“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.
