Pages tagged “lucinda williams”

Texas-bred singer/songwriter Carrie Rodriguez received just about the greatest compliment a rootsy artist such as herself can get when Lucinda Williams wrote of her in the January 27 edition of the New York Times: "She's got something unique in her voice that's very subtle and a little smoky and sweet ... I detect a certain wisdom in her, and yet a sense of wonder as well."

One month later, and Williams’ admiration has already transformed from a distant appreciation to a spot on her upcoming tour.

Rodriguez, whose Back Porch debut Seven Angels On A Bicycle hit shelves in August, will join Lucinda for nine April shows scattered among the eastern U.S. Rodriguez’s touring band will include Hands Holzen on electric guitar, Kyle Kegerreis on stand-up bass and Sam Baker on drums. Oh, and she’ll play fiddle and mandobird.

Carrie Rodriguez and Lucinda Williams tour dates:

April
11 - Minneapolis, Minn. @ State Theatre
13 - Chicago, Ill. @ Vic Theatre
14 - Chicago, Ill. @ Vic Theatre
15 - Ann Arbor, Mich. @ Michigan Theatre
17 - Toronto, Canada @ Massey Hall
18 - Buffalo, N.Y. @ Center for the Performing Arts
21 - Knoxville, Tenn. @ Historic Tennessee Theatre
23 - Memphis, Tenn. @ Michael D. Rose Theatre
24 - Louisville, Ky. @ W.L. Lyons Brown Theatre

Related Links:
Carrie Rodriguez’s homepage
Carrie Rodriguez on MySpace

“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.

The story of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is long and winding. When the disc dropped in the summer of 1998, it was a major event. Williams’ previous two records—Lucinda Williams and Sweet Old World—had made the then-45-year-old singer/songwriter a bona fide critical darling and near-guru among the burgeoning alt.country crowd. Not only was Car Wheels her masterpiece, but it had been six years in the waiting. During that time, another alt.country darling, Uncle Tupelo, had splintered into Wilco and Son Volt, and a prolific young North Carolina songwriter named Ryan Adams had arrived on the scene with his band Whiskeytown.

The lags between Williams’ albums were already the stuff of legend. Before Car Wheels, she’d been on two indie labels, Chameleon and Rough Trade, that folded shortly after she released albums with them. (Rough Trade has since re-opened.) Williams also is known for being a studio perfectionist; She tinkered with Car Wheels for so long—bringing in new producers and moving sessions to different cities—that music-industry pundits claimed she’d never be satisfied. But when the album eventually came out on Mercury Records, it was worth the wait.

Nearly a decade later, Car Wheels remains the quintessential Americana album, from its painstakingly precise production and spot-on use of instrumental textures to Williams’ sweet-to-grainy vocal nuances and terrifically detailed songwriting, in which she spins heartbreaking, unmistakably Southern tales of tortured artists, lost loves and bitter breakups. So what should we ask of a deluxe edition? How about versions of the songs in their ragged glory? There must be hundreds of outtakes from all those sessions and producers, but you’d never know it from this reissue. What we do get are two excellent previously unreleased tracks (“Down the Big Road Blues” and “Out of Touch”) and an alternate take of “Still I Long for Your Kiss” that appeared on the Horse Whisperer soundtrack. Disc 2, though, makes up for the dearth of unreleased goodies. It’s a 1998 World Café appearance that includes blistering performances of nine Car Wheels songs as well as three tunes from Sweet Old World. And, of course, it features a soul-baring performance of road-tested crowd pleaser, “Changed the Locks.”

In 1998, Lucinda Williams released her magnum opus, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Widely regarded as her best work, it sold more than 750,000 copies and won a Grammy in 1999 for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

Eight years later, Car Wheels is back, this time in a remastered two-disc collection set for release on Oct. 24. Two previously unreleased songs and an alternate version of "Still I Long for Your Kiss" augment the original album, and the second disc encompasses a live performance from Penn's Landing in Philadelphia on July 11, 1998. The enhanced Car Wheels prefaces Williams' latest album, due for release later this year.

For more information, visit Williams' official website.

Sweet, sad harmonica and delicate tremelo guitar echoing from a rotating speaker, the soft sound of brushes against a snare and then… that voice. God, that beautiful aching drawl that lets you know—if you’re feeling bad, if you’re hurting, if you’ve got nowhere else to go—don’t worry, I’ve been there, too. Lucinda Williams' music—simple but profound. Painful but cathartic. Heartbreaking and full of life. It’s hard enough to imagine someone can feel this much, but its even harder to imagine someone can convey this intensity of feeling simply by stepping up to a microphone and letting go.

“She’s somebody I really admire,” says friend and fellow musician Matthew Ryan. “Lucinda has the ability to inhabit a real innocent heartache. It’s genuine. She’s that vulnerable. She’s that angry. She’s all the things she appears to be. And she’s smart, you know? I mean she’s super intelligent. She’s an open wound in some ways…”

Williams' latest, World Without Tears—with earnest, image-laden lyrics that will knock you over; one of the best roots song titles ever (“Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings”); an energetic live-in-the-studio feel (suggested by co-producer Mark Howard); some seriously talented studio support from Doug Pettibone (guitar, harmonies), Jim Christie (drums, organ) and Taras Prodaniuk (bass, harmonies); and material approaching her acclaimed Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, William’s proves she hasn’t stopped making essential albums.

“Well, I’ve been through another heartbreak,” says a rather cheerful Lucinda Williams over the phone from her new home in Los Angles.

And while it seems that the 49-year old who was recently named “America’s Greatest Songwriter” by Time, has experienced more than her allotted portion of emotional damage at the hands of men—all beautifully captured in her admittedly autobiographical canon of songs—she seems genuinely excited about her current lot in life. She’s left Nashville and what she calls the “general ambience of middle Tennessee … square … suburban … safe” for a thriving roots music scene in L.A. In a year in which she didn’t even release an album, she was nominated for yet another Grammy (for “Lately,” her song on Red House Records’ 2002 tribute to Greg Brown, Going Driftless). And she’s about to release World without Tears, an album that stretches her enough to creep out from the shadow of 1998’s Grammy-award-winning masterpiece Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

While 2001’s Essence was possibly her most reserved and sedate record of the last two decades, World without Tears is certainly her most eclectic. There are several trademark Williams ballads with sweet country gee-tar and her gravelly Mississippi drawl carrying as much passion and emotion as the best soul or gospel singers. But they’re interspersed with more adventurous tracks; songs like “American Dream” and “Sweet Side” are downright funky (though it’s much more a Chuck Prophet kind of funky than a Jurassic 5 kind of funky). “Righteously” is a frank and sensual plea to a beau: “Flirt with me don’t keep hurtin’ me / Don’t cause me pain / Be my lover don’t play no game / Just play me John Coltrane.” The Delta blues foundation of “Atonement” is drenched with distorted rhythm guitars, tin-can vocals and Southern Gothic hellfire-and-brimstone.

The disparate styles are held together by a core group of veteran players and the production of Mark Howard (engineer on such seminal albums as U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind and Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball). Whereas Essence featured 11 contributors (including guests like Jim Lauderdale, Ryan Adams and Gary Louris), World Without Tears was recorded live off the floor with Williams, Doug Pettibone, Jim Christie and Taras Prodaniuk. The quartet spent eight weeks in a 1920s mansion in L.A.’s bohemian bourgeois Silverlake neighborhood with Howard serving both as producer and engineer. It was a bit of a leap for the notoriously perfectionist Williams to consent to Howard’s live-take style.

“At first I was a little nervous about it,” says Williams. “I just figured I’d have to redo all my vocals anyway, or overdub them or do something like I’d always done before. [Howard] said, ‘We’ll worry about that later. Let’s just play the songs.’ And as it turned out—lo and behold—I didn’t have to redo any of my vocals. They’re all what I call ‘scratch vocals,’ live vocals, on every single song. I don’t know how that happened, but I guess miracles do happen. We started recording that way, and after a while we got comfortable with it. … I was able to just relax and sing, and it worked.”

Lean over the toilet bowl
And throw up my confession
Cleanse my soul
Of this hidden obsession
—“Ventura”

The two-year gap between albums is record time for an artist who only released two albums between Happy Woman Blues in 1980 and Car Wheels in 1998. Part of the inspiration can be attributed to the aforementioned break-up with her ex-bassist Richard Price. Williams insists that you don’t have to have your heart broken to write good songs but doesn’t deny that it helps.

“You have to experience whatever you’re writing about,” she says, “whether it’s heartbreak or abusive situations, religious persecution. You have to experience life. It’s just part of life and that’s just one piece of it. “

The daughter of poet Miller Williams grew up around poets who valued openness and vulnerability and who liked to stretch the limits of acceptability. It’s this legacy of transparency—along with an impish desire to “push people’s buttons”—that makes her music so personal and allows her audience to connect to the lyrics.

“In the world of poetry you don’t censor yourself,” she says. “You write about anything and everything—unless you’re Rod McKuen. I grew up around people [whose] main rule was, you don’t sugarcoat things. That’s a big no-no in my world. That’s why I never thought twice about it. “We get in our own way most of the time. When I’m writing, I get out of my own way—I just completely open myself up—and that’s why it seems like people say, ‘Your stuff is so vulnerable.’ We should do that all the time anyway. If I don’t do it enough in other parts of my life, I do it when I’m writing. That’s when I’m probably the most tuned in to a higher consciousness, or God, that God-consciousness. … I open myself up. I get out of my own way. To me, that’s the only way to create.”

She also has the poet’s gift of finding beauty in the mundane. In “Ventura” she sings of making a bowl of soup, going out for some live music, taking the long way home—all tinged with a sadness from those who have wronged her and sense of guilt for those she’s wronged. And then a chorus of “I wanna watch the ocean bend / The edges of the sun then / I wanna get swallowed in an ocean of love.” She’s careful to distinguish her gift from her father’s, though.

“I’ve dabbled around with poetry, but it’s really two different things because you don’t have the music to support the lyrics. … In poetry the lyrics have to sing alone, and it’s a little bit different craft. My dad’s tried writing songs, and I’ve tried writing poetry, and we both decided we’re just going to stick with what we already know.”

Words Fell
When we lay among the stones
And watched the Druids dance
And walked along the rocky shores
—“Words Fell”

Little Cindy Williams knew what she wanted to do at the age of 12. “I got turned on to Bob Dylan in 1965—Highway 61 Revisited—and that was it for me. That was when I said, ‘OK, I get this. I don’t completely get it because I’m only 12-and-a-half years old, but I completely get the correlation between the traditional folk music, which his stuff was musically based on, and the literary aspect of his lyrics because I grew up around writers. … When I was finally introduced to that record, all of a sudden it brought those two worlds together for me, and I said, ‘This is what I want to do, I want to do this, I want to figure out how he did that.’ And I’ve been working on it ever since. So, there you have it. That’s my life in a nutshell.”

The non-nutshell version includes detours to Santiago, Chile, in 1963, and later a year in Mexico City. Despite missing things like peanut butter and jelly and Captain Kangaroo, those early years abroad shaped her significantly. One of Williams’ earliest musical influences was Chilean folk-singer Violeta Parra, and while she was in college—“for about a minute”—she was studying cultural anthropology.

By junior high, she and a friend would sit around singing folk songs and even played a concert at school: Cindy Williams and Rebel Price. Price recently sent Williams a recording of the duo singing Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

Did you only want me
for those three days?
Did you only need me
for those three days?
Did you love me
forever just for those three days?
—“Those Three Days”

As we talk—more than three and a half decades after that junior high concert— Williams is getting ready to go out to a small club called the Hotel Café, a mini-art gallery and acoustic venue. She’s excited because Tim Easton will be playing, as well as her good friends Jonny Kaplan and Bryson Jones. Afterward, “everyone’s walking around the corner to the King King to see Keith Gattis … and Mike Stinson, and they’re just two of the best people playing around here.”

She goes out to hear live music with regularity, often joining the local roots-rockers on stage. She seems to be thriving off the Los Angeles music scene, and you can hear a reinvigorated Lucinda on World without Tears. Freed of her romantic relationship, freed of Nashville, she’s turned the past into song, is enjoying the present, and looks forward to the future—particularly releasing the new album to the world and touring.

It’s certainly a sad record, but she says, “There is a sweetness to the sadness.”

And that’s the magic of Lucinda Williams. If we lived in a world without tears, how would these gorgeous songs move us so? Tears are the soul of her muse, turning heartbreak and struggle into pieces of comfort and healing—using simple but powerful imagery—four minutes at a time