Lucinda Williams feels stressed. Even
though she's one of the foremost pop songwriters and her career is still
cresting, all of a sudden there's too much happening. Her gripping new
album World Without Tears is slated for release in a couple of
weeks, and she's gearing up to leave her rented—and completely
furnished—Burbank, California, home for a trip with her band to
Austin, Texas, to play the South by Southwest music conference. While
there, she's also going to record one of her songs, "Over Time," with
Willie Nelson for his upcoming CD.
She's been on a streak of tension-building
incidents lately. A week ago she was even more frazzled, having spent
a good chunk of her day wrangling on the telephone over some foreign
song-licensing complications. Exhausted, she canceled our scheduled
phone interview and planned some R&R in her new town after nine
years of residing in Nashville. What was slated for the evening?
"Well, first off I'm going to slow down,
then call my girlfriends who have given me a lot of support. I'm going
to take a shower and then put on the Doors—that Best of the
Doors CD with all their great stuff like ‘Break on Through
(to the Other Side).' Then I'm going out to dinner with this guy—another
musician—who seems really sweet and nice, and after that we're
going to the King King in Hollywood to see the Blue Shadows, this band
with Bill Bateman from the Blasters that plays Howlin' Wolf and Muddy
Waters tunes." She paused, then added, "I'm going to have some drinks
and listen to some music. What else is there? That's my life."
Today, Williams is still feeling squeezed
but ready to field questions. "I just get caught up in too much stuff,"
she says in a frank Louisiana drawl. "It's hard to be an artist and
have to do the business stuff, too. If all I had to do was write songs
and play them, that'd be so great. All the other stuff is so stressful.
Musicians and deadlines don't really mix. At least, not with me."
Heralded by Time magazine two years
ago as "America's best songwriter," Williams, who turned 50 in January,
has indeed made music her life, melding a southern gothic literary sensibility,
a steeped-in Delta blues/country style, and a joy-to-misery intensity
of delivery. A no-nonsense woman who speaks her mind freely, she comes
from the artistic school of bruising hard knocks. She told Esquire
once, "If you're a dreamer and a romantic, you're going to have a hard
time in the world. That's all there is to it. Because it's a rough,
hard world. I try to find bits of joy where I can."
Williams doesn't mince words, whether
she's venting her misgivings about an ex-beau (who will inevitably show
up in one of her forthright songs anyway) or bemoaning the state of
country music in Nashville ("Half the town is now made up of musicians
from New York or L.A. who are trying to write country music but have
so completely ruined it, you always have to clarify: When you say country,
do you mean Hank Williams or Faith Hill?"). She talks downhill-fast,
laughs giddily about her own shortcomings ("I still can't play a barre
chord"), and at times slips into a plaintive zone where her drawl slurs
into a whine. But get her gabbing about World Without Tears,
her raw, rocking, and largely live-in-the-studio new recording, and
she beams.
"I've always wanted to make a record like
Neil Young and Crazy Horse," says Williams, who is managed by Gary Briggs,
Young's former A&R rep at Reprise Records, and is coheadlining an
amphitheater tour with Young this summer. "I wanted the new album to
be rock 'n' roll and a real loose, jangly live thing. On the last tour,
I wrote a lot and played many of the new songs, which was a big plus.
When we went into the studio, we were ready to go. Most everything was
road-tested, and I recorded with the same band."
Unlike Williams' milestone 1998 album
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road—which infamously took a full
five years and three sets of producers to complete—World Without
Tears, her seventh and arguably most visceral disc, was nailed in
two months (last September and October). It's arrived a year after her
previous outing, Essence, making it her quickest follow-up since
her bare-bones debut discs on Smithsonian Folkways: 1979's Ramblin'
and 1980's Happy Woman Blues. (She endured a songwriting drought
for five years between Car Wheels and Essence but recovered
the emotional muse on the heels of a breakup. As she explained to one
interviewer, "A lot of times you're acutely sensitive to a cataclysmic
event in your life that spawns creativity.")
Williams concedes that she is a stickler
for capturing just the right sonics for her songs, but on her latest
endeavor she strove for immediacy over production. In the past she obsessed
over her vocals—a sandpaper-like rasp which Emmylou Harris once
described as capable of "peeling the chrome off a trailer hitch." This
time Williams overdubbed her voice on only one track. The results make
for an even more abrasive, anguished delivery than on previous CDs.
World Without Tears was coproduced
by Mark Howard, who Williams chose based on his work engineering such
projects as Bob Dylan's '90s classic Time out of Mind, U2's All
That You Can't Leave Behind, and Willie Nelson's Teatro.
Howard set up shop at Paramour Estate, a restored 1920s mansion in L.A.'s
Silver Lake area, which has a large open living space that served as
the studio. Joining Williams was her tour band: Doug Pettibone on guitars
(including a pedal steel on the sober last song about reincarnation,
"Words Fell"), Taras Prodaniuk on bass, and Jim Christie on drums, percussion,
and overdubbed Wurlitzer loop on the soul-vibed "American Dream."
With its unseemly images of scorpion tongues,
Holy Roller fire and brimstone, and "sexy crooked teeth," World Without
Tears may not be an easy listen, but Williams' despairing honesty
and at times high-spirited euphoria give the album its emotional depth.
The CD opens with the slow, tremolo guitar of "Fruits of My Labor,"
a rootsy lament on lost love with a glint of hope: "I been cryin' for
you boy, but truth is my savior." (Later on the disc, she revisits the
painful breakup, again with a tremolo guitar sound on the ballad "Overtime.")
Taking the offensive, Williams rips into "Righteously," a surly anthem
on how to treat a woman, with warpath electric guitar brazenly rocking
home the ground rules:
Flirt with me don't keep hurtin' me
Don't cause me pain
Be my lover don't play no
game
Just play me John Coltrane
Williams rocks with Keith Richards—like
fury on the embittered "Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar
Strings," where her phony "Prince Charming" wreaks havoc. There's more
raucous wrath on the dark and dirty "Atonement," which she sings with
a hellfire shout 'n' moan. "That's about my time living in Nashville
where I got tired of people asking me what church I attended," she says,
noting that there was a house of worship on every corner. "It wasn't
‘Do you go to church?' but ‘Which one do you attend?' This
was written as a backlash to that."
Then there's the lightly strummed acoustic
guitars and pedal steel of "Ventura," a sober beauty marked by loneliness
and longing. Williams sings about listening to Neil Young during a long
ride home, driving up the Ventura coastline, and in the chorus muses,
"I wanna watch the ocean bend / The edges of the sun then / I wanna
get swallowed up in / An ocean of love." "Who doesn't love that stretch
of the Pacific Coast Highway?" Williams says. "My drummer lives in Ventura,
and he talks about it all the time. He's a surfer who's in the waves
every morning at seven. I used that drive as the backdrop to set the
song. Obviously, I'm making a point about something else."
In the midst of the gloom, Williams honeys
the setting with "Sweet Side," an acoustic guitar—backed narrative
with spoken lyrics. But even there the dark side lurks. The tune is
about a faithful lover who helps a victim of child abuse overcome her
low self-esteem. "I wrote that song about a boyfriend I once had," she
says without elaboration.
When asked what song she's most fond of,
she immediately replies "Minneapolis," a brooding tune of lost love
that cuts to the bone lyrically. In the song, she admits to being "wasted,
angry, and sad since you left Minneapolis" and wishes "I'd never seen
your face or heard your voice / You're a bad pain in my gut / I wanna
spit you out."
Minneapolis is where Williams recorded
Essence. "This is one of those songs that I worked on here and
there, on and off, since that session," she says. "I like the way it
resolves at the end. But I'm not going to tell you who I wrote that
song about. That's off the record. I'll tell you one day when we're
in a bar and drinking."
So, innocently, I ask if all her songs
are true stories or if some are fictionalized tales? "Oh my God, can't
you tell?" she asks exasperatedly. "You think I'd make something like
this up? Hey, this is the voice of experience." She laughs hoarsely
and chalks it up to her astrological sign. "I'm an Aquarius. I'm all
air and water. I'm completely emotional and cerebral and just floating
through life with very little ground beneath me. I feel as if I have
some kind of attention deficit disorder and have trouble focusing and
making decisions. Which is not good if you're in the music business.
That's why I have a great manager and a great new personal assistant."
Lucinda Williams was born in Lake Charles,
Louisiana, to a poet/professor father (the well-known Miller Williams,
who has more than 30 books of poems and short stories to his credit)
and piano-playing mother (Lucy, who divorced her husband when Lu was
still a child). Raised by her dad, Williams traveled with him—as
far away as Chile and Mexico City—as his academic positions changed.
This upbringing exposed Williams to a
wide range of music and literature. She loved country music (Loretta
Lynn, Hank Williams), gravitated to the folk rock of the era (Leonard
Cohen, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, especially his seminal Highway 61 Revisited),
reveled in rock (the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Jimi Hendrix), immersed
herself in Delta blues (Memphis Minnie, Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf),
and found solace in jazz (John Coltrane, Chet Baker, Dinah Washington,
Astrud Gilberto). She also rubbed shoulders with her father's literary
friends, such as Allen Ginsberg, James Dickey, and Charles Bukowski.
Williams recalls singing songs and writing
poems and stories when she was very young. There was a piano in her
house (her mother was a music major at Louisiana State University in
Baton Rouge) and a zither, which she started to play when she was eight.
A couple of years later, she got a Magnus chord organ ("all the rage
back then," she says), which could be played without reading music.
"I never learned how to play the piano because I wasn't patient enough,"
she says. "I sat and tinkered on it, but it was frustrating. I was desperate
to figure out how to read sheet music so I could sing a song."
In 1965, when she was 12, Williams picked
up the guitar—a cracked six-string that a friend of her dad's left
at the house. Her father hired a college student to come by each week
to give his daughter lessons. "I still didn't know how to read, but
this guy, who played in a rock band, would teach me songs, stuff like
‘Puff the Magic Dragon' from the Peter, Paul, and Mary songbook,"
she recalls. "He showed me chords and a fingerpicking style for each
song. I learned rudimentary chord progressions and several different
picking techniques. My right hand actually became more important than
my left."
Williams took lessons for a year, built
up a repertoire of songs and taught herself how to transpose tunes to
different keys to fit her vocal range. She learned Elizabeth Cotten's
"Freight Train" as well as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger tunes. She
bought records and searched for songbooks. "I'd get all excited if I
found a songbook with a song from a record I owned," she says. "I spent
hours learning new material. That became my whole life."
Because her dad was a writer, when she
was 13, Williams started writing her own songs. She still remembers
the first tune she wrote. It was a "cute little folk" number called
"The Wind Blows" ("I wasn't aware of double entendres at the time [laughs]").
She sings it to me over the telephone. It's a sing-songy ditty:
The wind blows and it blows through
the town
And the people in the town
hear it blow . . .
The leaves
fall and they fall to the ground . . .
She can't remember the rest of the words,
but she says that a friend from her teenage years recently sent her
a recording of the song.
As for her overall guitar knowledge, Williams
says, "I'm no purist and I'm no aficionado. I've been playing for almost
40 years, and I still don't know much about guitars. What kind of strings?
Whatever's on them. What kind of wood? I wouldn't know if it's maple
or rosewood. As long as a guitar sounds good and doesn't go out of tune
easily and feed back, that's what I like. It's an intuitive thing. I
like what I hear."
Williams does have a favorite though—a
Martin acoustic she figures was built in the early '70s. She's owned
it since 1979 when she bought it for $400 while living in Houston. "That's
the guitar I play at home and what I write all my songs on. I never
play it live because it always feeds back. There's nothing special about
it or fancy like pearl inlay. I don't think it's even valuable."
On her new CD, Williams plugs in, using
her Fender Esquire. "I'm looking for a crunchy, fucked-up sound that's
part electric and part acoustic," she says. "I do a lot of Delta blues,
but now I've got edgier rock stuff in my sets." But she's still getting
used to playing more electric music. "It's hard because my style is
still folk/blues. I started out playing by myself, but now that I have
my own band, I can't really play much acoustic guitar because I won't
be heard. I have to have something loud to cut through. Plus I still
use fingerpicks and thumbpicks. I never learned how to flatpick. The
neck of the electric has to be like an acoustic because I like to hug
the body of the guitar when I play it. Needless to say, I don't play
guitar by the book."
Nor does she write songs in an orthodox
fashion. Over the years, Williams has collected folders with song ideas
on scraps of paper and cocktail napkins. "I'm not disciplined. I don't
write every day," she says. "But if I come up with a great line, I'll
write it down and file it away. I never throw anything out until I use
it. That's part of my process." She also collects snippets of melody
on tape (she has "tons of cassettes" with song ideas and hooks). "I
go to the folder and pull out the tapes when I'm in the writing mode,"
she explains. "When that hits, I close myself off like I'm in a cave.
I won't even take a shower for two or three days. It's real enjoyable.
Most of the songs from Essence and the new album happened during
periods like that."
Williams' tape recorder and Martin are
integral when the songs arrive. She sits at her kitchen table, spreads
her lyric ideas out, and begins to experiment (see the Essence
CD booklet where a photo of her Walkman, notebook paper, guitar, and
coffee cup on a table captures her creative space). "It all happens
together," she says. "When I'm ready to write, I have to have my guitar
with me."
The final step of the songwriting process
rests with Williams' father, who offers constructive criticism of her
lyrics. "Yes, I still show him my songs," she says. "My dad is a great
poet and a great editor, and I respect him as an artist. When I grew
up, it was like having a built-in creative writing course. He always
made suggestions for making the songs better. It's not a father-daughter
thing. It's what poets always do: show each other their poems. He's
my mentor. It's been like an apprenticeship. In fact, I think it's a
good idea for all songwriters to have someone who knows more than them
critique their work. That, to me, is the most important part of the
creative process."
So, how did Lucinda fare with World
Without Tears? "My dad told me this was a great body of work, that
it's the closest to poetry of anything I've written." Did he suggest
changes? "None." How did that feel? "That made me feel real good. He
told me not long ago that he wouldn't always be there. He's 73. That
made me sad, but he's right." She pauses and says proudly, "I feel like
I've graduated."
Excerpted from
Acoustic
Guitar magazine, August 2003,
No. 128.
