The Atlanta Journal-Constitution July 12, 1998

You may not know her name. You may not have seen her face. But after hearing 'Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, ' you'll know . . . LUCINDA WILLIAMS

By Eileen M. Drennen

The perfect sound can live in your mind like a landscape you know by heart. You can circle around it, tirelessly, until maybe, just maybe, you capture it on tape. When others finally hear it, they will heap praise upon you for getting it so right. Until then, you may be dismissed as a "nutty perfectionist" by band mates or even The New York Times. And instead of talking about your music, every interviewer will want to chat about being obsessive.

Welcome to Lucinda Williams' nightmare. At 45, she is revered by other musicians, critics and fans for making country blues that are closer to poetry than pop. She's never charted, and every label she's ever signed with has folded, so she's largely unknown to the average consumer of popular entertainment. "Passionate Kisses, " her most famous song, only hit country radio when Mary Chapin Carpenter covered it, winning them both a Grammy in 1994.

Though her fifth album, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" is being greeted with raves (see ours on Page L3), it did not come without a price: three sets of producers, an ever- expanding cast of musicians, take and retake, mix and remix.

The usual question is "why does Lucinda Williams take so long to make a record?" She's gladly sacrificed volume for creative control on each disc --- her last, the acclaimed "Sweet Old World, " came out in 1992. Unlike, say, Van Morrison or Bob Dylan, notoriously bad judges of their own vast output, she has brutal clarity about each song. Plenty have damned her exactitude, but others consider it an achievement.

"This has become a pet peeve of mine, " says Emmylou Harris, who sings harmony on the new record. "A lot of times male artists take a long time between records and rerecord (them) --- and people call them geniuses and laud them for having control. They can't heap enough accolades on them. Yet Lucinda's taking a lot of grief. The only thing I can think of is it's because she's a woman.”

Now that "Car Wheels" has music writers tripping over superlatives --- senior rock critic Robert Christgau gave it 4 1/2 stars out of 5 and called it "more perfect than perfect" in Rolling Stone magazine --- the question Williams wants to ask is, "Why does anyone care how long it took?”

Poets' wanderlust

Moving on has been a way of life since childhood. Her father, the poet Miller Williams --- who read at President Clinton's most recent inauguration while she played at one of the balls --- took his family from one Southern university job to the next. As a 20- something songwriter in the early '80s, steeped in the folk revival and wanderlust of the '60s, she followed suit, blowing from Louisiana to Texas to California.

So it's interesting to see her parked in Nashville, in an older suburb called Green Hills. The house, with its hardwood floors, tall windows and tree-laden yard, is a roomy older model she rents from the man next door. If living rooms reveal favorite things, hers are music, Mexican folk art and Bob Dylan: A print of his 1970 album cover "Self-Portrait" hangs over her brown leather couch; his face looks out from other walls and a magnet on the fridge.

It doesn't look like the home of a "nutty perfectionist." It's orderly (CDs arranged alphabetically) but not obsessive (cookbooks are not). Navajo rugs, framed poems by Dad, photos of blues heroes John Lee Hooker and Sunnyland Slim. Guitars in cases and on stands. "Snakes, skulls and crosses, " she jokes later, summing up the decor. A brick from Woody Guthrie's house rests in the bookcase.

The only clutter is contained in an office she hasn't unpacked since she and boyfriend- band mate Richard Price moved in six months ago. Which is, naturally, where the photographer for Newsweek is hoping to pose her on a hot Saturday in June.

It's nearly 5 p.m.; Williams was due at 3 from a photo shoot a few miles away. Those in wait --- representatives from her management company and the record label, a neighbor, a reporter --- have gravitated from the porch steps to the air conditioning. Photographer Michael Tighe has staked out the yard and is making one more sweep inside.

"This room is perfect!" he yells from the top of the stairs. "Looks like a bomb went off." Paid to be low-key, the management rep tells him it's probably off-limits.

Providentially, car wheels on a gravel road announce Williams' arrival. As she pulls up in a Ford Explorer, you wonder if she'll be up for the last two rounds of publicity that were wedged into what had been her day off. Especially since she's known to prize "cool quiet and time to think" --- and her privacy. But she's not dragging when she climbs out of the driver's seat and pulls off her shades.

"Hi, " she says, sticking out a hand. "I'm Lucinda." She doesn't give you the flat hand, but a real grasp. Tired, maybe, but she seems almost grateful to be able to push "Car Wheels, " the best and the hardest thing she's ever done.

She's high on the sounds that are finally blaring out from Americana stations across the country, but still feels defensive about a September 1997 New York Times article that portrayed her as the ultimate diva. Haunted by the sound in her head and struggling to catch it on tape, she came across as the worst kind of neurotic: driven but indecisive. When the Times article ran, her album was still nine months from radio or record stores. American Records honcho Rick Rubin was doing the final mix when he dissolved his label and moved to Sony --- without Williams. Until Mercury Records bought her contract and released "Car Wheels, " she couldn't respond to charges of being a control freak by cueing the sound or brandishing a rapturous review.

"I don't see how you can be criticized for being a perfectionist and still have people like what you do, " she says.

Maybe it's just that her personal standards are so high.

In Austin, Texas, in 1995, she had recorded the 13 songs with her longtime band, and the inside word was that they were perfect. Something was missing to her ear ("it needed more oomph, " she says) and she rerecorded the entire set in Nashville with the twangtrust --- songwriter Steve Earle and his engineer partner, Ray Kennedy. Their vintage recording equipment snared a rawness that had been eluding her.

"I didn't want to make the same record I made before, " she says, "with different songs."

A layering of guitarists, including Buddy Miller, Johnny Lee Schell, Greg Leisz and Charlie Sexton, added what she calls "different textures and colors.”

By that fall, Los Angeles-based producer Roy Bittan (formerly of Bruce Springsteen's E- Street Band) was, in her words, "putting the icing on the cake, " which included additional vocal tracks by Emmylou Harris and Jim Lauderdale.

Now she's chewing over the most recent issue of the music magazine Spin. Though the article was favorable --- it dubbed "Car Wheels" album of the year --- she's only talking about the photos.

"Have you seen the pictures of me in the latest Spin?" she asks. Framed by a worn cowboy hat, a bleak, harshly lit, older-looking version of her stares into space, as if spellbound at a trailer park. She hated the photo shoot so much that she had her cool blond highlights warmed into chocolate and hired a makeup artist. Tell me, she asks, would a control freak even allow those pictures to exist?

Stylist Melanie Shelley asks Tighe if Newsweek should shoot her in the same outfit --- bluejeans, black tank top and a big silver concho belt --- she wore that morning for the music magazine Request. "Maybe something softer?" They trail Williams upstairs to consider the contents of her bedroom closet.

Fifteen minutes later, she's in an apricot negligee and black shoes, trying to find a bug- free patch on the tree she's been asked to hug.

"I hate posing, " she says, flicking an ant off her arm. "I never know what to do with myself. My face gets all . . . " she rubs the muscles that cradle her mouth, " . . . tight." Her voice, even when she's talking, sounds like music: an Appalachian sadness filtered through Delta grit. The descending sun backlights her smile and frames her eyes, a summer-sky blue. A black bra strap peeks out from one shoulder. She presses her face close to the tree.

"Perfect, " says the photographer. "Now let's move to the front yard." Williams would rather be looking through the viewfinder, focusing on anything but herself. In frustration, she flops onto the ground, arms at her side, looking for a second like Tennyson's Lady in the Lake floating on a sea of grass.

"I wish I was an actor, " she says, rubbing her hands as if removing something sticky. "Then I would know what to do in front of the camera.”

Simple songs of home, longing

An hour and a half later, squeezed into a stairwell, she pulls her guitar into her lap and aims the neck of it into the camera, making jokes about penis envy. She's comfortable enough to let the subject of "Right in Time, " the album's driving first single, lust after a memorable lover --- then take matters into her own hands when he doesn't show up. But she's a serious enough writer to keep all that implied.

In the song, a woman stands over a stove, watching water boil. She turns off the TV, bites her nails and turns out the lights. "I see it as a little movie, " Williams says. "We're watching this woman go through her routine. It's not like she's sad, it's more like a longing thing.”

Ah, the longing thing. It courses through most of her songs, making you wonder if she writes about it because it's easier or it just suits her cast of mind.

"Both, " she says later. She has changed back into jeans, lit incense and put on a John Lee Hooker record. "I mean, I think I'm just going through that in my life right now. I'm in this stage where I'm looking back on things. I've got a lot of history, and I've lost people close to me, and all those changes make for more powerful songs.”

Not that hers ever lacked force. The songs on the acclaimed third album, "Lucinda Williams, " her second set of originals but the first that crystallized her mature style, are so heartbreakingly rendered that some feared it might be as good as she could get. (Koch International just reissued this out-of-print 1988 classic, which includes "The Night's Too Long, " "Crescent City" and "Side of the Road.”)

"I always compare it to the way poets write, which is the world I grew up in, " she says. "They write about anything and everything; there aren't any boundaries. I always work off of notes that I already have, that I've collected over the years.

"I don't throw anything away if I think I can use it at some point." Unless Dad, her most exacting editor, detects a repetition. Like the word "angel, " which shows up here in a song called "Drunken Angel" and on her '92 release in "Little Angel, Little Brother." "He said, 'You can't ever use that in a song ever again. You've already done it twice. You've broken the cardinal rule, ' " she says.

He can quibble. But most will be grateful to finally have "Car Wheels" in hand. "I feel better about this (album) than I have any of the ones before just in terms of the sound, " Williams says. "It feels closer to what I've been going for. I think something was captured in my vocals that before I didn't think really came across. That's why I went in and did it over again with Ray and Steve.”

Hard-won congratulations

She must have told her version of the saga a hundred times by now, and in the coming months, she'll tell it a hundred more. She'll tour throughout the summer, including stops at Lilith Fair and the Newport Folk Fest, and each appearance will mean more interviews. No one but the most dedicated industry types can keep it straight, or, by this point, care. Today she has a payoff of sorts. The Rolling Stone with Christgau's rave in it has just hit the stands, so "4 1/2 stars" has become the salutation du jour.

It's 10:40 p.m. before she gets to favorite haunt Tin Angel, a nuevo Mexican restaurant south of the Vanderbilt University campus. She orders catfish and substitutes green beans and sweet potatoes for the black beans and rice. The waiter congratulates her, as does fellow singer-songwriter Kevin Welch, who stops by to pat her on the shoulder. "You must be so proud, " he says.

She is. The praise helps dim her feelings of being judged. A little wine, a couple of espressos (she stirs the black liquid with a lemon strip, as close as she comes to dessert), and she's ready to laugh.

By the time the server brings her boxed leftovers with inky blue stars (4 1/2 of 'em) drawn across the top, she's downright giddy.

"Yeah, " she says, with a weary glee. "I'm really just a mild-mannered, regular old salt-of- the-earth neurotic perfectionist."

By the parking lot, she's talking about which part of that would fit on a T-shirt.

IN CONCERT Lucinda Williams plays Atlanta with her band--drummer Fran Breen, guitarists Kenny Vaughn and Bo Ramsey and bassist Richard Price--at 8:30 p.m. Saturday at Variety Playhouse, 1099 Euclid Ave. Joy Lynn White opens. $15. Ticket information: 404-524-7354.

THE LUCINDA WILLIAMS FILE Born: Jan. 26, 1953, in Lake Charles, La., the oldest of three (brother Robert, sister Karyn) children of poet Miller Williams and Lucille Day. Personal: Lives in Nashville with boyfriend-bassist Richard Price. Was married briefly in the '80s; no kids. Loves: Letters, both getting and sending. Is said to have kept every one she's ever received. On the Web: Tons of sites, from official (www.mercuryrecords.com) to un- (www.lonestarwebstation.com). DISCOGRAPHY "Ramblin' on My Mind, " 1979, Smithsonian Folkways. Covers of blues standards. "Happy Woman Blues, " 1980, Smithsonian Folkways. First album of originals (including a stripped-down version of "I Lost It, " which is amped up on the new album). "Lucinda Williams, " 1988, Rough Trade. A classic --- it has "Passionate Kisses" and "Changed the Locks, " which Tom Petty covered --- reissued last month with six bonus tracks by Koch International. "Sweet Old World, " 1992, Chameleon. Includes "Pineola, " "Sidewalks of the City" and a transcendent cover of Nick Drake's "Which Will." "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, " 1998, Mercury. Well worth the wait. Driving layers of guitar and studio chemistry capture all her raw glory.