LUCINDA WILLIAMS COUNTSHERBLESSINGS

BY JEWLY HIGHT PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANNY CLINCH At the time of this writing, Lucinda Williams is up for another Grammy, only she’s nominated in a category she’s never won before. This one has nothing to do with musical genre – Americana, folk, country or otherwise – and every- thing to do with where the songs in it have been used; that is, on the big screen or, in her case, on the small one.

48 AMERICAN SONGWRITER MARCH | APRIL 2011 MARCH | APRIL 2011 AMERICAN SONGWRITER 49 Her sensual, bewitched bal- show’s hosts and stood up for her lad “Kiss Like Your Kiss” is the song during the on-air interview. twelfth and final track on her “I said, ‘Everybody says it’s new album, Blessed. But it had such a dark song, but my music its recorded debut a year ago – in was influenced by all those old a version shaded with Elvis Child ballads that were so dark. Costello’s harmonies – during What about Johnny Cash’s ver- season three, episode eight of sion of “Long Black Veil”? Or the blockbuster southern gothic [the murder ballad] “Barbara vampire drama True Blood. Allen”? Especially the ones Williams may have passed where he [the almost always the thirty-year mark in her male murderer] takes her [the recording career, but this is new more often than not female vic- territory for her. Valuing artistic tim] out to the middle of the control the way she does, she woods and stabs her and blood hasn’t been one to give use of runs down her breasts.’ They her songs before she’s presented couldn’t really argue.” them to the world in the con- As for Williams’ True Blood text of her albums, though songs experience years later, there from her albums have been were no ruffled tail feathers on licensed for dozens of films and either side. The show’s music T.V. shows. Plus, sticking to her supervisor had used her song guns the way she has for authen- “Lake Charles” – from her 1998 ticity’s sake hasn’t always made breakthrough Car Wheels on a for such a comfortable fit on tel- Gravel Road – in an earlier sea- evision. son, and he wanted something There was the time, in the brand new from her pen. early ‘90s, when she went on the “He picked that one, ‘Kiss perky country music chat show Like Your Kiss,’ for obvious rea- Crook & Chase prepared to per- sons – the vampire kisses,” she form a song from her then-new explains. “It kind of had this album Sweet Old World. “I was moody, smoky-sounding thing. gonna do ‘Pineola,’” she remem- We said, ‘Great.’” bers, her gripping country rock It wasn’t a scripted vampire narrative about people mourn- love scene that’d inspired the ing a suicide. “That was the song song, Williams reveals with evi- I chose to do. They didn’t want dent satisfaction, but real-life me to do it because it was too romantic feelings for her hus- dark: ‘Please pick another song.’ band and manager Tom Overby; Well, that just got my tail feath- she decided it’d be okay to lend ers all up in a ruffle, you know. a fresh work of personal expres- And I complained. The produc- sion – meant, potentially, for her er of the show was real sweet. He next album – to a primetime said, ‘You know what? Go soundtrack. ahead. Do it.’” True Blood wasn’t the most So, she went ahead and did unexpected song request to it. Then she sat down with the come her way of late; Faith Hill’s

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people also asked if she might be able to come up with a tune or two for the pop country diva. Says Williams, “They were looking for kind of edgier stuff. So edgy equals Lucinda Williams, I guess. I said, ‘Well, you know I’ve never really known how to write for someone. But I’d like to learn.’” “What I realized was,” she adds, amused by how this line of thinking must sound com- ing from her, “I don’t really have to worry about if I’m writing this for a particular person. I can just write a song like I would write a song nor- mally, but just not record it yet. [Laughs.] That’s really the way to go. Because they don’t want a song once I’ve recorded it usually. They want to think that it’s for them. Which is fine with me. At first I was kind of like, ‘No, that’s weird. I don’t know her. How do I write a song for someone I don’t know?’” It’s not that Williams has never had suc- cess with somebody else cutting her emotional- ly potent songs. In fact, that’s exactly how she won her first Grammy in 1993 – for Best Coun- try Song of the Year. Mary Chapin Carpenter had covered an arresting declaration of desire from Lucinda Williams called “Passionate Kiss- es.” “God bless her,” says Williams. “She had to go to bat for that song. Her label didn’t think it was country.” After that, Williams moved to Nashville for a time, in part to see if she might get lucky again. She had a few more songs covered – including two by Emmylou Harris – but a main- stream country songwriting career just didn’t seem to be in the cards. Recalls Williams, “My manager at the time, Frank Callari, said, ‘Well, your songs are too personal. People just don’t know what to do with them.’ …And then the only other ones I had, the only other brave person was Patty Loveless when she did ‘The Night’s Too Long.’ That just didn’t go anywhere, partly because of the label, her people. They were so conserva- tive.” A lot’s changed in the past couple of decades about how Williams views songwriting and the business, and how the business views

MARCH | APRIL 2011 AMERICAN SONGWRITER 51 her and her songwriting. She’s for critics who preferred she stick come to occupy such an impor- to the sort of writing she’d been tant place in the world of con- doing. With its narratives temporary American roots music grounded in the southern towns – she’s the first one that many ris- of her childhood and its full-bod- ing and aspiring Americana song- ied alt-country sound, Car Wheels writers compare themselves to, won a Grammy for Best Contem- and deservedly so – that any porary Folk Album (there wasn’t spooky, South-conjuring T.V. yet an Americana category) and series worth its salt could hardly brought a heap of new listeners ignore her catalog. her way; even so, after that she Her songwriting process is pointedly reshaped her songwrit- still personal and from the gut, ing with a lyrically lean, groove- but it seems she’s holding the fin- driven and decidedly different ished products more loosely, approach. entertaining different possibilities “It was taking me a long for where her songs might belong time to come up with a bunch of and saying things about all of it new songs,” Williams says, that you might not have caught “because it was like that sopho- her saying in earlier eras of her more jinx thing, it was the album career. following Car Wheels and I was Things like this: terrified. I thought, ‘I’ve got to “To me, who you write the write a bunch of new songs like song for is really neither here nor “Car Wheels On A Gravel Road” there anyway. By the time the and “Lake Charles” and all these song gets out and I’m done with really narrative songs. I’m not it, it kind of goes off into the uni- necessarily just going to come up verse. Whoever wants to do with those songs again, or songs whatever with it is fine with me.” like that.’ I just kind of went She laughs, acknowledging through this thing where I started this isn’t entirely true. “Well, I writing and kind of allowed wouldn’t want to have it in cer- myself to open up.” tain commercials.” And a decade later, she It’s easier to be laidback seems anything but closed. about these things once you’ve Blessed, Williams’ tenth stu- established certain facts: that dio album, is both a sure-handed there is, unmistakably, such a distillation of some of her most thing as a Lucinda Williams song salient songwriting impulses and and that a good many people are something of an expansion of her drawn to them. It could be argued range. It’s not especially dark or that she’s at the height of both happy (2008’s Little Honey was her career and her satisfaction pegged as her “happy” album by with it; she’s also got her war sto- many, in part because it opened ries about how she reached this with a rocking love song), though point, how she’s kept at this it does contain three songs that singer-songwriter thing long deal with death – one of those enough to see a lot of her artistic about a suicide – and a pair of instincts proven right. what she describes as “sweet love There’s a particular war songs,” the one that made it onto story she’s circled back to fairly True Blood and a poetic ballad often these past several years. called, literally, “Sweet Love”. Essence, the album that followed Williams might’ve linked Car Wheels, represents a moment her songs to traditional murder when she drew a line in the sand ballads on Crook & Chase and

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elsewhere, but there are important differences As for the three songs that deal with that get to the heart of themes Williams has between the way she writes about death and death directly, “Copenhagen” is an impression- taken up in the past; here, as in “Sweet Old the way it’s portrayed in those old songs. She istic, affectionate country meditation on the World,” she can’t take her mind off all that a makes you care about – not just fear for or pity passing of Callari, her late manager. She wrote person gives up with suicide. Then there’s – the protagonists who meet their untimely the bracing roots rock number “Seeing Black,” “Don’t Know How You’re Living,” a troubled ends, and the people they leave behind; she she says, after the indie rock singer-songwriter plea to a long lost loved one which continues a actually dwells more on the good of life than Vic Chesnutt took his own life; the lyrics arrive thread begun in “Are You Alright?” from West. on the grim inevitability of death. On the new in the form of increasingly urgent questions As she puts it, “I wrote yet another song for my album, a pair of slow-burning soul numbers – wrestling with his life-and-death decision. And brother, prodigal brother.” And “Awakening” “Convince Me” and “To Be Loved” – illustrate “Soldier’s Song” surreally juxtaposes battlefield shares the caustic attack and cravings for tran- a remarkable symmetry between desperately deaths with cozy home life; love is the link scendence of “Unsuffer Me” before it. doubting and wholeheartedly believing in the between those two distant worlds. “It’s funny that you mention this,” worth of it all. “Seeing Black” is one of the new songs Williams says when the subject of connections

MARCH | APRIL 2011 AMERICAN SONGWRITER 53 between her songs comes up, “because now anything like that in a long time.” She’d about. But actually it’s not been like a force- that I’m thinking about it, ‘Buttercup,’ for never taken up a storytelling challenge quite ful thing. It’s actually very liberating to instance, is chapter two of ‘Jailhouse Tears.’ like it, moving back and forth between two spread out and write about some different Like, I wrote that about the same guy. different vantage points, one a soldier, the things.” “The last few shows we did I was high- other his wife and the mother of his child. “I’ve been wanting to for years,” she lighting some of the new songs and I told the “I was struck by that Jimmy Webb clas- continues. “I’ve struggled trying to write audience – talking about the songs on the sic, ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’,” she more of what used to be referred to as topical new album – I said, ‘I’ve only got one bad boy explains. “That one, where there are two dif- songs, like Bob Dylan.” song on the whole album.’ I still had a little ferent things going on at the same time in The title track of Blessed is an example bit left in my system and I had to get it out. two different parts of the world. My dad of what she means. Beginning with purpose- So I think that squeezed the last little bit out wrote a poem like that.” (Her father is the ful strumming on acoustic guitar, she of there.” poet Miller Williams, who was selected to describes people that upend social norms – “Buttercup” – which opens Blessed – is read at Bill Clinton’s second presidential like a girl who sells flowers on the street set- the better of the two songs that guy inspired. inauguration.) ting an example of how to live – with a mix- It’s a sturdy, sarcasm-laced country rocker, Though war is a central feature of “Sol- ture of hope and romanticism and a simple, while “Jailhouse Tears,” from an album back, dier’s Song,” it couldn’t rightfully be called a repetitive folk melody. is a sorta goofy honky-tonk duet with Costel- protest number; instead of voicing an out- She’d scribbled that particular image lo. That Williams is playfully forecasting the right indictment, it makes its impact through down on a napkin. “There was this young girl end of her “bad boy” songs is no small thing, tangible, parallel narratives. “For me,” she who used to come in and sell roses in this since bad boys – tough and troubled artistic says, “this is a statement about the whole Mexican restaurant we go in. She’s not just types – have been favorite song subjects of general insanity of war, but just done in a dif- some girl selling roses. She has a family. She hers and she has a striking way of calling out ferent way.” has a life.” the pain they inflict. Williams has shifted some of her song- Not only is Blessed one of the most bal- “Soldier’s Song,” on the other hand, writerly attention from those ne’er-do-well anced collections of songs Williams has represents for Williams a revival of a certain heartbreakers to broader social topics, and released, it may well be her best-sounding kind of songwriting. “I’m actually really she lightly suggests a reason. “Well, probably album. At a time when just about everybody proud of that song,” she offers, “because it is because I’m in a relationship now with Tom, else’s recording budgets seem to be shrinking, very detailed narrative and I haven’t done so I had to find some other things to write she cut the final album in her contract with

54 AMERICAN SONGWRITER MARCH | APRIL 2011 Mercury roots imprint Lost Highway with one two of his buddies, Bob Clearmountain and table, get my guitar, sit here and record a song of the biggest budgets of her career. Ted Jensen, two of the world’s premiere mixing on it, and this is something I never had before Williams’ last album, Little Honey, was and mastering engineers, respectively. that changed the process by which – well, just produced by Overby and her longtime engi- “That’s the great thing about bringing the entire writing process. Because I was able neer Eric Liljestrand. This time they brought Don in – he brought in this whole new circle to get instant gratification. I would put it in Don Was, after Williams hit it off with him of people we hadn’t worked with before, we down, take the Zoom up to Tom’s office, he back stage at a Neil Young tribute show. Was is weren’t able to work with,” Williams says, would hook it up to his computer, burn a disc, as busy a roots music producer as they come clearly excited about the results. “I wouldn’t and we’d play it back and it would sound amaz- these days, but the most telling reference point have been able to afford Bob Clearmountain. ing. So we ended up with all these songs that for what he achieved with Williams on Blessed [Laughs.] But he cut us a good deal. And plus, we could listen back to like that.” is the string of terrific blues-pop albums he I’ve never had someone just mix the record. The fact that Williams had all those songs made with Bonnie Raitt during the late ‘80s Like, that’s all he does is mix. That adds a to capture at the kitchen table is hardly and early ‘90s; he helped Raitt take substantial whole other nice, shiny element to it.” insignificant. In her younger years, the songs songs and make them widely and immediately It just so happens that the most polished didn’t always come that easily. accessible. album in Williams’ oeuvre also comes in a So what’s changed? “I think I just give Was, Williams and company recorded at deluxe edition that pulls back the veil on her myself more permission,” she muses. “I’m just Capitol Studio B in Hollywood, “the former songwriting process in a way no release of hers better at what I do now. It’s as simple as that. recording home of Frank Sinatra,” she points has before. (Acoustic demos of Essence exist, It’s just the more you do it the better you get, out. Unlike West, with its electronic and she says, but they’ve yet to make it out there in or at least that’s how I feel in my case. I think orchestral flourishes, there’s nothing experi- any official form). A bonus disc – dubbed The it’s a combination of confidence and just hav- mental about the playing on the album. Nor Kitchen Tapes after her writing spot of choice ing done it this long and just learning. I’m does it have the rough, live feel of Little Honey. – contains no-frills guitar-vocal demos of all always learning. I’m still honing my craft.” It’s crisp, dynamic and, yes, accessible. the songs on Blessed. It may, indeed, seem as simple as that. But You can hear every last jabbing guitar lick, If Williams has grown more comfortable it’s not every thirty-two-year veteran who can every melancholic arc of steel guitar, every with sharing her work in its barest form, tech- pull off what Williams is doing – finding new seductive groan of her one-of-a-kind wind- nology – her new Zoom recorder, specifically – ways to loosen up, even about the business chapped drawl clearer than ever before, and for was also a real motivator. “Oh my god, it’s stuff, without losing her edge. good reason; Was passed the album along to amazing!” she says. “I just set it on the kitchen