Gateways: How Lucinda Williams Remade My Mother

If you ask my mother what kind of music she likes, she’ll grin self-effacingly at you and tuck a piece of hair behind her ear. “Ladies of the ‘80s!” she’ll laugh, an answer as inoffensive as she herself strives to be. If there is an 11th commandment, it’s something like, “All mothers will love Madonna.” My mom isn’t lying when she pledges allegiance to Blondie, but she’s probably choosing the path of least resistance. I can’t blame her. My father is the musical lodestar of our family; what he pronounces to be good, my sister and I duly appreciate. The first videos of me crawling have Eminem playing in the background; the first CD I ever owned was Pearl Jam live in concert. Most of the artists my father loves are either a) men or b) women who are weird and avant-garde enough that they have shed the trappings of traditional femininity.

But as with all rules, there is an exception. In this case, the exception sports a cowboy hat and a mean streak, a Southern drawl and a voracious appetite for all she sees. She’s got bleached hair and a shock of dark eye makeup crawling up to her brows. She is Southern Gothic, sexified. She is the inexorable “it girl.” She is Lucinda Williams, and God, does she sound great.

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams’s roaring, twangy masterpiece, came out in September 1998, when my mother was around the age I am now. The alt-country heroine’s fifth album rollicks and rumbles through the backroads of the Deep South, where Williams lived, and across the hilly, crisscrossed landscapes of her romantic history. Car Wheels itself mirrors Williams’s travels, both physical and emotional: The album went through a host of collaborators and labels before finding a home at Mercury Records and being released to critical and popular acclaim.

Williams remembers the album as a “clusterfuck,” albeit one that won the 1999 Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album and which the Village Voice called 1998’s best musical endeavor. I remember it as my mom in our 2001 Infiniti sedan, singing as loud as she dares—which is to say very quietly—neat hair blowing around her thin neck as we bounce along the dirt roads beneath the Catskills. She is beautiful and her smile is stretching out the smooth skin around her mouth. Her freckles are more pronounced than mine, and I ritualistically offer my face out to the aestival brightness in an effort to emulate her. It is sometime around mid-July, two or three in the afternoon, and the sun is shining like a great big melon in a huge expanse of powder blue sky. We are heading back from somewhere kitschy and down-home, an artisan tea shop or a diner in an old railroad car. Soon, we will arrive at our creaky house in the middle of the great big woods and swim in a massive, frog-infested pool. This is how I like to remember my mother: in the passenger’s seat, softly ebullient, capable of breaking a man’s heart and running away, hopping on a train to a dusky old town and dancing through its unpaved streets.

Throughout Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Williams wants it all, and the women that populate her songs are a swirling mixture of a ‘90s riot grrrl fervor and rural resistance. They are slutty and fiery and mad. They are fiercely sexual: In “Right In Time,” a forever favorite of mine, Williams croons, “I take off my watch and my earrings, my bracelets and everything, lie on my back and moan at the ceiling, oh, my baby.” I imagine these women with very small denim skirts and smirking carnation lips. I like myself most when I can identify with them, when I inhabit my body with a demanding sort of velocity. It’s no surprise, then, that I’ve veered toward my dad’s music as I’ve grown up: His is the brash, imposing force of the male artist, the thrumming want-want-want of the Stones and the Replacements. Williams wants just as hard as any man; I bet she’d argue that she wants it even more. More than that, she insists what she wants is her right: “I don’t want you anymore, ‘cause you took my joy,” she snarls on “Joy,” a vindictive assertion of self-ownership. “I want it back, I’m gonna go to West Memphis, I’m gonna go to Slidell,” Williams promises as the song sidles to an end, hinting at the adventures of the flesh which await her. She is an avenger and an empress, a conquistador of Southern desire.

But my mother is nothing like Lucinda Williams. She has always gone to great lengths to make herself soft and acquiescent and unimposing. She listens intently and makes a mean kale chip. She doesn’t like to drive alone. She has always, as far as I can recall, had a sensible bob—from the very few pictures she’s willing to show us of the time, it seems this was true even when she was my age. She would never flee a lover or brawl in a saloon, or allow herself to be the sort of depressive Dylanian ne’er do well that Williams paints herself as. The closest she’s gotten, I think, was when she threw up a couple too many Bartles and Jaymes’ in the Jersey basement of my dad’s childhood home. Granted, she was 16, and even then, she wasn’t the type not to make it to the toilet. Williams is, in fact, a sort of darkroom print of my mother, the answer to all the what-ifs and never-coulds of her life. Williams houses the hurt of her failures and foibles. My mom carries the weight of never having been able to fail like that in the first place. It aches sometimes to listen to Williams’s silky simper, to wonder if my mom regrets being so sweet.

There is a sweetness, though, to Williams, one which wrenches her away from the grasps of the men she shirks and places her squarely in the realm of feminine longing. This, I think, is what my mother nestles into when she listens to Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. In “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten,” Williams croons, “June bug versus hurricane, June bug versus hurricane, hey-hey…I had a lover, I…I thought he was mine, thought I’d always be his valentine.” She is the June bug and she is the hurricane. She is the masculine and the feminine, warbled together over an insistent base and a twanging guitar. She inhabits a want-want-want all her own, and it is one I can see in my mother as she glides over our own gravel roads; she wants to envelop and be enveloped, to love with the gentle insistence that has oiled the stuttering cogs of all who are lucky enough to encounter her. The power of her want, more times than I can count, has calmed a hurricane through its barrelling path. Just like Williams’s own, it is omnipotent; perhaps, it is something more. If Williams’ own desire has kicked up the dust into swirling clouds ready to be whirled into the hurricane of her need, my mother’s, over and over and over again, has left the plains sparkling even brighter in the wake of the storm.

In “Jackson,” a gentle searer from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road’s close, Williams promises herself, “All the way to Jackson, I don’t think I’ll miss you much.” The refrain repeats six times, intertwining with others of the same ilk to suggest that Williams, in fact, will miss her lover dearly. She is strong, and she is soft; she is insistent, and she is imploring. She is my mother, and my father, and me: Her capacity to inhabit the whole of human desire manages to bring us together in a way few artists ever could. Lucinda Williams is not my mother, but sometimes, just for a moment, with the breeze on her cheeks and her eyes closed toward the afternoon sun, my mother is her.

Miranda Wollen lives in New York and attends school in Connecticut, but you can find her online @mirandakwollen.