Best of 2014: Lucinda Williams – “Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone”

The Southern author Flannery O’Connor once wrote that her task as a writer was to shock readers out of complacency, conducting them into the off-kilter, gritty, ugly human landscape they had blithely not noticed. Almost as if she were nodding directly to Lucinda Williams, in “The Fiction Writer & His Country” from her posthumous collection Mystery and Manners, O’Connor wrote, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” Like O’Connor, Lucinda Williams captures in her songs the ragged, jagged, sometimes twisted and bitter nature of human relationships; like O’Connor, Williams beautifully renders in often haunting prose our aching desires for transcendence, even while we embrace our crippled mortal states. Unlike O’Connor, though, she embraces our constant struggle between flesh and spirit with an exuberance and downright joie de vivre that acknowledges our losses with poignant regret, while at the same time revealing the fervent hope and ardent passion that lies beneath living life fully.

Although Williams herself has endured tragedy — she describes the suicides of two young poets who snuffed out promising lives and careers in Sweet Old World’s title track and “Pineola” — as well as the terrors of an abusive relationship, her songs move through those layers of despair, embrace it, and often emerge on the other side. While the lyrics of “Sweet Old World,” for example, acknowledge the depths of darkness into which the song’s subject has plunged, they also describe with achingly sensual joy the beauty of the world the song’s subject has left behind. The music that surrounds these lyrics is no typical blues riff, but rather a joyous, lilting, folk tune that captures the sweet promise of the world around us.

Twenty-four years and ten albums into her career, Williams underscores her joyousness about songwriting, her infectious way with words and music, and her downright “it-can-be-a-shitty-imperfect-world-but-hope-and-love-can-make-it-better” attitude on Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, a double album of 20 songs, 18 of which are original. What we’ve known about Lucinda Williams all along becomes more forcefully apparent on this album: she refuses to be limited to one style of music and wraps the stories she tells in country waltzes, pop, blues, jazz, and rock. The one- or two-word titles of many of the album’s songs — “Compassion,” “Protection,” “Foolishness,” “Magnolia” (a J.J. Cale song), “Walk On,” and “West Memphis,” among others — point not only to her economy as a songwriter but also to her ability to drive to the heart of the matter. The album’s title comes from a line in the song “Compassion,” based on a poem that her father, Miller Williams, published in 1997. And, those words — “down where the spirit meets the bone” — capture the intimacy of the physical and the spiritual that sits at the center of so many of Williams’ songs.

In a year of great albums, Williams’ album stands out because she shows once again just how brilliant a songwriter she is, but also how deft and canny she is in wrapping the oh-so perfect chords and riffs around her crystalline stories of despair and hope, loss and promise, defeat and love. Williams pulls us into these 20 tales of the halting ways we try to be human, wrapping tendrils of rapture around the tenacious weeds of evil, disease, and corruption that often grow and crowd out the beauty in our lives.  Williams carries a joyful spirit into this album that strikes a high-spirited groove, which she rides from the first spare notes of “Compassion” to the affirmation in the closing word — “you’re the best I’ve ever had” — of the album’s final song, “Magnolia.” Indeed, this is the best Lucinda Williams we’ve ever had.

Williams keeps that groove going with a group of musicians with whom she doesn’t usually work. Longtime Elvis Costello collaborators Pete Thomas (drums and percussion) and Davey Faragher (bass), guitarist Bill Frisell, Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan, guitarist Stuart Mathis and frontman Jakob Dylan from the Wallflowers, along with Tony Joe White, lend their distinctive talents to the album, while Williams’ longtime rhythm section of David Sutton and Bruce Norton provide the foundation for a number of songs. Guitarists Leisz and Val McCallum — collaborators with Jackson Browne — also bring an edge with their sparkling string work.

Williams sandwiches her 18 originals between two songs written by others; the album opens with “Compassion,” the song based on the poem her father wrote. In a spare arrangement —Williams’ tender, tough voice and her acoustic guitar — she captures the stripped-to-the-bone power of her father’s words. For years, Williams has wanted to turn one of her father’s poems into a song, and she here turns in a spare, rapturous version. The song urges compassion for everyone since we never can see or know what others are feeling or experiencing at any particular moment. An individual may act arrogantly or rudely in the line at the store because he or she is doing his or her best to cope with devastating illness, financial loss, or death, a side of the story we don’t see. Williams urges:

For those you encounter, have compassion
even if they don’t want it
what seems bad manners is always a sign
of things no ears have heard
of things no eyes have seen
you do not know what wars are going on
down there where the spirit meets the bone.

What makes this such a great album is Williams’ ability to move from the sparseness of the opening song to the rousing “Protection,” fueled by McCallum and Leisz’s dueling guitars that channel the rocker “Sultans of Swing.” It’s a swampy funk anthem that cries out both for defense and shelter from those who would destroy all goodness in the name of something they call good. Trials and tribulations, being burnished in the fires of struggle, fashion a strong spirit of self-preservation:

I’ve seen some things in life as God is my witness
I’ve cried and cried and nobody could help
Now I’m traveling thru the world with dedication
What I do I did it by my own sweet self.

Nothing can get in the way, especially those false protectors who always preach what they think is best for others:

I need protection from the enemy of love
I need protection from the enemy of righteousness
I need protection from the enemy of good
I need protection from the enemy of kindness
Give me protection from the enemy of love.

Channeling Johnny Rivers’ classic “Poor Side of Town,” Williams delivers a tale about the ugly smugness of hypocrisy in “East Side of Town.” Mathis and Leisz’s guitars and McLagan’s sparkling Wurlitzer wrap a pop sensibility around knowing lyrics that depict the distance between the poor and the rich sides of town and the ways that we often convince ourselves that our good acts overcome that divide. Scorching lyrics couched in a hummable tune drive the point home; the music seduces you before you realize you’re being indicted:

You got your ideas and your visions
and you say you sympathize
you look but you don’t listen
there’s no empathy in your eyes…
you wanna see what it means to suffer
you wanna see what it means to be down
then why don’t you don’t come over to the east side of town.

Much like Bobbie Gentry – and Flannery O’Connor – Williams excels at pulling back the thin veneer of hypocrisy that covers much of Southern society. On “West Memphis,” echoing Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” she brings to life the story of justice gone wrong in the South. Led by Tony Joe White’s swampy guitar, Williams’ sandpapery voice re-tells the story of the West Memphis Three, the now-freed men once convicted under flawed prosecution of killing three young boys. The narrator indicts the entire system of life in West Memphis with the simple refrain: “That’s the way we do in West Memphis.”

Part of Williams’ genius is her ability to deliver the brutal reality of a love gone wrong in the dulcet tones of a pop song. “Cold Day in Hell” may be the most beautiful song on the entire album. McCallum and Leisz’s guitars, drenched in fuzz, play under and around each other, and the background vocals of Leisz, Gia Ciambotti, and Doug Pettibone create an almost angelic, choir that provides the perfect counterpoint to the singer’s feelings:

Before I trust you again
Before you use me again
Before I lust for you again
Before you confuse me again
It’ll be a cold day in hell.

“Stand Right by Each Other” is a reggae-tinged, pop-inflected song that travels perkily down the road; it’s a talk-song that rattles off the theme of staying the course with a loved one no matter the curves life throws your way:

We gotta stand right by each other
gotta try harder baby
I gotta stand right by you
and you gotta stand right by me.

Tony Joe White’s funky guitar kicks off “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” a tune that channels Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle,” except that Williams’ tune is not a celebration of the joy of life; it’s a warning that our worst selves are so close to us that we often can’t even see them or resist their embraces. Or is it about a hypocritical preacher who leads people to do more evil than good? Is the song literally about a satanic figure who invites and drives folks to fall from grace? Is it a wicked person who “invites you to come in/and drink with him/he won’t leave you alone”? Is it simply the evil side in each of us that we hide from ourselves so well we don’t — or we refuse to — recognize it?  Again, Williams’ writing genius is so deep that her song operates on many levels, and it’s so insidious, we find ourselves terrified yet entranced by the wicked that comes our way.

“When I Look at the World,” “Walk On,” and “Temporary Nature (of Any Precious Thing)” carry us back to the easy pop sensibilities of the mid-’60s. Taking their cue from the soul of the Delfonics or the softer sounds of Carolina beach music like the Embers and the jangly folk guitars of The Byrds, these songs offer that characteristic duality with which Williams so easily offers hope in the midst of despair. It’s not simply the lyrics that transform; it’s the music that carries us away, that transcends, so that it takes us to places outside ourselves before we even start singing the lyrics. “When I Look at the World,” with Leisz’s 12-string electric guitar, reaffirms the beauty of the world around us, even in the midst of the ugliness of everyday life:

I’ve had the truth hidden, I’ve been kicked around
I’ve been wasted, I’ve been on the brink
I’ve had my faith tested and my spirit sink
I’ve been unwelcome, I’ve been unloved
But then I look at the world and all its glory
I look at the world and it’s a different story
Each time I look at the world.

In her strong, supple voice, so suited to rhythm and blues, Williams delivers a pure soul vibe in “Walk On,” a tune that encourages the song’s subject to keep traveling down that road, no matter what:  “People gonna treat you unkind/But you don’t pay ’em any mind.” It’s Aretha Franklin meets Paul Revere and the Raiders as Pete Thomas’ drums and Leisz’s guitars catch that 1960s rock vibe while Williams channels the queen of soul. McLagan’s organ and Mathis’ and Leisz’s electrifying leads lift “Temporary Nature (of Any Precious Thing)” in the center of the album. Couched in the beauty of the music, Williams’ lyrics mourn the loss of an individual close to her, all the while acknowledging that the short time we have with others — or, the short time we ourselves have in this world — is made even more precious by that ephemeral nature. It’s so beautiful because it’s so temporary, but it’s a lesson we learn through loss, so that the next time, we embrace beauty more fiercely: “Afraid to love, afraid to give/just because of what it might cost us/but love can never, never live/without the pain, the pain of loss” This is where the spirit — our willingness to give of ourselves, our aching to hold and love — meets the bone, the corruption of all things physical.

“This Old Heartache” is a good old country ballad, driven by Leisz’s crying, though often jaunty, pedal steel. It’s a classic country weeper that would have fit easily and comfortably on Pure Prairie League’s Two Lane Highway, with its twinning of McCallum’s guitar and Leisz’s steel.

With a spare arrangement similar to the opening song interpreting her father’s poem, Williams’ version of J.J. Cale’s “Magnolia” captures the deep longing and slow-burning passion of the song. Williams’, Frisell’s, and Leisz’s guitars cascade beautifully behind Williams’ honeyed voice, so that in the end this drawn-out version of the song is a fitting tribute to Cale, who died while the album was being recorded. It’s also a fitting illustration of Williams’ ability to capture with ardor the central meaning of a song and deliver it with her characteristic power and vitality.

This has been a banner year for Lucinda Williams; early in 2014, she re-released her eponymous 1988 album, which had gone out of print under Rough Trade. Now, after a three-year break following Blessed (2011), she delivers an album full of the wry, thoughtful, passionate, soulful, and evocative songs that we’ve come to expect from her. On Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, though, Williams more than ever before captures in song the fleeting nature of life, the challenges that confront us all physically and spiritually, the times that comfort fails and the times where we find comfort even in the midst of our failure, the preciousness of love and its all-too-soon demise, and the power of music to transcend the limitations of this world. More than anything, the songs on this album help us to find our way, to overcome, to keep living through the hard times, to look at the glory of the world in all its beauty, and to be thankful for the beauty, passion, and power of music itself. Songs like “Walk On,” “East Side of Town,” and “Temporary Nature (of Any Precious Thing)” remind us forcefully that music can lift us out of the muck and mire, but even more importantly, we’re encouraged to find that space — which is never easy to do — where the physical and the spiritual meet. There is where we find ourselves and where we often find our solace — where the spirit meets the bone.

This month, we’ll be profiling selections from the Top 5 Albums of the Year according to ND’s commissioned writers and critics. Each writer was asked to write about the parts of the album that were most striking to them, and Henry Carrigan’s exploration of Lucinda Williams’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone is the second in that series. (See Part I on Hurary for the Riff Raff, by Jewly Hight.) The final results of the ND Critics’ Poll will be published along with the final profile, on Dec. 26. Our Readers’ Poll will remain open until Dec. 12.