Another source of inspiration, this one from working with Hal Willner, was getting to play her guitar on takes that eventually became West. Lucinda’s past producers typically had her put down the basic tracks for a record only to have someone come in later and redo her guitar parts. The trouble was, the way she plays — her rhythm — is so integral to her singing that if the producer didn’t use the scratch vocal, which was often the case, and then later asked her to sing another take without her guitar accompaniment, something invariably was lost. The dynamic is analogous to that scene in the movie Akeelah & The Bee where the adolescent protagonist, an otherwise gifted speller, can’t spell the simplest of words without rapping a double-dutch cadence out on her thigh. Likewise with Lucinda; unless she played her guitar while they recorded her vocals, she had trouble getting her groove on.
“People finally started figuring that out on my last couple of records,” she said. “In the early days, I would play and my guitar part would be redone because they wanted it to be, I don’t know, more perfect or something.”
Willner heard things differently. “I love the way she played her guitar, and we used a lot of it,” he said. “She told me that she’d had some issues with that with past producers. Maybe they’re listening for other things. I just want to feel the track.”
“I didn’t realize that my phrasing and everything worked so much around my guitar playing,” Lucinda said. “It all goes together. When the other musicians are following me it helps to have my guitar. It just has its own feel. It helps create the mood and the tempo.”
The benefit to her vocals on West is undeniable. Lucinda has always been a distinctive singer, someone who, as she’s matured as a performer, has developed greater command of her voice as an instrument, as something much more than just a vehicle for delivering her lyrics. She sings with full command of that instrument on West — languidly drawling here, crackling with feral intensity there, vivid in all its craggy, grainy abandon.
The quality of the recording certainly has something to do with the immediacy of her vocals on the record. The intensity of emotion, Lucinda’s commitment to reaching deep inside herself, and to using her voice more aggressively, a lot like Iggy Pop on “I Wanna Be Your Dog” or “Hurt”, can be staggering. When at her no-count lover she seethes, “Come on!”, it’s a put-down and a dare. She’s indicting the guy for his inability to make her come and goading him to give it a shot anyway. Few singers today could wring half the emotion from those two words as she does.
“I’ve never considered myself a great singer, in terms of range and all of that,” she said. “When I was younger I would get really frustrated. I grew up listening to singers like Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell and Emmylou Harris, to these beautiful voices. Then people started asking me to sing on their records and I wasn’t used to that. I really didn’t see myself as a singer. I saw myself as a songwriter first. I looked to Bob Dylan and figured, ‘Well, if he can get away with it and he doesn’t have a perfect voice, then it’s OK.’ I figured if my songs are really good I don’t have to have a perfect voice.
“Of course my voice became a unique instrument that had its own quality. But it took me awhile to grow into that and learn to appreciate it. I remember doing this radio convention thing. Emmylou and some other people were there. We were at this restaurant and there was someone singing light opera. I turned to Emmy and said, ‘I wish I could make my voice do that, go up real high and everything.’ And she said, ‘It’s important to learn to work with your limitations, and to make your limitations work for you, instead of working against them.’ She was telling me, ‘Take what you have and build on that, then that becomes a cool thing.'”
Beyond cultivating the distinctive properties of her voice, Lucinda also seems to have begun searching herself more as a writer of late. Not so much by worrying over staples of the craft like imagery and narrative (she already had those down cold), but by burrowing further into her interior life, especially the darker recesses. “I climbed all the way inside [the] tragedy/I got behind the majesty of the different shapes in every note,” she sang on “Real Live Bleeding Fingers” (from World Without Tears). “Tryin’ to find lightness is the dark” is how she put it in “Happy Woman Blues”, and nowhere does she inhabit the shadows more than on West.
The results can be devastating. “Unsuffer me,” she spits, more by way of demand than entreaty, to the lurching undertow and sinister string arrangement of the song bearing that name. The way she hurls her coinage at us resonates so forcefully that one can only hope it enters the lexicon soon. Lucinda’s performance — she hungers for both oblivion and deliverance here — is as sexy as it is scary. Once again her delivery is reminiscent of Iggy, only this time the lines it conjures are “Gimme danger, little stranger, and let me feel your disease/There’s nothing in my dreams, just some ugly memories.”
“She doesn’t hide anything,” said Willner. “You see her without skin on. It’s just there, in her speech, in how she talks and in how she writes. It’s an amazing way of dealing with things. She’s not a dark person at all. It’s like [the cartoonist] Ralph Steadman. You meet him and he’s this warm guy. But then you watch while he works and that other side comes out. I think it’s this incredibly healthy thing, to be able to do that.”
“I’m actually a very optimistic person,” Lucinda said. “I mean I’m not a Pollyanna. I just think it’s important to explore the darkness. I think that’s why I’m able to be more optimistic. To me it’s therapeutic. It’s very cathartic, just like writing in your journal. I guess maybe that’s what I’m doing.
