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.

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