In a 1986 article about Delta blues singer Robert Johnson, Greil Marcus observed that blues was music born not of enslavement, but of liberation. "For the first time," he wrote, "[blacks] were acting like free people, and running into the wall that separates desire from its realization." Such is the struggle that plays itself out in "Phonograph Blues" and "Stones In My Passway", songs that find Johnson wrecked by pent-up longing. And yet as "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day" attests, the bluesman never quite surrendered to the obstacles in his path, even if the only moments of transcendence he enjoyed were imaginary or came through music.
Although socially and historically far removed from the world of Robert Johnson, Lucinda Williams' "Changed The Locks" is as surreal and defiant an expression of the desire to master one's fate as "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day". Desperate to keep her estranged lover from her, Williams puts new locks on her door, changes her phone number, buys new clothes, starts driving a different car. But none of these things give her the peace of mind she seeks. Dauntless, she proceeds to alter the larger public domain around her. By sheer force of will, she re-routes the railroad tracks that run through town and, in a stroke that's as brilliant as it is absurd, renames the town itself. Detonated by the thunder of drums that closes the song, "Changed The Locks" doesn't just scale the wall that separates desire from its realization, it brings that wall crashing to the ground.
Williams displayed this relentless spirit at a gig last September at Nashville's Bluebird Cafe when, midway through the first stanza of "Car Wheels On A Gravel Road", she waved her band off in disgust. "That's not right," she winced, recoiling from the mike. "It's too slow." Then, harnessing her anger, she added, "I'll start it this time." It was only after she plunged headlong into the song, her band in tow, that the crowd of 100 or so crammed into the club finally let out its breath.
This refusal to compromise -- this fierce desire to get things right, no matter what the cost -- is arguably the hallmark of Williams' brilliant yet stammering career. It accounts for her impatience with such songwriterly formulae as rhyme schemes and for the way she diligently rids her lyrics of cliches. It explains why her last two albums have such emotional resonance. And yet it's also the reason six years have passed between her last album, 1992's Sweet Old World, and her new one, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, released June 30 on Mercury Records.
"I don't know if I can make a record that I feel totally 100 percent right about," admits Williams over beer and Thai food at Nashville's Siam Cafe. "I would love to have that feeling but I have never had that feeling, and I still don't have that feeling.
"But I don't want to get into that too much," she continues, "because I'm already accused of being a demanding perfectionist. If I even say anything at all, such as 'I'm not sure about this one song,' then people are gonna say, 'See, there she goes. She's getting into that whole perfectionist thing again.'"
Considering the lengths to which Williams has gone to make Car Wheels -- lengths as Heraclean, in some respects, as those detailed in "Changed The Locks" -- it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume as much.
Williams began showcasing material for the project during the winter of 19945. She then recorded the album with her longtime guitarist and co-producer Gurf Morlix in Austin in February and March of 1995. (Ian McLagan, formerly of the Faces, engineered and played organ on the sessions.) But after singing on Steve Earle's "You're Still Standin' There" -- and being knocked out by Ray Kennedy's production of the song -- Williams decided to scrap what she'd done with Morlix in favor of working with Kennedy and Earle.
Backed by her regular band, including Morlix, Williams re-cut Car Wheels in Nashville during the summer of 1996. Then she and Earle hit an impasse. After Earle walked out on the nearly-finished sessions (he cites Williams' indecisiveness and his busy schedule as reasons), Williams took the Nashville mixes to Los Angeles, where E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan added organ and accordion to eight tracks. Bittan also overdubbed the guitar parts of Charlie Sexton, Greg Leisz, Buddy Miller, and sometime Bonnie Raitt sideman Johnny Lee Schell. Then, using the roughs from Nashville and L.A., Rick Rubin and Jim Scott mixed the entire project in L.A. except "Metal Firecracker", which Ray Kennedy mixed in Nashville.
Meanwhile, reports of the album's imminent release circulated in the press, by word of mouth, and on the Internet. Fans, critics and biz-watchers grew impatient. Most were just eager to hear studio versions of songs that Williams had played live for the past few years. Others were less forgiving. The record's release date became a running joke on America Online's No Depression message board. A contributor to Request magazine's annual critics' poll went so far as to dub Williams "Tease of the Year." More devastating, though, was a September 1997 cover story in The New York Times Magazine that portrayed Williams as a nut-case who couldn't bring the project to closure. To add insult to injury, the Times piece included a quote in which Williams' new manager, Frank Callari, likened her to "a bowl of cornflakes."
Not even when changes at Williams' label, American Recordings, further delayed the album's release did people cut her much slack. Although few actually knew what went on behind the scenes, some were starting to talk about Williams as much for what she hadn't delivered as for the lasting music she's made. It didn't help that her detractors kept pointing out that she had also recorded, abandoned, and re-recorded her previous album, Sweet Old World. Indeed, many of those who shouted a resounding "no" when Williams first sang "Do I want too much, am I going overboard" on "Passionate Kisses" weren't so sure anymore.
"It makes me look bad," an embattled Williams said last summer. "People think I'm never satisfied with anything. And maybe I am a bit demanding. But I don't think I should have to defend myself. All that should matter is the quality of my records."
Even worse than the ongoing scrutiny was the price -- not just artistically, but personally and financially as well -- that Williams paid for not having her album out. "It really is debilitating when you have that much time between records," she says. "Creatively, I just shut down. I didn't write the whole time, which added to the stress. So not only am I broke, I can't go out and work, and I'm not writing. It's no wonder I was feeling so depressed and so tense all the time. I'm an artist and I'm not doing my thing. My spirit's not being fed."
Given the tortuous route by which Williams arrived at Car Wheels, it's a wonder that she doesn't lighten up and stop putting herself -- and others -- through hell to make records. And yet like everything else with Williams, it's not that simple. "My songs are an extension of who I am," she confides -- so much so, she adds, that she's willing to forsake almost anything for her music.
Williams' relationship with Morlix, who had been her creative partner for eleven years, is a case in point. After having second thoughts about the album they'd made in Austin, Williams decided to redo the project at Room & Board studios with Earle and Kennedy. Although Morlix played guitar on the sessions and is, according to guitarist Buddy Miller, "the primary musical voice on the record," he isn't credited as one of the project's co-producers. Morlix and Williams haven't spoken to each other in nearly two years.
"Lucinda sacrifices a lot for her art," says Morlix diplomatically. "And I sacrificed a lot to be involved with it. Then the scales tipped a little too far. Before that, they were always balanced by how great the music was."
In the end, it would seem that Williams stands to suffer most from this parting of ways. Not only does she lose a close friend, but "without Gurf," says Miller, "Lucinda's music's not gonna be quite the same in the future."
At the time, though, getting Car Wheels to sound the way Williams heard it in her head was her top priority, "regardless of personal relationships, and regardless of the other things that make me happy," she said.
"The worst thing," she continued, "would be to sell out. I'm terrified of that happening. I've got such an innate fear of that happening that my defenses go up if I even think something's headed in that direction.
"I've seen it happen with other people. They make an album the way somebody tells them to, and then three years later they're making the record they wanted to make in the first place. My feeling is, 'Why didn't you do what you wanted to do to begin with?'"
Williams, who is the daughter of poet laureate Miller Williams, an Arkansas professor who read at President Clinton's 1996 inauguration, comes by this uncompromising spirit naturally. "I was raised to think about a career, to pick something that I wanted to do and go for it," she says. "Fortunately, the music thing worked out for me. If I wasn't doing this I would have stayed in school and gotten a degree in cultural anthropology, or something like that. But this is my calling. It's almost like a responsibility."
Such an attitude explains why, as a young woman who cut her teeth on Bob Dylan and country blues -- and who grew up around her father's writer friends, Charles Bukowski and Flannery O'Connor among them -- Williams subjected herself to the humiliation of an audition at Opryland theme park.
"At the time -- I think it was '72 or '73 -- I didn't really know what it was," she recalls. "I hadn't been playing out in public very long. So to me, any gig was great, especially if they were gonna pay me to play. I guess I figured that if I got a gig at Opryland in Nashville, then maybe I'd get a regular gig. And so I went and did it -- and, of course, I didn't get picked.
"I just looked at it like I did everything back then," Williams continues. "I said, 'To hell with them. I'm more original that.' I was coming out of the '60s. I'd always been surrounded by free thinkers and been encouraged to be original and stand up for what I believed in. So I figured it was a good thing that I didn't fit in at a place like that. It was a badge of honor."
Williams, now 45, has dealt with not fitting in most of her life, doubtless some of it due to having moved around so much. As an adult, she's lived in Nashville, New Orleans, New York City, Houston, Los Angeles, and Austin. During her childhood, her father's teaching took Williams all over the South -- hence the references to Jackson, Macon, Vicksburg, Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette she sprinkles throughout Car Wheels. In fact, it's easy to imagine Williams as the child in the title track, the tear-stained four-year-old who's strapped into the back seat of the family car as cotton fields and sharecropper shacks rush past her window.
Williams, whose grandfather was a conscientious objector in World War I and whose father was active in the Civil Rights Movement, has known social and political displacement as well. She was expelled from high school in New Orleans when, in protest of the Vietnam War, she refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. She dropped out of the University of Arkansas after less than a year. And despite the fact that Mary Chapin Carpenter's lifeless version of "Passionate Kisses" earned her a songwriting Grammy -- and that Patty Loveless and Emmylou Harris have recorded her songs -- Williams has always been an outsider in the world of country music.
"In Nashville," she says, "people know me mainly on the strength of the covers of my songs that people have done. 'Who do you write for,' they ask. 'I write for myself,' I say. 'Where do you write,' they continue, meaning, 'Which office on Music Row?' It's kind of funny. They're always trying to pull me into that world, but I'm just not part of it."
Williams recorded her first two albums -- Ramblin' (1979), a collection of Delta blues and hillbilly covers, and Happy Woman Blues (1980), a fetching set of originals that draws on blues, folk and Cajun sources -- for Moses Asch's Folkways label. Such a move might strike some as hip in the wake of the much-heralded 1997 reissue of the imprint's Anthology Of American Folk Music. At the time, though, with punk still a force to be reckoned with, it was downright anachronistic; even Joe Ely was out touring with the Clash.
On the promise of her early recordings, Williams spent much of the next decade flirting with major labels; she even cut an album's worth of demos for Columbia in 1986 (overseen by Henry Lewy, who co-produced the first two Flying Burrito Brothers LPs). She finally released her third album in 1988 -- not, however, for a major, but for Rough Trade, a U.K.-based punk holdover known for championing such outsider female artists as the Raincoats, Liliput, and the Slits.
Nevertheless, Lucinda Williams, a $15,000 project co-produced by Morlix, marked a breakthrough of sorts. The album -- which was reissued in June with bonus tracks by Koch Records -- not only sold a staggering 100,000 copies (becoming Rough Trade's best-selling U.S. release), it presented Williams as a singularly gifted singer-songwriter, and proved to be one of the finest roots-rock albums of the post-punk era. Fueled by nearly a decade's worth of frustration, not to mention rancor over her recent divorce from Long Ryders drummer Greg Sowders, Williams emerged as a woman who wanted it all -- kids and a rock band, romance and time for herself -- and who saw absolutely no reason why she shouldn't have it.
By 1989, it appeared she would: Assuring her complete creative control, Bob Buziak, the president of RCA Records, signed Williams to the first major-label deal of her career. Then Buziak got canned. After his successors finished meddling in the studio, Williams wound up with an overproduced album, one that sapped the life out of the searching originals she'd penned for the project. Unable to reach a middle ground, Williams opted out of her contract and signed with Chameleon Records, where Buziak landed after he left RCA.
And yet Williams, it seemed, had gotten off track. Dissatisfied with her first crack at Sweet Old World for Chameleon, she insisted on recording the album again. As much as her critics might like to believe otherwise, Williams wasn't being difficult. Nor was she imagining things, as the tapes of those sessions and co-producer Morlix attest. Heard alongside the album that became Sweet Old World, the production and, in some cases, the playing, on the RCA and first Chameleon recordings was flat and without imagination -- more akin to album-oriented rock than to the lean, bluesy sound that has become Williams' trademark. Even the writing on earlier versions of such songs as "He Never Got Enough Love" (originally titled "Dead End Street") and "The Lines Around Your Eyes" was hackneyed by comparison. Williams, in other words, had relied on her instincts, however exacting, and it had paid off: The final incarnation of Sweet Old World was by far the strongest.
The same is true of Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. The unreleased sessions that Morlix produced three years ago have their moments and, to be sure, a couple of the Mercury album's tracks -- in particular a new version of "I Lost It", which originally appeared on Happy Woman Blues -- suffer from overproduction. But all told, Williams could hardly have made a better record: Car Wheels brims with humanity and ranks with her best work. More than that, the recordings boast more muscle and punch than her previous albums; they also find her vocals more commanding, her phrasing rarely less than breathtaking. Whether Williams is conjuring the smell of coffee, eggs, and bacon (the title track), salvaging dignity from a failed relationship ("Metal Firecracker"), or fantasizing about a lover's touch ("Right In Time"), the desire in her willowy drawl is palpable. On "Lake Charles", she even approximates the sultry country-soul of one of her heroes, Bobbie Gentry.
Williams is quick to acknowledge that she's grown as a singer. But she also gives credit to co-producer Ray Kennedy for the way her vocals sound on Car Wheels. "When I went in to sing on Steve Earle's I Feel Alright, I was blown away by the technique that Ray used to record my vocals. I heard nuances in my voice that I hadn't heard before."
She cites "2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten", the third track on Car Wheels, as an example. "When I do that 'hey-hey,'" she says, "I barely had to sing out. I mean I just whispered it. Normally, if you're making a record, that wouldn't get picked up unless you pushed your voice out more. But I didn't have to do that and we still got all those gritty sounds from the back of the throat."
As with Williams' other records, Car Wheels runs the roots-music gamut. "Still I Long For Your Kiss" rides a humid soul groove; "2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten" exudes the breathy languor of Dusty Springfield's classic Dusty In Memphis album. "Concrete And Barbed Wire", an Arcadian waltz, is harmonically reminiscent of The Band's version of "Ain't No More Cane (On The Brazos)", while the acoustic folk of "Greenville" and "Jackson" aches with a mountain purity.
Ultimately, though, Car Wheels is grounded in the blues, not so much as an idiom -- although that's there too -- but in blues as a sensibility or feeling. Take "Joy", where, over a stabbing slide guitar, Williams snarls, "You had no right to take my joy. I want it back." Ostensibly, the song is about a faithless lover, but heard in light of the drama that has surrounded Williams lately, she could just as easily be venting her spleen at those who would rather cavil about how long she takes to make records than celebrate the uncompromising art she produces.
She'd hardly be unjustified: Considering that Williams has given the world yet another incandescent record, it's baffling that folks don't leave her alone to do what she does best -- make music. Even Morlix, someone who has a legitimate beef with Williams, sees it that way: "Who's to tell an artist how often they should put out a record?" he asks.
"It's her record," echoes Miller. "As long as somebody's giving her money for it [Mercury reportedly paid $450,000 for the right to release Car Wheels], she might as well get it how she wants it." Not only that, Miller believes the New York Times Magazine feature unfairly portrayed Williams as "unstable for wanting to redo a vocal.
"A lot of thought and emotion goes into making a record," he explains. "You want to make sure that feeling comes across. I don't think the guy that wrote the New York Times story understood how records are made. There was nothing that unusual going on. If Lucinda can sense that the wrong emotion is coming through on a vocal and can stop it herself, I think that's great. That's a lot better than singing an entire five-minute track and then having to start over."
The issue, says Holly George-Warren, editor of Rolling Stone Press, "goes beyond an artist being held to task for taking too long to finish a record. A lot of the things I've heard said about Lucinda are sexist -- that she's difficult, for example. You don't hear things like that about Bruce Springsteen and John Fogerty. Both of them have taken a long time to make records.
"It seems that happens a lot," George-Warren continues, "especially if a woman hears things a certain way -- her way -- rather than the way a male producer tells her they should sound. Look at Sinead O'Connor. It was the same situation with her second album. She hated the production and started over. That set her on the path of being 'difficult' because she didn't agree with her male producer's opinion."
"Guys have a hard time taking direction from a woman," confirms Miller. "I'll be the first to admit it working with my wife [singer-songwriter Julie Miller]. When we're working on a record, things can get pretty intense around the house. But I know it's my problem and I have to deal with it."
"We're all conditioned to react in a certain way," adds Williams, referring to how issues of gender often complicate things in the studio. "It's something we've learned. I also am conditioned to react in a way that's not healthy. I have a tendency to back down and allow myself to be controlled. That's something that I have to work on.
"But I'm trying to grow," she continues. "And you can't grow if you're constantly blaming someone else. You have to look at yourself too. I'm on a path. I've been on a spiritual growth path all my life. And I'm still on it. I'm trying to evolve."
Williams' willingness to work with -- and stand up to -- Steve Earle, someone she describes as "intimidating," is evidence of this growth. "I think Steve is brilliant," she says. "I love his stuff, but we did butt heads in the studio. But the thing is, I got a great record and he knows it's a great record." (Although Earle at one point said he'd have to hear the final Car Wheels mixes before he put his name on the album, he and Williams are, by all accounts, on good terms again: His name is all over the project.)
Doubtless Williams will continue to run up against producers, record execs, and the press; she might even change the locks on a couple more of them. But, as her comments suggest, she knows her greatest challenge comes from within -- specifically, from her fierce resolve to close the gap between her artistic desires and what she's able, within limits, to achieve.
It's tempting, in fact, to hear "Can't Let Go", especially the lines, "It's over, I know it, but I can't let go," as a description of Williams' creative process. Her account of how the track took shape in the studio certainly points in that direction.
"I really wanted to swamp it up," Williams says of the song, which was written, ironically enough, by Randy Weeks of the Lonesome Strangers. "Steve [Earle] had loaned me this dobro. The neck was real wide and I couldn't get my fingers on it. I thought it sounded completely out of tune. Then we put the track down and everyone said, 'That's it! That's it!'...And yet I couldn't leave it at that. I kept complaining. I kept saying, 'No, I can't have that on there.'
"I wasn't happy," she continues, "but in the end it was one of those perfectionist things that I was able to accept. But it bothered me for a long time, and I still know it's there. Nobody else knows it's there, but the dobro is really out of tune. And yet because of the nature of the song, it sort of adds to that rawness thing. I got vetoed on that one. It was like, 'No, we're not doing this one over.'
"And yet I could tell the difference. I know when something's not right."
"The way she moves is right in time with me," says ND contributing editor Bill Friskics-Warren, referring to the way that Williams makes records. Friskics-Warren lives in Nashville, where he writes for the Nashville Scene and The Washington Post.
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