After spending the previous decade releasing spare country and folk albums, Lucinda Williams spent most of the 1990’s recording and re-recording one of the greatest country albums released by a female artist. Gone was the lone voice and guitar of her previous albums and in its place was a lush mixture of guitar, mandolin, accordion, dobro, piano, and electric guitar. The album is a showcase of Williams’ fine song-writing skills and emotive voice that can go from a growl to a purr in the blink of a song. It is an album that takes its sensibility not only from Nashville (country), but also from New Orleans (Zydeco), Chicago (Blues), and Los Angeles (Rock and Roll).
The album covers your typical country fare of love gained, hearts broken, and a life that is not smooth like a highway but instead bumpy and worn down like a gravel road. From the album’s first line - "Not a day goes by I don’t think about you" - we are introduced to Williams’ reminisces about love lost. Highlights for me include the opening song, Right in Time, which is about a woman who literally aches carnally for her man; Drunken Angel, a song about/for Gram Parsons; Lake Charles, (love lost); Greenville (saying goodbye to a lover who is a drunken lout); and Jackson (thinking about a lover as she drives across the south).
I Lost It standouts as a country-rocker about falling in love but worried about getting ones heart broke. The second verse is classic:
I just wanna live the life I please
I don't want no enemies
I don't want nuthin' if I have to fake it.
Never take nuthin' don't belong to me
Everything's paid for nothing’s free
If I give you my heart
Will you promise not to break it?
Sweet. If we could all have standards like that.
This album is southern, but Williams isn’t getting her Lynyrd Skynyrd on. It’s the south of cotton picking, humid nights, rutted roads, and beer guzzlin’ good ol’ boys who done their woman wrong. Lucinda Williams imbibes these songs with her voice, making them real -- your heart literally goes out to her and you curse the men who have burned her in the past. Top to bottom there isn’t a fill-in song or throw away line on the entire album and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road should be considered a classic alongside your Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Jayhawks collections.
No argument that this is a classic record, my contention comes from this statement:
Lucinda Williams and Sweet Old World--her 3rd and 4th records (although they were the first two that were widely available) feature everyone of these instruments played by ace musicians. In fact, I'd argue that Sweet Old World is every bit the record Car Wheels is. And both of them rock harder than CWoaGR, which is a slicker, more polished sounding album.
Given her literary bent, I'd say she's southern like Cormac McCarthey.
Shoot, I wasn't familiar with that album. Looks like I will need to do more than 20 minutes of research on these album reviews.
Half-baked. 😉
I saw her tour behind both those records--the first show in front of maybe 150 people in the Entry. Blew me away. Became a fan for life. Her 5(?)-piece band was road tested and hotter than Louisiana blacktop.
Okay free (and 6), I'm in.