Music Box | Lucinda Williams

Mike Newmark Arts Editor

Lucinda Williams
West
[Lost Highway; 2007]

Notwithstanding the hit-making assembly line of Nashville, country music will always bring me back to the idea of wandering, a sense of nomadic drift brought about by pain, heartbreak and loss. The tradition dates back nearly a century to the Carter Family, whose songs may sound dated but whose lyrics of leaving heartache to wander away from home and into the grave ring surprisingly true today. After all, our emotions and our natural reactions to them have stood the test of time, even as society has evolved tremendously since the Carter Family first laid down their music on wax.

To look at Lucinda Williams on the cover of West is to see a woman who has lived through enough pain for three people, as she turns her back on the world with a frustrated yet resigned sigh. The country singer/songwriter has spent the last year of her life wandering in the most literal sense, making a pilgrimage to Los Angeles in response to her mother’s death and a turbulent relationship that likely ended with lots of tears and thrown kitchenware. Like it or not, Williams’ first studio offering in four years is inspired by exactly those two things and little more. Suffice to say that West is a monumental downer—the starkest and bleakest album in a line of stark, bleak albums that began with Essence in 2001.

It’s an approach that leaves West somewhat flat and one-dimensional when viewed from a distance, but for Williams, God is—and has always been—in the details. Far from being the instrumental knockout that was 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, West has the studio musicians wisely stepping back to plant the focus squarely on Williams, whose torchy, weathered voice can make even trite lyrics like “The days ahead will never be the same / for you I would have changed my name” quake with sorrow. “Unsuffer Me,” in which Williams prays for someone to relieve her of years of abuse, is downright painful to hear, not necessarily because of what she sings, but because she sings it in repetitive vocal droops that evoke consecutive blows to the head in slow motion. Quiet is the new loud here; the final track, “West,” is simultaneously simmering and shattering, making great use of empty space that mimics the void upon which she now gazes.

Williams remains the talented songwriter she’s always been, but she’s constrained a bit by the limitations of West’s subject matter. There are only so many ways one can describe a breakup. “Everything has changed / Everything has changed,” she sings on “Everything Has Changed.” Well, yeah. Williams also has trouble pulling off anger in an album that has every right to be fraught with it. She only takes a few stabs, preferring instead to stay esconsed in her own gloomy universe, but all fall short. Consider “Come On,” the album’s only bona-fide rocker, whose rough electric guitars, crashing drums and high-pitched violin fizzle when they should explode, and whose weak double entendres (“You didn’t even make me…come on!”) would elicit snickers from anyone who’s ever heard Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville.

While “Come On” has proven to be a consistent turkey in the eyes of the critics, the best song here, “Words,” has the misfortune of landing in the penultimate slot where it’s guaranteed to be passed over. For a precious brief moment, “Words” switches things up; the song is about mustering strength, not accepting renunciation (“My words enjoy the feel of the paper/ better than mingling with your consonants/ once they get going, they never waver/ and they slip in between your ifs, ands, and buts”), and the guitars and drums percolate plaintively, even hopefully. But this isn’t an uplifting album by any stretch of the imagination; it’s a breakup record if ever there were one, a record for those down-in-the-mouth moments before you can even begin to think about taking the next step. Clearly, Williams isn’t ready for that yet.

All of this prompts the question: Can we really fault her for churning out such an oppressively dreary record? Far be it from me to invalidate anyone’s feelings, and Williams convinces us of her depressive state through the honesty of her lyrics and her sobering, somber arrangements. Yet, perhaps the album’s release was a bit premature. Williams’ best friend and worst enemy has always been her own staunch perfectionism; there might be a several-year gap between her albums, but until now, the wait has been entirely worth it. She took three full years just to record Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, but her adherence to the integrity of the final product made it one of country music’s contemporary watersheds. Her Live at the Fillmore album in 2005 bought her enough time so that she could have waited one or two more years to release something, possibly during her reemergence from the doldrums. But now we have West, and a bummer is a bummer, especially for those who don’t have the time, energy or desire to meet Williams halfway.