THE COMPLEX LUCINDA WILLIAMS
Her lyrics show her emotional depth
Lucinda Williams
Where: CityFolk Telus stage, Lansdowne Park When: Sunday, Sept. 20 at 5:30 p.m.
Tickets: cityfolkfestival.com
If Lucinda Williams wanted, she could make the object of her anger slink away with an acidic sneer. It’s to her credit that she’s more likely to reach out than push away.
The frustration simmering in so many of Williams’s songs occasionally boils over, but through the course of her career, she’s been more interested in building a bridge between hurt and compassion.
“Even when I’m sort of pointing the finger at someone — in Drunken Angel, for instance, I’m saying: ‘Why’d you let go of your guitar? / Why’d you ever let it go that far?’ I’m not going, ‘You stupid idiot, you let yourself get shot and killed in a ridiculous argument,’ ” Williams said recently.
“At the same time that I’m bothered or disturbed by something this person did, I’m trying to be empathetic and put myself in that person’s place. Some of the songs that come to mind are Drunken Angel, Pineola, about this poet I knew who shot himself to death, Lake Charles — these people lost their way.”
Williams’s connection with the bruised and broken runs in the family. The sleeve of her 2007 album, West, was tattooed with the indelible line: “You don’t know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.” It came from a poem titled Compassion by her father, Miller Williams. She adapted the work for a stark song of the same name on her latest collection, and returned to that line when seeking an album title.
Clearly, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone is a phrase that resonates with Williams, no doubt in large part because it marks the intersection where she has situated much of her tough and tender catalogue.
“I love the way the line sounds, first of all,” she said. “Just saying it. And what it depicts — that inner place that’s hard to define. Where the spirit meets the bone is about as deep as you can go inside a person.”
Williams dedicated Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone to her father — who died this past January, three months after its release — with the inscription: “As Flannery O’Connor was to you, you were my greatest teacher.”
“I never studied creative writing formally, but it was almost like an informal apprenticeship,” the 62-year-old Louisiana native said of the suggestions her father would give on her works in progress.
“He said, ‘Never censor yourself as a writer.’ In other words, don’t be afraid to write about anything and everything, and be brave. Don’t worry that you’re baring too much or showing too much. And then he taught me more of the logistics of it, about the economy of writing. Stripping away the fat and getting to the point, while still maintaining the interest in whatever it is you’re writing about. And never lose your sense of wonder. ... People get older and they kind of lose that ability to be impressed or surprised.”
Williams honours all three of those lessons on Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone. As always, her hard-luck stories probe far inward and outward, delivered in that unmistakably passionate voice that’s equal parts granite and velvet. The blue-chip players, including late Small Faces keyboard legend Ian McLagan and members of Elvis Costello’s band, infuse the swampy blues and deep southern grooves with a palpable joy: “Everything was recorded live and you can tell we were having a good time.”
And while Williams has always wielded her pen like a scalpel, cutting to the core with startling directness, the new album’s lyrics are especially minimalist. Wrong Number gives just enough unsettling detail on a futile manhunt to let the listener fill in the blanks; West Memphis quickly zeros in on the grim, unfunny joke behind the pretence of justice in the West Memphis Three murder case.
The economy is all the more striking in light of Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone’s length. Rarely has a 20-song double album sounded so lean.
Rather than result from a sudden burst of activity by an artist who was famously slow to release albums in the two decades following her 1979 debut, Williams says the wealth of material was in keeping with a creative flame that’s burned steadily for eight years.
“It really started with West, which was shortly after my mother died, so that would make sense. I started going through this real prolific period,” she said.
That sombre collection would have been a double album, were it not for her label’s reluctance.
“I was really disappointed, because I had all these songs and I just wanted to get them out there and move on, you know? I’d been through my mother’s death, this horrible abusive relationship with this guy that I’d finally broken free of, so there were these huge, momentous, cataclysmic events in my life.”
Some of the resulting songs trickled down to the 2008 successor Little Honey — “a frustrating album” whose creator had moved on by the time of its release.
“I’ve met Tom (Overby, Williams’s manager since 2007 and husband since 2009) and we’re living together, and the Little Honey album comes out and everybody thinks all these songs are about Tom.”
Now on her own label, Williams has the freedom to dictate her release schedule. With the number of quality tracks in contention for Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, “it was just obvious to everybody involved that there’s no way we’re going to be able to narrow this down to one album.”
In fact, they narrowed it down from a triple. There’s enough material banked for a followup.
The songs that made the cut sound both timeless and contemporary. Williams notes with surprise that East Side of Town, whose gentle twang masks a stony glare at those who pay lip service to the downtrodden, has been nominated for song of the year at the Americana Music Awards.
“That wasn’t one of the ones I thought would have jumped out. ... I think it’s the subject matter that’s hitting home,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to write more songs like that over the years, but that’s always been challenging for me — more so than writing, you know, your basic unrequited love song.”
Those compositions that make up the spine of Williams’s songbook are from the perspective of a writer intimately acquainted with the cathartic power of heartache. You don’t attain that level of emotional truth by holding back, and Miller Williams’s dictum to lay oneself bare has come naturally to his daughter.
“I’ve just found it more interesting to write like that,” she said. “The challenge is to be able to say what you want to say without beating people over the head with it or cramming it down their throat.
“But it depends on the style of music. If you’re listening to heavy metal, they’re not gonna care. They’re just gonna go, ‘I hate my grandmother! I want to kill my mother!’ or whatever. But the kind of writing I’m trying to do, I’m trying to get something different across.”