5 Lucinda Williams

Good Souls Better Angels

HIGHWAY 20 2020, £12

You say: “’Cos Lu sings what needs to be said. Rage and Glory.” Johnny Borgan, via Twitter

In Nashville with time on her hands, Williams visited Ray Kennedy at his studio where they worked on Car WheelsÉ in 1998. She’d been writing songs for the first time with husband Tom Overby, and figured Kennedy’s studio with its vintage equipment would be a great place to record a dozen of them with her longtime road band of Stuart Mathis, David Sutton and Butch Norton. There’s raging, politically charged blues (Man Without A Soul sounds like Trump); electric blues-rock (You Can’t Rule Me); Dylan-esque talking blues (Bad News Blues) and dark, Old Testament blues (Big Rotator). The slow Big Black Train is a powerful study of depression.