Lucinda Williams has always considered happiness a threat to her creativity. For over three decades now, she's kept herself in song by mining the heartache of tumultuous love affairs (usually with some lethal, charismatic, screw-up of a man who's more often than not a bass player), death (typically by suicide), and a difficult childhood. She depends on pain and neediness for the stark narratives they yield, and prefers life a bit darker, more bitter than sweet. Life with enough grit to do her gravely voice justice.
But if her new album Blessed is any indication, this "poet of loss" has developed a chink in her emotional armor. Three years in the making and written during Williams' courtship and subsequent marriage in September 2009 to boyfriend and manager Tom Overby, love has tempered the Grammy-winning folk-rock singer. With songs like "Sweet Love" and her sultry duet with Elvis Costello on "Kiss Like Your Kiss," Blessed offers a reprieve from the soul raking of her previous releases and attests to the power of romantic contentment to smooth off some of the rough edges. "Being married and feeling comfortable in my life, I've been able to go outside myself and write about other things," Williams says. "I feel like this album, as a whole, is positive. There aren't all those unrequited love, 'I've-been-shot-down-by-a-bad-boy songs'…well, there's one of those…but there are songs about all sorts of things. It's just a lot easier to stretch these days."
Blessed is not a "happy" album in the kick-up-your-heels sense but more an optimistic record, quiet and meditative. The lyrics are full of ghosts and sad goodbyes as Williams reflects on a difficult period in her life. Instead of mourning her own losses though, she wrote the spare "Copenhagen" for longtime manager Frank Callari, who died suddenly in 2007, and "Seeing Black," with its more accusatory tone, for close friend Vic Chestnutt after he took his own life in late 2009. And the love songs on the new album are thankful, vulnerable, and without all the bile of her earlier work. Lucinda Williams has relinquished her past. She's done martyring herself to ex-lovers and hopeless situations as the album's opener "Buttercup" will attest, and is in a much better, more serene and prolific place now. Blessed is a celebration of her survival and rebirth.
Lucinda Williams was born on January 26, 1953, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She inherited her love of language and rich imagery from her father, Miller Williams, a literature professor and poet, and began writing when she was 6 years old. She developed an interest in music from her mother, Lucille Morgan, who before her marriage to Miller had been an aspiring pianist. Lucinda was playing guitar at 12 and first performed live at age 17.
When her parents divorced in the mid-1960s, Williams' father gained custody of Lucinda and her younger siblings. He moved the family frequently to accommodate his teaching posts at universities around Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas and even Mexico City and Santiago, Chile. What Miller Williams felt he lacked for his children in stability, he made up for with the nature of the creative and stimulating environment he provided for them. Lucinda was inspired by a host of her father's friends, including writers James Dickey, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski and Flannery O'Connor, and learned to write as a poet does, using a "process of elimination, of removing all but the essential parts." She was ejected from school in the tenth grade for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance and spent a year working her way through a reading list supplied by her father that included the Iliad and 100 Years of Solitude.
When Lucinda left home, she first headed to New Orleans where she performed as a folk artist on street corners, dressed in granny dresses and singing a mix of covers and original material. She relocated to Austin, Texas, and became part of that city's burgeoning roots music scene and then bounced around between Houston, New York, and Los Angeles before settling in Nashville, Tennessee.
Long the darling of critics, peers and the more musically adventurous, Williams put out four albums—Ramblin' On My Mind (1978), Happy Woman Blues (1980), Lucinda Williams (1988), and Sweet Old World (1992)—before she caught the attention of the mainstream in 1998 with Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which was hailed as a masterpiece of modern country music and won her a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Years in the making, Williams recorded and re-recorded Car Wheels and tinkered obsessively with production. "I've been called a neurotic, a demanding diva, a perfectionist," she told Spin Magazine in 1998. "Okay, I'm a perfectionist." What's more important to her than getting a record out, is getting it out right. And Car Wheels was very right. The album's incredible reception had fans wanting more of the same on Williams' next release, but never one who enjoys repeating herself or conforming to expectations, she disappointed many when Essence came out a few years later in 2001. Lighter in tone and less acerbic, the lyrics dealt with love and maturing into life, rather than chronicling the missteps of the beautiful losers who populated her best songs.
Lucinda dove right into the heart of darkness on 2003s World Without Tears, giving listeners the pain and angst they'd come to expect from her, before a much needed change in direction came in 2007 with the release of Williams' eighth album, West. Full of tender odes to her recently deceased mother and meditations on middle age, the album was the most beautiful sounding record of her career. But West's great sound hid the fact that the songs themselves sometimes offered very little that was new or lyrically challenging. So, no one was surprised when Lucinda next came out with a loose, rough and tumble affair called Little Honey. Released in 2008 the album was filled with songs about real love, stability and plans to marry. Williams was clearly at a crossroads, though the numbers on Little Honey did little to add dimension to her overall body of work.
That will never be said of Blessed. Simply put, it is the first great release of Lucinda Williams' personal and artistic maturity. A casual listen through this collection of twelve songs might not reveal anything new, but spend some time with this music and you'll start to hear a slight shift in perspective that gives the album a depth of strength and understanding. There is still pain and regret here, but no wistful nostalgia. Time passes. People disappear. That's life. Feel it and move on, she seems to say. There are no cloying strings holding her to a past she's clearly moved beyond. With Blessed Lucinda Williams has broken free from past constructs and expectations to release what is certainly her best album in years.
