Chasing the peacocks and drawing from her pain
In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln, the best writer ever to become U.S. president, spoke these words: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
“The better angels of our nature” is an elegant line that over time, through no fault of its author, has been reduced to cliche. People use it whenever they want to invoke the finer qualities of human beings, that part of us that knows compassion and empathy and forgiveness. That part of us which isn’t strictly transactional and self-interested.
Lucinda Williams’ new album is called Good Souls Better Angels (Highway 20/Thirty Tigers), and the final track on the album is “Good Souls.” It is a kind of prayer, a beseechment:
Keep me with all the ones Who have a hand at my back When I’ve strayed from the path
It is an acknowledgment that despite the catalog of civic misery and personal horror the preceding 11 tracks have led us through, those better angels still exist.
★★★
Lucinda’s father, Miller Williams, was a poet.
I’d argue he was a great one, whose genius was in making his complex and intricately designed work feel like the offhand, unconsidered speech of a certain kind of intelligent but unprepossessing, entirely relatable friend of the receiver. Reading — or hearing — Miller’s poetry felt like thinking your own thoughts.
He worked with plain language, with a mind that was trained in science and skeptical, but open to mystery.
“The poet in the child is crippled, I think, when the child is conditioned to expect an answer whenever there is a question,” Miller wrote in his 2006 book Making a Poem.
In that same book, he described how doubt crept into his life when he was a boy, and the preacher began to describe Armageddon: “It was to be the battle to the death between the good angels and the bad angels.”
“I knew that whatever a preacher could do with words, there was no such thing as a bad angel,” he wrote. “The definition of goodness was implicit in the word angel — and the definition of quality, of rightness, of efficacy, I like to believe are implicit in the word art and in the word poem.”
Meaning there are no bad angels, no bad art, and no bad poems. There are only angels and fake angels, art and counterfeit art, poems and phony poems. I believe Miller was right about that, and that what we call things matter.
Lucinda’s work in many ways resembles her father’s poetry. She does not expect every question to resolve like a romantic comedy. She uses the same common tools. But Lucinda’s blues are her own. And a song is not a poem. There are ways in which they are similar. A poem is composed of words, and a lot of songs have words. One of the ways to make a song is to put a poem to music. But a song unsung is not necessarily a poem. And not all poems can be tamed into songs.
This has nothing to do with
one form being higher or lower than the other. Poems and songs are kin but work in different ways, in collaboration with the ears and brains and hearts of those who willingly receive them. (Poems and songs are like hypnosis in that they can be willfully resisted. They do not work on those determined not to hear them.)
While songs and poems may have words in common, words are (nearly) everything to a poem. A poem is made up of words and silences, freighted sentences, clauses and phrases and sometimes discrete syllables suspended in space or ether.
Sometimes they are read aloud, and sometimes people argue that this is the best and probably only way that poetry should be received, but it is OK to read a poem silently to oneself and let it bloom (or not) in the privacy of one’s mind. There is something intimate in this act, that it is as near to telepathy, as near to direct mind-to-mind communication, as we will ever get.
A song is aspirated by the breath of its singer. Some songs require a particular voice to come alive; every singer changes every song. This is one reason why it is hard to imagine some songs sung by some singers, and why some singers seem to transcend the songs they sing.
A beautiful tone is worth a lot. This is why some people can be deeply moved by songs sung in languages they do not understand. A voice can carry an emotive charge; a melody pulls one way or the other depending on the intervals between the notes. A half-step can be the difference between ecstasy and murder.
A song’s lyric serves as a map for a voice.
All of us have voices, even if they sound only in our heads. But not all of us are singers. And not all singers are songwriters, though some might lay claim on a particular song through their interpretation of it. Never believe that Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Linda Ronstadt and Andrea Bocelli are not great creative artists.
The main duty of a song lyric is to guide the voice through the territory. The syllables needn’t stand on their own, and it is unfair to remove the words from the context of the song. Steve Allen reciting the lyrics to “Be-Bop-A-Lula” on television (mispronouncing the title phrase as “be-bopa-luBAH,” by the way) over a tinkling piano may or may not have been decent comedy, but it was also smug philistinism in which Allen, a fine pianist who Miles Davis thought understood music, cynically indulged in order to reassure a petty bourgeois audience that they were finer than the savages who embraced that rock ’n’ roll.
Allen could present “BeBop-A-Lula” as a phony poem, but it’s a great song.
That’s not to say song lyrics can’t, or shouldn’t, be artful.
There are songwriters who, while not poets, understand the shadows and hollows of words. They can be playful with words, they understand their hauntedness, the degrees of meanings that lurk behind them, the ways they change color in different lights and how their proximity to one another affects their mood. Some of these songwriters might also be poets, but that is beside the point.
Songwriters write for voices; they work with rhythm and syllables, chords and riffs. They work with time. Some of the best songs succeed in spite of their lyrics. “Yesterday” is a melody that it took months if not years for Paul McCartney to find the words to, with “scrambled eggs” famously holding the place and preserving the phrasing of the eventual title.
I think McCartney might be the first one to tell you that he is not a poet and that he is OK with that.
★★★
Some critics are calling Good Souls Better Angels Lucinda’s best work since 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. That is very high praise, because Car Wheels is one of those albums that makes lists, that people use as a kind of metric.
I don’t think you could write the history of American popular music without mentioning it, and while a person conversant with her work might prefer 1988’s Lucinda Williams or 1992’s Sweet Old World (or that album’s 2017 remake) or even 2011’s Blessed, any argument against Car Wheels as a great record is likely to be perceived as willfully contrarian. There is no doubt that it cemented her as one of those minor-key pop stars that populate our cultural firmament.
I first heard Car Wheels in Miller Williams’ living room in Fayetteville in very early 1998, some months before it was released. I remember he was giddy and papa-proud when he played it for us, that he told stories about how his daughter had stood up to the record company executives who wanted her to conform to their idea of country-pop stardom. How she’d done it her way and made a record that she could be proud of — something true and clean-eyed that cut through the sentimental notions and half-measures that had come to define country radio.
Miller told me that when he first heard the title track, a song about a peripatetic childhood told from the perspective of the child in the back seat of the family car (“a little bit of dirt mixed with tears”) that he apologized to her. “Honey, I’m sorry,” he said. My immediate reaction to the song was to think of Eudora Welty and the part in One Writer’s Beginnings where she wrote about the first car her family ever bought and how, as a little girl, she would sit in the back seat and listen to the adults converse.
“When we at length bought our first automobile, one of our neighbors was often invited to go with us on the family Sunday afternoon ride,” Welty writes. “In Jackson [Mississippi] it was counted an affront to the neighbors to start out for anywhere with an empty seat in the car. My mother sat in the back with her friend, and I’m told that as a small child I would ask to sit in the middle, and say as we started off, ‘Now talk.’”
Low hum of voices in the front seat, Lucinda sings in “Car Wheels.” Got folks in Jackson we’re going to meet …
Miller Williams knew Eudora Welty; Lucinda met her as a child.
She also chased Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks.
★★★
If we are to abide by the conventions of journalism, I should not review any of Lucinda’s albums. I am in no position to pretend to be objective and I feel protective of her and her work. But we all have artists we respond to and those that leave us cold, and I’m not sure would-be critics owe their audiences anything other than honest consideration of the work at hand.
To me, Good Souls Better Angels is a fairly transparent blues record, filled with righteous anger, at times sonically reminiscent of Paul Thorn’s gospel-inflected 2018 album Don’t Let the Devil Ride.
Obviously recorded before the current pandemic, it feels prescient in its dark, muscular and at times murderous tone leveled at the array of “fools and thieves, clowns and hypocrites” who have gotten us into this mess.
One of the record’s standout tunes, “Man Without a Soul,” is a jeremiad obviously aimed at the current tenant of the White House, though it could be applied to a number of other high-profile figures as well. It’s a less subtle song than we might expect from Lucinda, who in interviews has credited her husband, co-producer and sometimes songwriting collaborator Tom Overby with the idea.
In some ways, the song seems like a bitter answer to Neil Young’s wistful acoustic “Campaigner” from 1976 in which he famously observed that “even Richard Nixon has got soul.”
But Young wrote “Campaigner” with Nixon in disgrace and hospitalized, suffering from phlebitis in his left leg.
Having made a good love match with Overby more than a decade ago, Lucinda has said she has wanted to move away from confessional material and “unrequited love songs,” citing “Masters of War”-era Dylan as a model.
She has observed those songs were probably the easiest for her to write, though maybe unrequited love songs are only easy to write when the writer is discontented; happiness can pose a problem for creative people who typically draw on pain. Interesting times can also provide tinder for the artist’s flint and steel.
I suspect Lucinda has also always wanted to sound like Howlin’ Wolf, and on a couple of songs here she approaches that kind of yarraaghhh, her voice weaponized, frayed and ferocious. On the sinewy, pounding “Wakin’ Up” — which features a boa constrictor of a bass line and a distorted Arabic-influenced guitar solo by her longtime bandmate Stuart Mathis — she snarls and spits through one of the most harrowing accounts of spousal abuse ever recorded.
It’s a song that leans more into Patti Smith/Jim Carroll ashcan punk territory than the sort of classic Americana vibe we typically associate with
Williams’ work.
While that song sounds like a bitter memoir, most of this is more broadsheet than a diary page, and as such it mightn’t appeal as much to the sort of fan who was crushed by her “Copenhagen.”
On the other hand, Good Souls Better Angels feels like a record of its time, something that in the years to come we might all look back on as a signal artifact of the lost year of 2020.
It is, as Prince once said, a “Sign O’ The Times.”
And there is nothing phony about it.