No one knows the dark nooks of the heart like Lucinda Williams. Throughout Blessed, her newest CD on Lost Highway Records, she travels across rugged emotional terrain. Williams’ songwriting displays an instinctive understanding that if you don’t put yourself way out there emotionally then you ain’t likely to come back with anything interesting to say.
The new record includes a pair of almost-formulaic portraits of the kind of shady characters Williams has always been drawn to. And her song-sketches of rough and tumble characters remain reliably spot-on and not without a strong element of introspection, as if maybe she’s singing to the mirror. Reflecting on the selfish habits of one particular bad apple on the blazing opener “Buttercup”, Williams snarls through a crooked grin and taunts him with the snarky overture, “Good luck finding your Buttercup”. But Miss Lu also takes frequent detours through new territory here, commenting on the ravages of war with “Soldier’s Song”, lamenting the loss of a beloved associate on “Copenhagen”, and, as ever, pouring her heart out in bittersweet love songs like “Sweet Love”, “Convince Me”, and more.
“Born To Be Loved” is a laconic and torchy recital of the awful things not intended for you: rejection, suffering, sadness. Juxtaposing this loving and positive message over a quiet and slow burning minor key vamp, Lucinda’s voice gets first into your ears and then your head and your heart like the warm rush of heroin permeating and percolating through your bloodstream and the effect is hypnotic.
As a songwriter, Williams possesses the rare ability to use stark, simple language that cuts to the core of human emotion. As a singer, her deep South mush mouth pronunciation subliminally suggests that to articulate the words any more clearly might be more than the heart could bear. She has a southern gothic’s strict economy with language, holding back all but the most essential syllables. Her voice frequently cracks with emotion when she sings, making the listener’s heart strings ripple and resonate like a livewire.
With vocal assistance from Matthew Sweet and some fiery guitar contributions courtesy of Elvis Costello, Lucinda and her band deliver twelve really strong tracks this time out. Arguably her best effort since 1998’s watershed Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.
*
[A slightly edited version of this review originally appeared on Crawdaddy.com in March 2011. –rh]
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