Pages tagged “little honey”

Whatever the subject matter, Lucinda Williams’ music has always dripped with the feel of the old, rural Deep South, but as I talk to her before the release of her 10th record, Little Honey (out Oct. 14), she’s at her home in Los Angeles, having just finished a conversation with online music portal iMeem about her 10 favorite protest songs. The times, they are a-changin'.

Lucinda gets her joy back

Lucinda Williams has a great laugh—it’s a joyful sound to hear on the aptly titled Little Honey, the 10th album in her three-decade career. A sweet sense of renewal imbues Williams’ latest work, which encompasses all the elements of her eclectic catalog—from her stark early sets Ramblin’ (1979) and Happy Woman Blues (1980) to her 1988 self-titled breakthrough to last year’s textural West, co-produced with Hal Willner (Lou Reed, Bill Frisell). But not since her masterpiece, 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, has Williams dug so deep and come up with an album that brims with such varied, impeccable writing. Aided by loose-limbed playing from her band Buick 6, some notable party guests, and a voice full of everything from righteous gusto to hard-won wisdom, Little Honey is Lucinda Williams at her best.

When Lucinda Williams fans pick up the Louisiana native’s 10^th LP Little Honey on Oct. 14, they might be surprised by the closing track, a cover of AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way To the Top (If You Wanna Rock N’ Roll).” But the bigger surprise might come two weeks later on the digital-only EP of protest songs Lu in ’08—a live cover of Thievery Corporation’s collaboration with The Flaming Lips, “March of the Hate Machine (Into the Sun)."