Quick – what’s the most uplifting
album you know with at least three songs about suicide on it? Well, if you
didn’t answer Sweet Old World, you and I either don’t see eye-to-eye
about Lucinda Williams’ gifts or you just haven’t heard it. Some people I know
think Lucinda's a drag, but for me she's the opposite – someone whose
experience with heartache and pain has made her feel her joy and love all the
more acutely. And some people don’t know that she’d been recording for nearly
20 years before her breakthrough with Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.
On her earlier albums – one a 1979
album of covers and traditional songs where she shows off her taste and range
and established herself as a solid singer/performer, two after that that she
made eight years apart that are full of originals and established her as a
great writer – she synthesizes as many strains of American roots music as she
can fit into her songs. Blues, folk, country, rock and roll and many more –
when she's on her game, she makes all of them work for her without kowtowing to
any of them. But it was only with the record before this (Lucinda Williams,
released four years before this 1992 classic, and reissued this week after
being long out of print) that sparks of her real genius appeared in some songs.
And this one’s even better, even with all the death and downtrodden folks on
it.
So when she's singing about a
relationship that coulda been but probably won't be, when she's singing about
an abused kid grown up to be a mixed-up guy, when she's singing about a friend
who committed suicide, the songs don't wallow in misery as they easily could
have. She wants her listeners to know about this “sweet old world” we all live
in; know that there’s pain and heartache but that these are not permanent
conditions. Unlike some music that strives for uplift but doesn’t seem to have
experienced anything real to buoy it, Lucinda’s got a great eye for the detail
that lets you know she’s been there and made peace with things. And of course
it helps that in addition to writing well about sad stuff, she can write
equally enthusiastically and convincingly about "Hot Blood" and how
much she loves the "Lines Around Your Eyes." And the way she puts
these across is the same – with strong, heartfelt vocals that augment her
melodies with simple, unforced beauty. So “Something About What Happens When We
Talk” – one of her best ever – comes on in the lyrics like a lament for a
relationship that didn’t happen, but the vocals make sure it isn’t sad about
it, just wistful, full of thoughts of what could’ve been. And when she’s
talking to her friend who killed himself, she simply catalog the little things
that make life worth living and asks him directly “Didn’t you think you were
worth anything?” The whole record makes me glad to be alive, just as she
intended.
- Patrick
Brown.
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