Joseph Smigelski 2008-09-05
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I've been a Beatlemaniac ever since I was thirteen years old. I can still remember the first time I heard the Fab Four: I had just woken up, and I could hear the radio in the kitchen, where my mom was doing whatever moms did in kitchens in 1964. "Holy smoke," I thought. "I've never heard anything like this before!" The song I was listening to was "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Popular music, of course, would never be the same; and neither would I.
Over the years, a few other musical artists appeared whom I have consistently held in very high regard--Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello--though none ever quite reached the pinnacle of my personal hierarchy where the Beatles had always rested. It got to the point where I was sure that no one ever would.
All that began to change about two years ago when I was browsing the CD collection in the Las Positas College library. I came across an album titled (at least, at the time, I thought it was the title) Car Wheels on a Grave. Such a dark, perverse, surrealistic image intrigued me, as did the artist, Lucinda Williams. I was familiar with her name because, in a New York City record store many years ago, I had found a benefit CD for her friend Victoria Williams, who was suffering from multiple sclerosis. Lucinda sang only one song on that album and, unfortunately, I forgot about her until she appeared in 2004 on Elvis Costello's CD, The Delivery Man, where she joined Elvis on a rousing duet titled "There's a Story in Your Voice," one of the album's highlights. As I write about this now, it dawns on me what a fitting title that was for my re-introduction to Lucinda.
When I got home and took out her CD, I realized that some librarian had covered part of the jewel case with a cataloging sticker, obscuring the true name, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. I thought, "Gravel road, not grave?" Man, what a disappointment, a level of intrigue had vanished. But what the heck--I had the CD, so I put it on. About thirty seconds after I pressed "Play," I was blown away by the most powerful vocalist I had heard in many years. Something about Lucinda's voice touched me as none other had before. It could be described as smoky or gravelly, I suppose; it is definitely not smooth. Lucinda is not Joan Baez. But that's okay. For me, Baez's singing has always been too smooth, too pretty, at least until her recent CD, Dark Chords on a Big Guitar, an almost perfect work of art. But, back to Lucinda, I hadn't witnessed such depth of emotion in a singer's voice since Bob Dylan's in the mid-1960s. There was no artifice in it, nothing phony. It was beautiful. I had heard people discuss "honesty" in singing, but that kind of talk had always struck me as abstract nonsense. Pretty soon, I knew exactly what they were talking about. All it took was hearing "Lake Charles," a tender encomium to a lost loved one and a beloved place.
Lucinda's songwriting is simple yet elegant, touching, sometimes sweet (but not saccharine), concise, and insightful. The musical arrangements are unencumbered by fancy studio tricks; none of her songs are "over-produced." Her style has been described as "raw" and "too country for rock and too rock for country," a pretty accurate assessment. Lucinda is a mature artist, one who is hard to categorize, hence her special status in my musical world.
Many of Lucinda's songs are about her home state, Louisiana, and their poignancy has only been strengthened in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricanes. Take, for instance, the beautiful "Lake Charles" from Car Wheels. The song is a catch-in-the-throat lament about an unnamed man who, although born across the border in East Texas, always said he was from Lake Charles because that was "the place that he loved." Lucinda's voice conveys a potent blend of sadness and desperate hope that is absolutely soul-wrenching, and the spare accompaniment enhances the purity of the emotion. The song brings tears to my eyes each time I hear it. Imagine these elegiac lyrics sung in a soulful, plaintive contralto:
Did you run about as far as you could go,
Down the Louisiana highway,
Across Lake Pontchartrain?
Now your soul is in Lake Charles
No matter what they say.
Did an angel whisper in your ear,
And hold you close and take away your fear
In those long last moments?
Lucinda's songs possess a combination of frankness and maturity that is rare in popular music. Consider the unusual quality of these lines from "Those Three Days," from the album World Without Tears:
You built a nest inside my soul,
You rest your head on leaves of gold,
You managed to crawl inside my brain,
You found a hole and in you came.
You sleep like a baby breathing
Comfortably between truth and pain,
But the truth is nothing's been the same
Since those three days.
She does not hold back. In the song "World Without Tears," she sings about a mature woman's needs and a mature woman's pain:
If we lived in a world without tears,
How would bruises find
A face to lie upon?
How would scars find skin
To etch themselves into?
How would broken find the bones?
And on the transcendent "Ventura," Lucinda's voice breaks out of a quiet ramble and soars when she reaches the chorus of a heartbreaking tale of longing:
I wanna watch the ocean bend
The edges of the sun then.
I wanna get swallowed up
In an ocean of love.
There is a fearless quality to her honesty that is truly inspirational, and the more I explored Lucinda's work, the better things got. Eventually I heard the Essence album. I guess if I had to choose, I'd pick Essence as my favorite--not because every song on the album is a knockout, but because of four songs in particular.
"I Envy the Wind" is the most beautiful song I have ever heard. It's impossible to bring a song across with just the lyrics, but I will quote a verse because it might give you at least a vague idea:
I envy the wind
That whispers in your ear
That howls through the winter
That freezes your fingers
That moves through your hair
And cracks your lips
And chills you to the bone
I envy the wind
The title song, "Essence," is a dark metaphorical meditation on the lure and the dangers of obsessive love: "Baby, sweet baby, I wanna feel your breath / Even though you like to flirt with death." It's almost scary to listen to this number because Lucinda sings it with such conviction that it's clear she knows exactly what she is singing about. And "Reason to Cry" is not only a gorgeous song about lost love, but it shares its title with a song I wrote about 27 years ago, when I was young, foolish, and fronting a rock band in New York City. That may be a bit sentimental; but hey, it's music we're talking about here.
And then there is "Blue." This song is truly remarkable on several levels. Lucinda is a mature woman who discusses matters of the heart and soul with frankness and undaunted wisdom gained from clear-sighted confrontations with the realities of life. In "Blue," she is able to transmute this rare understanding into heartbreaking laconic poetry. I won't quote any lines here because their meaning will not come through without her voice behind them. This is one of those rare songs that suggest more than can possibly be said in words. Sometimes words--any words--are just too weak to do it on their own, and only a voice perfectly suited for a song can provide what's needed. There are songs that we either get or we don't, and if we do connect with them, they are the ones that usually wind up being our favorites. "Blue" is one of those songs, and it is my favorite, having eclipsed both Dylan's "Visions of Johanna" and the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever." And those two had been my favorites for almost 40 years!
Perhaps there is something else that contributes to my liking Lucinda so much. Most people's favorite music is the stuff they listened to when they were teenagers or young adults. The other artists I mentioned earlier all arrived on the scene at that time in my life. What a surprise I had when I discovered Lucinda! Who would ever think that someone could discover new and exciting music at the age of 55? And what's more is that Lucinda has been writing and singing great songs since 1980. She's almost as old as I am! How could I have been unaware of her for all those years? As an old friend of mine used to say, sometimes you find a diamond in a coal bin. Well, Lucinda is my diamond that had been hiding in my own personal musical coal scuttle of the last two and a half decades. I'm glad I finally found her.
And the dark surrealism that I first expected when I mistook Gravel for Grave finally appeared on Lucinda's latest CD, West. The stark wail of spare guitar work and the lonely plaint of a sad violin infuse "Unsuffer Me" and "Rescue" with strange emotional power. In the first, Lucinda asks for fulfillment, enlightenment, and the unnameable assuagement sought by all:
Anoint my head
With your sweet kiss
My joy is dead
I long for bliss
I long for knowledge
Whisper in my ear
Undo my logic, undo my fear
Unsuffer me
And there really is no rescue from the pain and misery of life:
He can't save you
from the plain and simple truth
the waning winters of your youth
He can't save you
He can't fix you
your tears will always leave their mark
from fears that stay inside the dark
He can't fix you
He also can't change "the thunderstorms within your purity," a line that goes beyond Dylan. And I love the beautiful irony of "Learning How to Live" because Lucinda knows--as we all do--that we'll never really learn to our satisfaction.
It's funny how coincidences happen. The other day, I was poking around on iTunes and came across one of those celebrity playlists that I usually avoid looking at. This one was Jim Carrey's. For some unfathomable reason, I was curious; so I clicked the mouse and was delighted to see a Lucinda song on his list. The celebrity usually offers a brief reason for including each of the songs. Next to Lucinda's "Overtime" (one of Elvis Costello's favorites, by the way), Jim Carrey had written, "She breaks my heart." And I thought, "Yeah, man, that about says it all."
