Williams Out "West"

Sunday News
Published:
By JOHN DUFFY, Correspondent

Lucinda Williams earned a reputation early in her career for taking so long to record albums that the process often outlived the labels that promised to release her music. Her 1998 breakthrough "Car Wheels on A Gravel Road," took six years of continuous work, the patience of a handful of top-shelf producers, and was twice started over from scratch. But the results; gold record sales, Grammy nods, multiple accolades, and not to mention setting a new benchmark for country- rock singer-songwriters to aim for, without a doubt must have seemed worth it in the end.

In the meantime, singers Patty Loveless, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Emmylou Harris made hits out of Williams' songs, helping to pay the rent long after she'd probably spent the advance. She also found a home at Universal subsidiary Lost Highway, which meant she could create in peace without worrying if her label is going to go broke and leave her in limbo.

Since then, Williams has kept up a brisk pace that oddly enough has only resulted in a continued increase in quality. Essence (2001), World Without Tears (2003), and a pair of live sets in 2005 have proven that while it took awhile to reach her stride, Williams is a modern talent with few equals.

In fact "West," her newest album, may be her greatest work yet, in the sense that Williams has given up on trying for perfection. "West" is full of holes; like the complete lack of bass on "Come On," the album's biggest rocker, the underdeveloped arrangement that makes "Are You Alright?" sound so perfectly sweet, or the dryness in Williams' voice when she sings of words that "move in phrase frozen til they decide/to melt and drip over pages/until that moment they live inside" on "Words."

Themes of losing loved ones, moving on after the loss, and in the end gaining from it, have been common themes for Williams, but here she has wrenched even more genuine emotion than ever before. The secret may lie in the fact that producer Hal Willner saved the scratch vocals from early demo versions of her songs through to the end of the recording process. It's an old trick, but one that's not often used any more in the age of Pro Tools and digital voice correction.

Of course, with a decent set of songs, it's nearly impossible to do wrong with veteran players like Jim Keltner, Gary Louris, and Bill Frisell, whose woody, atmospheric guitar, drenched in watery tremolo, is a sympathetic counterpoint to Williams' worn-sounding Southern voice. But what it means is that the genuine vulnerability and heartache Williams sings about is not lost in the often-repetitious process of making an album. It means that on a gem like the gently waltzing title track, which closes the album on a hopeful note, the instruments are played around her voice, not underneath it, or behind it.

When you hear the aching distance she sings about, the simple request to "come out west and see/the best that it could be," it's as if the song came up out of the California sands in which she traces the initials of the one she pines for. Instead of spending two presidential terms trying to get it to sound right, Williams has finally learned that she's good enough to get it right without trying very hard at all.