Car Wheels on an Asphalt Road: Lucinda Williams Makes the Ultimate Road-Trip Album
Mike Seely
Posted On January 31, 2016
There are a lot of wonderful musicians—Bill Frisell, Greg Leisz, Carlton Davis, and Ras Michael among them—who lend their talents to Lucinda Williams’ new album, The Ghosts of Highway 20 (out February 5 on Highway 20/Thirty Tigers). But, in a way, it doesn’t matter who Williams surrounds herself with—the output is hers, and not just due to her unmistakable voice. You could make a case that, at this point in her career, the 62-year-old Americana godmother is a sub-genre unto herself, melding country, folk, blues, jazz, and voodoo into a sound that she and she alone can produce.
The LP has a weary, slow-cooked vibe—appropriate for a quasi-concept album that Williams has rooted on the southern roadway (stretching 1,500 miles from South Carolina to Texas) where she’s spent much of her life. Whereas 2014’s heralded Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone was a smorgasbord of tempo and style, The Ghosts of Highway 20 is notable for the gluey cohesiveness of its 14 tracks, splayed out generously over two discs.
The second half is the more memorable of this collection. Williams strips down and darkens Bruce Springsteen’s “Factory”—which is saying something, considering how down and dark the original is to begin with—to impeccable effect, and it’s easy to imagine the heart-wrenching “Can’t Close the Door on Love” quickly establishing itself as a wet, end-of-set kiss to the crowd. Elsewhere—especially on the epic “Faith and Grace”—she gives her band unfenced acreage on which to run, and they don’t let her down.
But here’s the thing about this album: You don’t really remember any one song. One night, alone in my kitchen with a bottle of wine, I played it straight through and just spaced out the whole damn time. It was the closest approximation of a long road trip I could imagine an album being, with unexpected beauty and introspective triggers at every turn. The only thing better would have been Lu riding shotgun; one imagines she’d make for great company along the two-lane blacktop, with eyes fixed forward and your head in the rearview.
