Lucinda Williams and Bob Dylan

Dear Lucinda,

In recent weeks, I've spent many hours revisiting the extraordinary string of albums you bequeathed to us over the dozen years from 1992 to 2003: "Sweet Old World," "Car Wheels On A Gravel Road," "Essence" and "World Without Tears." (Can it be that "World Without Tears" is already five years old?) Time and again, I've found myself saying, "Oh, please, just one more time!" before replaying "Fruits of My Labor."

Shortly before "West" was released in 2007, rumors were rampant that you had, at long last, found the true love of your life. Upon hearing them, my friend Sean, who had first introduced me to your music, said something like, "Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll turn out to be an abusive drunk." A cruel joke, perhaps, but I knew just what he meant.

I assure you that Sean and I wish you, personally, nothing but joy and serenity. But Lucinda Williams, the public artist"“ that's another matter. You've consistently and explicitly drawn upon your personal experience in your glorious catalogue of the miseries of the human condition, so imagining you contented is like imagining Billie Holiday padding happily around her apartment in bunny slippers. What sort of music would a happily married Lucinda Williams create?

Well, now we have the answer in "Little Honey," just released on October 13th.

If you read your own press notices, you're no doubt aware that even the most favorable write-ups, like this one in Rolling Stone, fall short of calling "Little Honey" a great album. And many more reviews, like John Caramanica's in the New York Times, have done no better than to damn you with faint praise.

My own opinion is less equivocal. Your voice is as strong as ever. Your current band, Buick 6, like all the bands you've recorded with in recent years, plays with both energy and finesse. Nevertheless, somebody must come out and say this: "Little Honey" is a real stink bomb of an album, completely lacking the passion and conviction of your earlier work.


The Chase Utley example

With you, it's all about the lyrics, I think you'll agree. To be sure, it's not always easy for a city boy like me to decode your Louisiana twang. And although a Google search for the lyrics of any of your titles will usually yield literally dozens of hits, one of the pleasures I took in "Fruits of My Labor," for example, was figuring out its sensual lyric imagery on my own. So it's doubly ironic that you've included a nicely printed lyrics booklet with the CD of "Little Honey" "“ ironic first because the lyrics on this album are easy to understand, and second because they are— well, here's a verse from "Tears of Joy" that's fairly representative of the entire album, I'm afraid:

I'll be your woman, be your everything,
You be my baby, you be my king.
You give my life meaning, that's why I wear your ring
And why I'm crying tears of joy.

I'm guessing that this time around, Lucinda, you didn't get much feedback from your poet father .

Weak as these lyrics are, they're downright Shakespearean next to your "author's message" song, "Rarity." What is this lugubrious, pretentious screed doing as the centerpiece of this album, anyway? As for its dénouement …

Lucinda, there is a young man on my city's baseball team, an intense and self-effacing local hero named Chase Utley. When Utley had his turn to speak at the Phillies World Series victory parade and exclaimed, to everyone's amazement (and, I'm sure, to the dismay of many mothers whose ten-year-old sons idolize him), "World champions! World fuckin' champions!" it was the spontaneous and surprising expression of deeply felt emotion— in short, a kind of poetry. But when you, Lucinda Williams, daughter of Miller Williams and the author of lyrics like "Words Fell" or practically anything from your greatly underrated "West" album, have to resort to the f-word not once but twice, it's a sign of desperation and artistic sloppiness.

I simply can't believe the renowned perfectionist who is notorious for making the world wait for years between albums doesn't know, in her heart of hearts, that "Little Honey" is a mess.

By contrast, consider Dylan

If I'm correct, then you must have had mixed emotions when Bob Dylan's "Tell Tale Signs," a two-disk set of unreleased and alternate takes, came out just a week before "Little Honey." On the one hand, it must be an honor to share the stage with your idol. On the other, Dylan is on his own hot streak: His past three albums rate among the best of his career, and "Tell Tale Signs" richly deserves the hosannas that have risen from the on-line world to greet it.

Consider "Mississippi." The album's two disks each lead off with a different unreleased version, the first, as many have already noted, one of the best single cuts that Dylan has ever made; the second, much darker and more in the spirit of the "Time Out Of Mind," the album for which it was originally intended.

Just look at those lyrics, Lucinda. Reconciliation is a theme that keeps on recurring in Dylan's recent work. In this song, especially, he yearns to heal the wounds of a broken relationship, as if he were trying to undo the damage of a long line of hostile break-up songs, stretching all the way back to "Don't Think Twice."

Never mind that, like so many of Dylan's songs, "Mississippi" has the quality of an overheard conversation, implying a history full of unexplained details the listener isn't privy to; it draws me in, makes me wonder what's going on, how it will all come out. And it quits while it's ahead; I could easily do with three or four more verses.

A foil to blackness

Lucinda, you— who know as well as anyone how to make an entire album hold together— can certainly appreciate Dylan's final disposition of "Mississippi""“ word for word unchanged from its original— as the second track of "Love and Theft." Dylan can't bring himself to be at peace, and the song fits in perfectly as a foil to the blackness of the album's last track, "Sugar Baby."

No one can compete with Dylan these days. His impact on our culture continues to be as deep as Beethoven's or Shakespeare's. But perhaps the ultimate secret of Dylan's lasting success is this: While he assumes and sometimes mixes together numerous personae in his songs"“ the apocalyptic visionary, the world-weary drifter, the embittered clown"“ there's no knowing what, if anything, his songs have to do with the life of Bob Dylan the actual person. And nobody cares!

It is dangerous to base an artistic career entirely on your own personal experience. Your audience wants art, a depiction of the human condition— not an ongoing emotional blog. And you seem to have reached a point where the circumstances of your life don't make for gripping art.

What Dylan can't do

But take heart, Lucinda. Some things you can do are beyond even Bob Dylan.

Dylan's essence lies in control and restraint: perfectly rhymed blues lyrics, sardonic commentary"“ ironic, cryptic, never ecstatic. You, however, hide nothing. You have the courage to take head-on topics like the suicide of a close friend, as in "Pineola," or to blast out your take on the horrors of revival meetings, as in "Atonement." Dylan has never gained access to this molten core of emotion that you have mined now for decades.

So what will you do now?

Maybe you should take a break to enjoy your life; maybe you should have left "Little Honey" on the shelf. But you've got nothing to prove. If you never make another song, you won't owe us anything. In the meantime, we can wait.





To read Dan Coren's previous essays on Lucinda Williams, click here and here.
For his pieces on Bob Dylan, here and here.


To read a response, click here.