Lucinda Williams (Round Two)

Just wild about Lucinda

DAN COREN

To those readers who responded to my article on Lucinda Williams:

Thanks so much. It’s always gratifying to find that there is in fact an audience out there. It is, I must say, puzzling to me that my articles on Williams and Bob Dylan have both elicited responses along the lines of “I’m so glad you mentioned that piece, it’s one of my favorites, too,” whereas during the year and a half I’ve been holding forth about the music Dan R. recruited me to write about, nobody, but nobody, has written anything like “Ooooh, yes, isn’t the Mozart G minor Quintet wonderful?!”

How did you come across Broad Street Review in the first place? Do you have Google alerts set for Lucinda Williams? Surely you haven’t been reading my classical pieces in the hope that one day I’d write about her music. And why should anybody care what I have to say about Lucinda Williams anyway?

Here are some specific responses.

To Joyce Ledebur:

My observation has been that Lucinda Williams fans fall into two groups: those who love Essence, her most introspective, understated album, and those who don’t. In all honesty, Essence isn’t my favorite. Or at least not this month. With regard to WXPN: I did in fact write, “In search of similar music, I now also make frequent, sometimes very fruitful, visits to WXPN and, in the late afternoon, to Princeton’s WPRB.”

To Ron Ozer:

I’m not sure what you mean by “her live album.” West is a studio production from beginning to end. There is a DVD of a live performance she gave in Austin that, I agree, is very disappointing. She just seemed to mail it in that night. However, have you heard the “bonus” material on the recent reissue of Car Wheels? It’s a live recording made at Penn’s Landing a few summers ago, and she was really on that day. Hot Blood shows her taking a completely different tack from the original recording.

To Sharon Barr:

My next project (better late than never) will be Bonnie Raitt. I’ve been meaning to do it for a long time.

To Donna Scheuerle:

Once you set me straight, I realized that something about “Which Will” had bothered me all along. To be specifically technical about it, the chord progression under “If you won’t choose mine” just didn’t sound like Lucinda Williams to me. (I can’t resist. She almost never uses strong dominant chords. Everything, as in Dylan and I guess blues in general, tends to be plagal. IV-I rather than V-I. On West, I just happened to notice after several listenings, Williams almost never even uses the seventh note of the scale, and never as a leading tone.)
Thanks so much for pointing me in the direction of Nick Drake. It’s amazing to me how accurate is Williams’s cover of the song, and yet how much she makes it her own. It’s just a piercingly lovely, sad song, isn’t it?



To read a response, click here.