Can’t Let Go. Lucinda Williams. 1998. Mercury.

 Lucinda Williams’ singing voice is so personally crafted an instrument of feeling and intensity that on record it evokes the semi-populated backroads of rural loneliness. Like Tom Petty, another idiosyncratic Southern vocalist with a keenly felt instinct for the short form narrative, she’s too impatient with strident feelings to immerse herself in them like Joni Mitchell or Van Morrison to give them their proper shape and color. Williams fights her way out of bitterness, and shows us the eroticism behind the struggle. On Can’t Let Go, from the 1998 breakthrough LP Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, Williams, in response to a recent, one-sided breakup, turns sexual desire into an open outpouring of frustration and dread. Her talent for tying together disparate feelings for the purpose of creating a cogent reality which she then proceeds to detonate in studio realtime, and in song form, is not to dazzle us but to reinvigorate the vernacular along its incautious descent into homogeneous glossolalia. Our urge to speak clearly, free from the intrusion of political, commercial, religious, or social dogmas, is as basic a biological need as human sexuality. Williams articulates this need viscerally, elevating her music to standards that transcend the mere sum of her influences; a feat Tom Petty sought but never rose to. Yet both artists are rightly considered musical heroes, one having achieved early in her career what the other martyred himself to, vainly attempting. The summer of 1998, when Carrier Wheels On A Gravel Road was released, my then boyfriend co-hosted a fundraising party for a friend who was participating in a Bike Across Texas event benefiting AIDS research. Mike asked me to bring some music for the party. I had an obvious choice selected but he later called asking if I’d bring Jimmy Buffet’s Greatest Hits, which was a rousing success. Months later, Mike began the long, tortuous process of ghosting me, on which I’d eventually expend a vast amount of time and energy recovering from. When I finally did, though, I could see clearly the enormity of the favor I’d been paid.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ça Plane Pour Moi. Plastic Bertrand. 1978. Sire.

  According to internet data, the Lollapalooza tour, 1995, reached Dallas, Texas, on August 10, a Thursday. Five of us rode in one car that I drove from Fort Worth to the Starplex Amphitheater; my fellow passengers were Jo, Pat, Trina, and that woman who lived in Azle, whose name I no longer remember, and who used to come into the record store often, along with her boyfriend. Her musical tastes tended toward the abrasive, commercial metal so popular with the white suburban kids of privilege: Nine Inch Nails, Iron Maiden, Alice In Chains. Her personal style was not that of a typical metal fan, more like Ally Sheedy after her character’s disastrous Breakfast Club makeover. I admired her bright and casual style, her propensity to good humor and cheer, and for not succumbing to conformity and becoming a metal clone like so many of our peers. She rolled joints during the entire car trip to Lollapalooza with the hurried precision of an efficient professional working against a deadline, and c
Read more

Blues Is King. Marshall Crenshaw. 1985. Warner Bros.

  Certain recording artists—Lindsey Buckingham, Lucinda Williams, Sylvester Stewart all come to mind—share such a deep affinity with American music that it can seem as if they’ve walked into our  fantasies of democracy and produced their best work from inside that dream. So it is with Marshall Crenshaw. His eponymously titled debut record was released in 1982, when American artists were engaged in a Janus faced dialogue with their audience; on one side, artists like Talking Heads, Prince, and Laurie Anderson boldly envisioned pop song dynamics that bore the irreducible stamp of their respective personalities, while on the other side, Los Lobos, the Replacements, and the Cramps refashioned the face of rock and roll itself to accurately mirror the tastes of a young public growing increasingly hostile to, as well as alienated from, the social and fiscal policies of a federal government that was becoming less and less representative. Somewhere between the two norms fell the music of Marsha
Read more

Les Bon Temps Rouler Waltz. BeauSoleil. 1988. Arhoolie.

  A modicum of sadness is built into BeauSoleil’s rendition of the Lawrence Walker ballad Les Bon Temps Rouler Waltz. It’s the emotional center point around which the song revolves, illuminating the record’s good faith by fixing the listener’s attention on the band’s collaborative dynamic, the process by which they draw poignancy from each instrumental performance. Every pop record is an implied contractual agreement between artist and listener, with listener consenting to his role as subjective recipient of the commercial audio product. The basic nature of this role is subject to change over a period of time as the listener’s relationship with the record changes, given, but not limited, to issues of personality maturity. Typically, the consumer role will fall into one of two camps: either the faceless, one-of-millions mass audience whose pop experience is often social or the cogent individual whose expectations of the pop experience are more personal and long lasting. The most signifi
Read more