Lucinda Williams

[HERO]

SLE? (Ti-ESTp?)

Here are the pictures:

http://www.simplyartonline.net/Lucinda+Williams.jpg

http://images.smh.com.au/ftsmh/ffxim...b__300x300.jpg

http://images.uulyrics.com/cover/l/l...album-west.jpg

http://exclaim.ca/images/up-1lucinda_williams_dvd.jpg


Here's what Robert Christgau had to say:

http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_a...cinda+williams

"Car Wheels on a Gravel Road [Mercury, 1998]
Williams hasn't just perfected a style, she's mastered a subject. She doesn't just write realistically and music traditionally, she describes and evokes Southerners for whom realism and traditionalism are epistemological givens. She writes for them, too--not exclusively, she hopes, but in the first instance. They are her people and her neighbors, with damn few media-savvy professionals among them. So reassuring shows of hip come no more naturally to her finely worked, cannily roughed up songs than pop universality. Situated in a subculture far removed from both Manhattan and Alternia, these indelible melodies and well-turned lyrics constitute a dazzling proof of the viability of her world and a robust argument for its values. Emotion makes you smirk? Local color has no place in your global mall? Well, you have Lucinda Williams to answer to. Because this is where she establishes herself as the most accomplished record-maker of the age. A+"

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/cdrev/lucinda-rs.php

"Her lyrics are easeful, trenchant, imaginative, concrete, and waste-free, her tunes always right there and often inescapable."

'The moods that prevail are defiance, regret, and what has to be called nostalgia, although the reminiscences are so clear-eyed they deserve a stronger word. There's no single song here that makes as indelible a statement as "Passionate Kisses," and probably no hits, not even for Mary-Chapin Carpenter. But from the album's very first lines--in which the flat "Not a day goes by I don't think about you" sets up the ambush of "You left your mark on me, it's permanent [pause, we need a rhyme fast] a tattoo [gotcha!]," which is instantly trumped by "Pierce the skin, the blood runs through" and then swoons into a forlorn, unutterably simple "Oh my baby"--Williams's every picked-over word and effect has something to say.

Whether it's the interrupted childhood memories of the title track, the imagistic shifts of "2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten," the one-chord rant-chant "Joy," or the re-recorded old song "I Lost It," Williams's cris de coeur and evocations of rural rootlessness--about juke joints, macho guitarists, alcoholic poets, loved ones locked away in prison, loved ones locked away even more irreparably in the past--are always engaging in themselves. And they mean even more as a whole, demonstrating not that old ways are best, although that meaningless idea may well appeal to her, but that they're very much with us. The emotional dissociation and electronic noise pop fans have learned to love feel natural to them, as they should. But we all subsist on a bedrock of human contact craved, achieved, and too often denied. This truth we repress at everyone's peril, and without melodrama or sentimentality, Lucinda Williams is one of the rare contemporary artists who can make it real. If that makes her too good for this world, then too bad for the world.
Rolling Stone, July 23, 1998'


Here are the songs:

[epheme]

I love her. My first thought was LSI. I haven't watched any interviews of her though. That's just from listening to her music.

[HERO]

‘His mama ran off when he was just a kid/So he never really knew her at all / Just a picture of a girl in a sad blue dress / Hangin' beside a cross on the wall / His daddy used to drive those eighteen wheelers / Now he drives the bottle deep into the night / He was always sayin', "Son, you're just no good / You'll never do anything right" / He never got enough love in all his life / He wasn't brought up right, he never got enough love / The screams and the bruises and the broken bottles / These were things he understood / From busted chairs to a broken heart / He got away as soon as he could / When he was just eighteen he got his very own gun / He shot a kid near a liquor store one night / He was all mixed up, he never understood why/He was only lookin' to prove his daddy right / He never got enough love in all his life / He wasn't brought up right, he never got enough love . . . .”




“As you walk along the sidewalks of the city/You see a man with hunger in his face / And all around you crumbling buildings and graffiti / As you bend down to tie your shoelace / Sirens scream but you don't listen / You have to reach home before night / But now the sun beats down/It makes the sidewalks glisten / And somehow you just don't feel right . . . . You pass by bars with empty stages / Three o'clock drinkers fall by / Chairs are placed on top of tables / As you brush the hair out of your eyes/A woman stops you with a question / So you drop some money in her hand / She sleeps in doorways and bus stations / And you'll never understand . . .”



“Don't wanna see you again or hold your hand/'Cause you don't really love me, you're not my man . . . . You scream and shout and you make a scene / When you open your mouth you never say what you mean . . . . You drink hard liquor, you come on strong / You lose your temper someone looks at you wrong . . . . Out all night playin' in a band / Lookin' for a fight with a guitar in your hand . . . . Lookin' for someone to save you / Lookin' for someone to rave about you . . . . Go back to Greenville, just go on back to Greenville”



“See what you lost when you left this world/This sweet old world . . . . The breath from your own lips, the touch of fingertips/A sweet and tender kiss/The sound of a midnight train, wearing someone's ring / Someone calling your name/Somebody so warm cradled in your arm / Didn't you think you were worth anything? / See what you lost when you left this world/This sweet old world . . . . Millions of us in love, promises made good / Your own flesh and blood / Looking for some truth, dancing with no shoes/The beat, the rhythm, the blues/The pounding of your heart's drum together with another one / Didn't you think anyone loved you? / See what you lost when you left this world/This sweet old world/What you lost when you left this world/This sweet old world . . . .”



- Robert Christgau:

http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_a...cinda+Williams

Sweet Old World [Chameleon, 1992]
On two songs as lived in as their titles, "Lines Around Your Eyes" and "Something About What Happens When We Talk," a star-crossed poet of the everyday grows into middle-aged love. The fetishized tire iron and casserole of "Hot Blood" romanticize attraction and commitment with a lit major's passion. And then there's death. The most powerful track on this Springsteen-meticulous work of songcraft is the raw, bare, strophic threnody "Pineola," where the truest poetic stroke is the bereftly banal "And they went to call someone." So, do the boys who inspired "He Never Got Enough Love" and "Little Angel, Little Brother" actually die, by which I mean fictionally die? Maybe not, but it sounds like they do. Death is how she knows the world is sweet. Music is how she tries to convince the rest of us. A

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road [Mercury, 1998]
Williams hasn't just perfected a style, she's mastered a subject. She doesn't just write realistically and music traditionally, she describes and evokes Southerners for whom realism and traditionalism are epistemological givens. She writes for them, too--not exclusively, she hopes, but in the first instance. They are her people and her neighbors, with damn few media-savvy professionals among them. So reassuring shows of hip come no more naturally to her finely worked, cannily roughed up songs than pop universality. Situated in a subculture far removed from both Manhattan and Alternia, these indelible melodies and well-turned lyrics constitute a dazzling proof of the viability of her world and a robust argument for its values. Emotion makes you smirk? Local color has no place in your global mall? Well, you have Lucinda Williams to answer to. Because this is where she establishes herself as the most accomplished record-maker of the age. A+

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/cdrev/lucinda-rs.php

'Whether it's the interrupted childhood memories of the title track, the imagistic shifts of "2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten," the one-chord rant-chant "Joy," or the re-recorded old song "I Lost It," Williams's cris de coeur and evocations of rural rootlessness--about juke joints, macho guitarists, alcoholic poets, loved ones locked away in prison, loved ones locked away even more irreparably in the past--are always engaging in themselves. And they mean even more as a whole, demonstrating not that old ways are best, although that meaningless idea may well appeal to her, but that they're very much with us. The emotional dissociation and electronic noise pop fans have learned to love feel natural to them, as they should. But we all subsist on a bedrock of human contact craved, achieved, and too often denied. This truth we repress at everyone's peril, and without melodrama or sentimentality, Lucinda Williams is one of the rare contemporary artists who can make it real. If that makes her too good for this world, then too bad for the world.


Rolling Stone, July 23, 1998'


'She skillfully deploys the usual roughness tricks, from sandpaper shadings to full-scale cracks, but her main techniques are the drawl, emphasized to camouflage or escape her own sophistication, and the sigh, a breathy song-speech that lets her moan or croon or muse or coo or yearn or just feel pretty as the lyric permits and the mood of the moment demands.

The moods that prevail are defiance, regret, and what has to be called nostalgia, although the reminiscences are so clear-eyed they deserve a stronger word. There's no single song here that makes as indelible a statement as "Passionate Kisses," and probably no hits, not even for Mary-Chapin Carpenter. But from the album's very first lines--in which the flat "Not a day goes by I don't think about you" sets up the ambush of "You left your mark on me, it's permanent [pause, we need a rhyme fast] a tattoo [gotcha!]," which is instantly trumped by "Pierce the skin, the blood runs through" and then swoons into a forlorn, unutterably simple "Oh my baby"--Williams's every picked-over word and effect has something to say.'