There is a time for loaves and fishes. See that the children of the porch never starve.
Voltaire
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The wait is over. Here it is. Lucinda Williams' new album. Legendary producer Joe Boyd declares, "Car Wheels on A Gravel Road is the Blonde on Blonde of the '90s." Whether time proves him right or not, you'll find this record an undeniably seminal work that secures Lucinda Williams' status as both a singer and songwriter.
For 20 years, Williams has haunted us with both talents. She's a musician's musician. Her songs have been covered by everyone from Emmylou Harris to Tom Petty. Mary Chapin-Carpenter's rendition of William's "Passionate Kisses" earned them both Grammys in 1994. Recently Lucinda Williams' achingly sweet voice--3 parts honey, 2 parts bourbon--has done duets on albums by Buddy Miller, Terry Allen and Steve Earle.
Earle himself is one of the co-producers of Car Wheels On A Gravel Road and can be considered one of the driving forces behind the album's magnificence. Williams reports, "I recorded a rough version of this album three years ago in Texas. Then I came back to Nashville and heard the work Steve did with [producer] Ray Kennedy. It blew me away. For ages I'd struggled with getting my vocals down, and I was amazed at the sound Ray got." So Williams and her band went into a Nashville studio with Earl and Kennedy to do cut a "couple" of tracks and "see what happens." Ha! The sound was so spectacular that Williams recorded all her songs over. "Steve really added that driving unity," Williams says. "He was playing rhythm guitar and everything just had this edge that it was lacking before."
After they finished the basic tracks, Steve Earle had to bow out because of scheduling conflicts. Williams went to Los Angeles, and co-produced the over-dub sessions with Roy Bittan, of Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band. The finished record was originally intended to be released on Rick Rubin's American Recordings label, but when Rubin entered negotiations to sell the label last year, Mercury jumped at the chance to be the ones to release Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.
Final mastering on the album was finished only last spring--coincidentally on the very night that a tornado raged through downtown Nashville. That storm becomes a fitting psychic indication of the power of these thirteen tracks.
Who Is Lucinda Williams?
Many of the songs on Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, from "Lake Charles" to "Jackson," form an autobiographical travelog of this singer's wanderings. Lucinda Williams was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but her college professor-father moved her family all over the south. "I lived in Jackson, Vicksburg, Atlanta, Macon," she lists, "Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, Mexico City and Santiago, Chile."
Her adult life has been just as itinerate--she's lived everywhere from Texas to California to Nashville. She assures everyone that she intends to linger in Nashville for a while, living two doors down from Emmylou Harris. But whether Williams stays put or not, these past few months have stabilized her career, putting in perspective her twenty years in music. Last May, Lucinda Williams was part of the fifty year anniversary of Folkways Records, and her Rough Trade label recordings from the 1980s were reissued on Koch International in early 1998.
The Folkways anniversary completed a full circle for Williams. "I was living in New York the year, Ramblin' On My Mind was released in '79," she reports. How did Lucinda Williams first record on Folkways? "An old friend of mine in New Orleans who had put out a record on the label called, God, Guts, and Guns suggested 'You should make a record for Folkways too.' So I sent them a demo from Arkansas and they send me back this one page contract, 'Here's $250--go make a record.' So I went to Jackson, Mississippi. A friend of the family knew one of the engineers at Malico Studios, so we went in and recorded it in one afternoon. In 1980, I later did another one for Folkways, called Happy Woman Blues."
After Folkways, Williams bounced between Austin and Houston. "I wasn't really trying to get a recording contract," she says. "I didn't think in those terms. I didn't know the first thing about the music business. I was trying to make ends meet and keep my head above water and get gigs." Then in '84 she moved to Los Angeles. "I went to L.A. to play a show and ended up staying there. That's when I jumped into the whole music business arena and started getting attention from other record companies. But at that time they still didn't know what to do with me."
Rough Trade had a hunch and in '88 released her self-titled Lucinda Williams as well as several EPs in the years to follow. It is this music that Koch International has just released on one disc.
Since her Rough Trade days, Williams released Sweet Old World in 1992 on another ill-fated label, Chameleon Records. She then went to Australia to tour with Rosanne Cash and Mary Chapin-Carpenter (which was when Carpenter decided to cover "Passionate Kisses"). "Then I got the Grammy in '94," Williams says. "I bought a house in Nashville, which was very time consuming. Then I moved back to Austin, but got down there and decided it wasn't the same. You can't go home again."
The singer is wrong, music is Lucinda Williams home, only she has no airs about her musical talent. Steve Earl remarked, "Lucinda is the last one to know how damn good she is." He's right. "I'm still surprised," she says, "the way you see yourself is so different from how others do. 'Wow you want me to write a song? You'd like me to sing?'" With her new album, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams has come into her own as a songwriter/singer. Track by Track
"Right in Time" It seemed impossible that Lucinda Williams could write a song more passionate than "Passionate Kisses," but here it is. This first track turned out to be the last song written for the album. "We needed one more song for the sessions and I finished this in the studio," she says. "Not that I sat down and started something out of the blue. Part of it was written five years ago. That's how I write. I use my notes." Then she laughs, "of course, this song is about unrequited love, and it's always easier to write about unrequited love." She says this like a woman who knows what she's talking about...
"Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" "This song was a challenge," Williams confesses. "I had this refrain, 'car wheels on a gravel road' for years. Then I remember dreaming some of the song, I woke up and it was lingering in my head and I wrote it down. I didn't know the song was about my childhood until my father heard it, and he said, 'I'm sorry! I'm sorry.'" "Jokingly," she adds.
"Too Cool To Be Forgotten" "I discovered two books of photographs, one by Adams called, 'Appalachian Portraits' and one by Shelby Lee called 'Juke Joint.' They knocked my socks off they were so lovely. On New Year's Day 1995 I started writing about my own Appalachian juke joint. "I was in Knoxville in someone else's home." She looks wistful. "Sometimes when I get out of my surroundings when I'm traveling it's very liberating. Songs come easier."
"Drunken Angel" "This is about a young songwriter out of Austin. He was just a renegade kind of guy--live fast and die young. He was killed in a Texas argument. Williams' father, poet Miller Williams comes up while she is discussing this song. "My father has really been my mentor. He's taught me about the preciseness of language. There's a line in "Drunken Angel" that used to go 'Blood spilled out from a hole in your heart.' And my father suggested that I write 'THE hole in your heart.' And just that one word made all the difference in the world."
"Concrete and Barbed Wire" "That line I've had for years. It could be about a woman or man in prison. But it's also about someone who is hard to communicate with. I remember I tried to write this song ten years ago in L.A. but it didn't work. Ironically it came together the night they tore the Berlin Wall down."
"Lake Charles" "This is about another hard living guy. He was real sweet, had a heart of gold, but he pushed the self-destruct button. He was from Nacogdoches, but he always used to tell people he was from Lake Charles. He wanted his ashes spread over Lake Charles when he died." She goes quiet for a long moment, then says, "There was a lot of unresolved stuff between the two of us. This was my way to resolve it. I still get emotional."
"Can't Let Go" "This was written by Randy Weeks of the Lonesome Strangers. I used to open for them out in L.A. A few years ago he sent me a tape with some songs on it and I really liked this one. It sounds really authentic. It sound like an old blues song, not like somebody wrote it recently." "I Lost It" "This is an old one. Remember how 20 years ago, some people had those bumper stickers that said, 'I found it'? That's what prompted the idea for the title. The song, of course, says more than that."
"Metal Firecracker" "Sometimes I'll be driving down the road and something pops into my head, a line and melody and I have no idea what I'm going to do with it. It just comes. I was driving and I started singing to myself, 'Don't tell anybody the secrets.' The title came from 1992, when one of the guys in my band would call the tour bus a 'Metal Firecracker.' The whole song came together one night when I was home and I just started messing around with the tape recorder. That's one of the ways I write. I use a tape recorder with a built-in microphone and speaker, so I can hear what I've done. I'll put something down and come back to it later. The majority of my songs are culled from different things I've been working on maybe years before. My father calls this process 'cannibalizing.'"
"Greenville" "There's something about the sound of 'Greenville.' I love it. I once knew someone from Greenville, Mississippi. I was thinking about him. And that part of the south. In a way I was thinking about the song "Jackson," that duet with Johnny Cash and June Carter." Then Williams starts to sing, "'We got married in a fever....'" Adding, "I like writing about places a lot. As a southerner, where you're from is important. If you're from Florida and you meet someone from Louisiana, there's a connection there. The first thing people in the South ask you after they ask your name is, 'Where are you from?'"
"Still I Long For Your Kiss" "I finished writing this in the desert out in Pioneer Town outside of L.A. This is another example of me writing better when I'm on the road." She pauses, "I remember a few years back I was living in this tiny furnished little apartment in Nashville. All my stuff was in storage. I felt better then than I did afterwards when I bought a house and had all my stuff."
"Joy" "This was written literally in the car on the way to my folks' house in Fayetteville during the Christmas Holidays. I was by myself and I got this rhythmic thing going. At first I thought, 'This is ideal for a song. But I have to write some more verses.' But then I showed it to the guys in the band and they started jamming on it and I didn't have to write any more verses. It became a groove, a mantra. Like all the old work songs, the slave work songs and the railroad work songs and the plantation work songs, they were all one-chord songs."
"Jackson" "This song is about my feelings about the towns around the whole civil war area, like Jackson and Vicksburg. Of course, I threw in Baton Rouge and Lafayette. Those are all places I have connections with from my childhood. And I just kind of turned it into a love song |
