These Armadillo Boots Were Made For Walking
Lucinda Williams @ The Orpheum Theater
by Dean “More Armadillo Pie, Please” Bonzani
2.13.04
Lucinda Williams is like a fine wine or a Martin guitar— she keeps getting better as she gets older.
At age 51, she may well have just released the most intimate, sensual album of her career. Her latest collection of songs, “World Without Tears” is a scrapbook of raw emotions and churning desires, livid as fresh scar tissue, clear as a snow-fed brook. The eagerly awaited follow up to 2001’s “Essence”, a recording that prompted Time magazine to name her “America’s Best Songwriter”, “World Without Tears” puts meat on the bare bones of her last project, showing a looser, more comfortable-in-her-wounded-skin artist.
Recorded in a 1920’s mansion in Los Angeles, Williams worked with producer Mark Howard, who has produced U2 and Bob Dylan, to project a more immediate and accessible poetic sensibility. For the first time since her 1988 debut album, she used her road band in the studio, eschewing studio musicians. “World Without Tears” was recorded essentially live in the mansion’s rooms, the material having been thoroughly rehearsed on tour. It was a conscious effort on Williams’ part to recapture the barroom fire of her debut album— with its subtle cohesiveness that many fans insist they favor over later works. The intensity of the performances on the album live and breathe in an airy expansiveness that can only be attributable to the interplay of flesh and room, heart and hips. Tucked into a decent set of headphones, one falls into the folds of the album’s terrain, submerged in the sweet turbulence of Williams’ heartache and yearnings.
The eldest daughter of acclaimed poet Miller Williams, Lucinda sent the lyrics of “Tears” to her father, hoping that its voice would meet with his literary approval. He told her, “I love it, it’s great— this is the closest thing to poetry you’ve ever done.”
On the opening track, “Fruits of My Labor”, Williams croons in an impossibly lazy Mississippi drawl, “Baby, I remember all the things we did, when we slept together in the blue behind your eyelids, baby, sweet baby.” Soft curtains of brushed snare and cymbals frame a tremoloed guitar. You can almost feel tender fingers brushing through your hair. .
Then, in the next song, between sentiments like “when you run your hand all up and run it back down my leg, get excited and bite my neck, get me all worked up like that” is some of the rauchiest guitar you’ll be pleased to ever hear. Absolute filth. Nasty, chewing-on-glass, rolling-naked-in-the-dirt guitar. Sweet Jesus, what blasphemous tone. This would be Lucinda’s guitar henchman, Doug Pettibone, who some claim is Satan. No, no! It’s true. Check out: http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Temple/1510/doug.html
In “Ventura” Lucinda sings, “stand in the shower, clean this dirty mess, give me back my power, and drown this unholiness.” What unholiness? Can it be the unnatural perfection of the sad steel guitar that DOUG is playing behind her creaky confession? Can natural-born humans play like that? Not likely.
Then there’s “Atonement.” Plagued by the grabby Pentecostal popstands on every corner of Nashville, Williams packed up and moved to L.A. She wrote this tune to convey just how weary she’d become of the curbside preaching in Tennessee. She must have had a few beers with Marilyn Manson at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go, then penned the delta version of “The Dope Show.” Snarling distorted bass and stinging guitar ride over a Tom Waits’ funeral procession of percussion, while Williams exhorts the faithful to “kill the rats in the gutter.”
Then, the aching majesty of “Minneapolis.” With quavering voice, Williams sings, “You’re a bad pain in my gut, I wanna spit you out, open up this wound again, let the blood flow red and thin.” The weeping steel guitar paints bare-branched trees against a stark, frozen sky.
Lucinda Williams has mastered her craft, and surmounted her every past effort with her new album. Her brutal honesty lays open the nerves of the listener— transporting the recipients of her passion. She rocks (her peon to former Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg is embarrassingly appropriate, down to its Rolling Stones swagger and fierce guitar stabs) and she rolls— softly strumming a song to put away the feelings for a shipwrecked romance, her world-racked heart on her sleeve.
©2004 by Dean Bonzani. All Rights Reserved.