow, but that Lu’s show was still on. Probably she’s the only one with a driver who knows how to maneuver in the snow. Be safe everyone. 🙂
“Snow covers the streetlamps and the windowsills, the buildings, and the brittle crooked trees”
Thanks, M5! I love, love, love that song!
I wasn’t sure if the corresponding Marty Duda interview transcript had been posted, but if not, here it is. You can also hear the interview if you click the link right below where you click to play the song. Good backstory stuff. 🙂
http://13thflooroffice.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/lucinda-williams-interview-january-21.pdf
Some factual errors (anniversary date, number of suicide songs), but good article and nice to see the “P” word mentioned again in a positive way.
http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/music/116413909.html
Lucinda Williams: Happily hitched, but riding solo here
To preview her new “Blessed” CD, the Americana queen is playing three rare solo shows at the Dakota.By JON BREAM, Star Tribune
You know how it goes. You bring your new spouse to your parents’ hometown. You’re feeling happy, you want to make a good impression. And, if you’re Lucinda Williams, the avatar of Americana music, that means you get roped into playing an unplanned solo gig — with a Gibson borrowed from a local Guitar Center.
Thirty-some years into her celebrated Grammy-winning career, Williams rediscovered the joys of singing alone last fall on a visit to her professor father in Fayetteville, Ark., when she ended up playing two nights at a little joint called George’s Majestic Lounge.
“It’s unusual for me to play solo. It ended up being a real positive experience,” Williams said recently from her Los Angeles home. As a result, she’s doing a few solo gigs on her way to Toronto, where her band starts a tour March 4, “just for a change of pace,” she said. “This is an experiment. We had so much fun at that venue at Fayetteville, and there are so many other cool venues like that.”
Like the intimate Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis, which will get three of her 10 solo performances.
Her sold-out engagements next week will be her smallest Twin Cities gigs since her debut in 1989 at the 7th Street Entry. She knows what she’s getting into. She saw Booker T & the MGs at the Dakota a few years ago.
Having been involved with Tom Overby, a former Best Buy executive who became her manager, for more than five years, she has spent some time in Minnesota. His parents live in Austin, Minn. The two got hitched in Minneapolis Sept. 19, 2009, during a combination wedding/concert at First Avenue.
“I love Minneapolis, but Tom can’t stand the cold,” said Williams, who recorded her 2001 album “Essence” in Minneapolis in wintertime. “Since I didn’t grow up in real cold weather like that, I guess I have a more idealistic and romantic view of the snow and everything.”
Prolific and ‘Blessed’
Her new album, “Blessed,” will be released March 1. It’s her third full-length in four years, a ➡ prolific pace compared with the seven studio albums she made in the first 24 years of her career.
“This prolific stuff started after I lost my mother in March 2004,” Williams explained. “Plus, I was in a really destructive relationship. I started writing and writing, and I met Tom. The big test after Tom and I got together was: Am I going to be able to still write like this? He passed the test. I frankly hadn’t been able to have a good relationship before in the sense that I felt productive, prolific and creative in a relationship.”
The excellent and remarkably diverse disc was produced by Don Was (Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones), whom Williams met a year ago at a Grammys tribute to Neil Young. One of his key contributions was hooking her up with superstar mixer Bob Clearmountain — the guy who puts the final polish on albums by Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones and the Pretenders. “Bob remixed it,” she said, “and it just pushed everything up a notch, or two, or three.”
While Williams is known as the queen of heartache, “Blessed” has a striking range of emotions and topics. It contains some of this century’s slowest, sultriest love songs, including the smoldering, late-night “Born to Be Loved,” the hymn-like “Kiss Like Your Kiss” and the accordion-embraced “Sweet Love.”
For the first time, Williams sings about war. “Soldier’s Song” is told from the dual reality of the man fighting overseas and his wife at home with their child.
“It’s a subject matter I’ve been wanting to write about, but it’s not easy to do without pointing a finger and getting your politics all involved in that,” Williams said. “I’m better at the humanitarian aspect, writing from the person’s feelings. I’ve always wanted to write some topical songs. Steve Earle’s real good at that. It’s really hard for me. It ends up sounding too corny.”
“Seeing Black” is about suicide, the second time she has addressed the topic (1992’s “Sweet Old World” was the other).
“What sparked that was when I heard about [singer/songwriter] Vic Chesnutt’s suicide,” she said. “We didn’t know each other really well. Of course, I was stunned and saddened. This is just kind of ‘Sweet Old World Part 2,’ but it has a whole different vibe. My perspective is going to be different at [age] 58 than it was at 42.”
One of the big discoveries on “Blessed” is the guitar player whom co-producer Overby invited — Elvis Costello.
Said Williams: “Elvis e-mailed Tom and said, ‘Are you sure this e-mail went to the right place?’ Tom said that Elvis will just tear these things up. He came, and he had three or four different guitars, and I just sat in the control room and Elvis just started [playing], and my jaw dropped.”
Judging by his expressively bluesy, delightfully twangy and mournfully majestic contributions to “Blessed,” Costello could be a guitar hero in his spare time — just as Williams can be a solo performer in hers.
Jon Bream • 612-673-1719
