The Late Bloomer

“This is the record I’ve been wanting to make for a while—a hip yet mature album with a certain kind of lushness,” Lucinda Williams says of her decision to tap Hal Willner to co-produce her latest album, West. It’s one of those rare recordings in which every note seems preordained, as if it couldn’t have possibly come out any other way. But the path that led to this intimate, subtly refined song cycle was a winding one. “It’s a really unusual process we went through with this record,” the artist, who just turned 54, recalls.

West had its genesis early in 2005, as Williams experienced an unprecedented songwriting burst. “I was just on this roll,” she says, as if in awe of her own right brain. With a dozen freshly penned songs in her pocket, Williams summoned her band—guitarist Doug Pettibone, drummer Jim Christie and bass player Taras Prodaniuk—to Hollywood’s Radio Recorders, in order to demo the new material with the help of her engineer friend, Michael Dumas, who co-owned the facility. They recorded in the evenings—Williams singing and playing acoustic guitar with her band while several of her friends watched from the control room—and Dumas rolled tape and manned the console. The vibe was palpable—“There was this sense of, ‘Wow, there’s some magic happening,’” she says. “Every few days, I’d take another song in to the guys, and everything was comin’ out just real fresh. And since the songs were so new, there was a spirit to the way I was singing them.”

It turned out to be Williams’ most gratifying recording experience—a far cry from the numerous stories of impossible demands, occasional meltdowns and erratic behavior that had given her the reputation of being difficult, if not downright impossible, in the studio. “That’s not to say it didn’t come without my neuroses and obsessiveness,” she acknowledges with a self-effacing laugh. But the positive vibes were bringing tangible results. “We’d gone in there just to do demos, and they ended up bein’ more like basic tracks,” she says.

LEAVE IT ALONE OR TAKE IT AWAY

After cutting 24 songs, Williams was faced with a crucial decision: either doing what she’d always done—overdubbing some additional instruments and putting out what was essentially another set of live-in-the-studio performances—or taking these new recordings to another place altogether. It was her fiancé, Tom Overby, an executive at Fontana Distribution (yes, she’s gone over to the other side after a series of volatile relationships with musicians), who suggested she check out Willner, who’s been the music supervisor for Saturday Night Live since 1981, and whose reputation is based in large part on his boldly unconventional, star-studded tributes to Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weill, Carl Stalling, Edgar Allan Poe and others. Overby put Marianne Faithfull’s Willner-produced Strange Weather into the stereo, and the sounds coming out of the speakers captivated Williams.

“Everything was very present, especially the vocals,” she says. “There was obviously a lot of production involved, but it didn’t sound over-produced. And that’s what I wanted to do—a record that was really a production, rather than ‘the band’s in the room and we play the songs and that’s it,’ which is pretty much what I’d done in the past. So asking Hal to do it made sense.”

Williams called Willner, who could hardly believe his good fortune, having had Lucinda’s name on his wish list ever since producer Joe Boyd had raved to him years earlier that this single-minded artist had redeemed his faith in music. After comparing notes on the kind of record each envisioned, they went into Village Recorders in West L.A. to “test the waters,” cutting a cover of John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind” for the film Talladega Nights and reconvening for a song on Willner’s sea-chanteys project.

GILDING THE NITTY GRITTY

Once Lucinda was satisfied that Willner “got it,” she allowed her music to be “worked on” for the first time ever. After listening to the Radio Recorders tracks, Willner decided to keep all of her original vocals. “We were gonna start from scratch again,” he says, “and I went, ‘Damn, why?’ And that made her really happy because she felt that she had put a lot into them.” He also opted to keep Pettibone’s guitar parts. “Doug is the perfect guitarist for Lucinda,” says the producer. “He does the same thing—just gets right to it.” The album would be built around these in-the-moment performances, with the help of what Willner describes as “our dream band”: drummer Jim Keltner, bass player Tony Garnier, guitarist Bill Frisell, keyboardist Rob Burger and violinist/string-arranger Jenny Scheinman.

“I look for things in a musician that go far beyond technical ability,” Willner explains. “Like what they do with it. All the musicians on this album listen to lyrics, which you don’t find in a lot of session players.”

The tracks were then stripped down to their essence and re-imagined from the inside out, with Willner adding understated sampling in certain places and engineer/mixer Eric Liljestrand performing the countless minute edits needed to achieve aural coherence and flow. The whole point of this laborious process was to put Williams’ vocals into the most resonant settings possible—Willner compares the job to creating the ideal frame for a brilliant painting—and for good reason: these were the most natural and heart-wrenching performances of her career. “She’s one of those artists who are their art,” marvels Willner, who cites “Rescue,” West’s centerpiece, as his favorite production. “She’s amazing in how she removes that boundary that separates a lot of artists from saying directly what they mean. These particular songs deal with her life over the last few years, starting from the end of a relationship to anger to redemption to finding a new love. The songs are so personal.” I’m really excited about this record and the future,” says Lucinda, sounding shockingly upbeat. “I’ve always been a late bloomer, and I feel like I’m only just now peaking as an artist—just coming into my own. I’m getting more comfortable in my own skin.”

Correction: This article, as it appears in issue 28 of Paste incorrectly credits “Gentle On My Mind” to Jimmy Webb. In fact, it was penned by John Hartford. It has been corrected for the web.