4 Lucinda Williams

Sweet Old World

CHAMELEON 1992, £10

You say: “Best Southern gothic writing since William Faulkner. It made Southern music smarter.” Jesse Dayton, via Twitter

After impressing with her selftitled album on Rough Trade, it was another four years before she followed it up with Sweet Old World. However good the songs on Lucinda Williams, this was in many ways better still. Co-produced by Williams and Gurf Morlix, who also played guitar, mandolin and steel, her band included Benmont Tench on Hammond and Jim Lauderdale on backing vocals. There’s something powerfully elegiac about songs like Sweet Old World and Pineola, and the closing cover of Nick Drake’s Which Will. As Steve Earle said, “All that sadness and anger directed towards a loved-one who has taken their own life is one of the bravest things I’ve seen an artist attempt to say.”