Lucinda Williams: Sweet Old World

Revisit:
Lucinda Williams
Sweet Old World
1992


Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.

In the early 1990s, Lucinda Williams was a mostly unknown country-folk singer/songwriter, her self-titled 1988 album garnering enthusiastic reviews from critics and fellow musicians but only modest commercial attention. It took a damn-near-perfect album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998), to gain Williams a much larger fan base and establish her as one of music's leading lyricists. After Car Wheels, the singer faced a lifetime of critical hyperbole - even being inaccurately defined as the "female Bob Dylan" - and every album that followed would inevitably be judged against the mighty weight of that masterpiece.

All of which gives Sweet Old World a unique position in the musician's discography. It marks the final album in which Williams would be largely free of preconceived expectations from both critics and fans; it's also likely to be the last album in which the musician could work without facing comparisons to Car Wheels. It received consistently favorable reviews upon its release in 1992, though a complaint that continues to plague the artist - the amount of time it takes her to release a new record - can be found in some of these reviews. It's around the time of Sweet Old World that Williams gained a reputation as a truculent perfectionist in the studio; indeed, it would take another six years before its follow-up album was released.

The album is essentially split between tragic character studies - the one exception, "Little Angel, Little Brother," is commonly mistaken as a song about death, owing largely to its funereal arrangement and slow vocals - and relationship songs that emphasize specific details over grandiose, generalized statements about Love. In both cases the album is somewhat inconsistent, and pieces of it haven't aged particularly well. Still, Sweet Old World does contain two of Williams' finest written suicide songs: the title song and "Piñeola." Complete opposites in terms of execution - one is a tear-soaked ballad, the other mixes the blues with southern rock - both songs find Williams using specific images like the "sound of a midnight train," "dancing with no shoes," the cemetery in which Sonny is buried, a mourner dropping a "handful of dust" on a grave and parents removing blood-soaked sheets to make both songs and their sentiments tangible. We don't personally know the person or people she's singing about, but we almost feel like we do.

In a similar manner, both "Six Blocks Away" and "Memphis Pearl" are precise depictions of two people whose lives didn't turn out as they'd planned, though the subject of "Memphis Pearl" - a once-married and now presumably single mother whose eyes offer only a "vacant stare" - seems to be in a far more precarious situation than the lovesick fellow with the "regular job" and a "roof over his head and food to eat" in "Six Blocks Away." But Williams does occasionally falter. The lyrics to "He Never Got Enough Love" read like a bad Nebraska-era Springsteen parody, its central figure ultimately pulling his own Johnny 99 by shooting someone in a liquor store; the song's impact and believability are completely deadened by the excessively banal reason Williams gives for the man's actions (read the song title; if only it were that simple).

Sweet Old World is not purely dark, however. As she would on every album from Car Wheels to the present, Williams devotes plenty of disc space to that most frequent of song topics. The cynicism and dysfunction chronicled in her catalog starting with Car Wheels are mostly absent here, as she instead includes love songs that range from affectionate to raunchy. True there are some weepers - most notably "Sidewalks of the City," where Williams tracks someone's movements through a city of early afternoon boozers, bums and "crumbling buildings and graffiti" - but the love songs here are generally affectionate. There is an underlying sadness in the departure about to take place in "Something about What Happens When We Talk," but it's mixed with a bit of hope and nostalgia, while "Prove My Love" is a straightforward, unadorned song about fidelity and is notably free of Williams' sometimes-caustic tongue. Sometimes Sweet Old World is even a little dirty - on " Lines Around Your Eyes" and more so on "Hot Blood," a song of old folk music puns and sexual innuendo - but never do these songs approach the levels of bitterness and betrayal that would surface on Williams' later records.

Lucinda Williams was by no means a novice when she recorded Sweet Old World, but in retrospect it probably was the last time listeners didn't have preconceived notions about who she was or what her songs should sound like. Free of such expectations, Williams created an album that, though not perfect, has a number of remarkable songs and deserves some of the spotlight usually reserved for Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

End of the Aughts: Disappointments

Go to spectrumculture.com for the full list.



Lucinda Williams-Essence was saddled with heavy baggage from the start. As the follow up to Lucinda Williams' career-defining Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, it had very little chance of surpassing its predecessor, at least in the minds of fans and critics who developed a borderline-obsessive devotion to that 1998 album. To Williams' credit, she didn't try to repeat Car Wheels' formula, instead abandoning that album's folk and country hybrid for Essence's atmospheric ballads. Though Williams didn't do her studio perfectionist/diva reputation any favors by taking nearly three years to release Essence, it was mostly worth the wait. It found Williams in a somber mood, with the mostly optimistic nostalgia and childhood memories of Car Wheels replaced by dark broodings about mortality and aging ("Bus To Baton Rouge"), loneliness ("Lonely Girls"), general sad shit ("Blue") and, of course, fucked up relationships ("Out Of Touch" and any other song you want to mention). A haze of regret and disappointment hung over most songs, with Williams' often-mangled vocals restrained, controlled and evocative of such moods. It remains Williams' darkest record to date; though Car Wheels still casts a long shadow over her entire career, Essence proves that the popular image of Williams as an alt.rock folkie is largely inaccurate.

It's also the last consistently good album Williams released this decade. Essence was followed in 2003 by the erratic and plodding World Without Tears, a meandering album that lacked much of the emotional resonance of the artist's previous work. Although Williams' unflinching lyrics were solid at times - especially in the used-like-a-cheap-whore laments of "Those Three Days" and "Minneapolis" - at least half the album was cluttered up by tedious vocals and bloated arrangements. "Righteously," "Sweet Side" and "Atonement" would have been best served relegated to the b-side shitbin, while "American Dream" and the title track were both preachy and pedantic.

And then the proverbial downward spiral really kicked in. The obligatory live album followed in 2005 with the dull Live @ The Fillmore; showing the complete lack of imagination we've come to expect from music labels, the release simply culled tracks from several different Fillmore shows, offering up bits and pieces instead of a complete show. The dual studio atrocities of West and Little Honey rounded out the decade and did nothing to offset this slipshod live product; taken together, they are underwhelming, self-indulgent and remarkably forgettable. West's songs were at least partially doomed by the album's lengthy running time - more than half its songs clocked in at over five minutes - though the stilted production did them no favors either. Little Honey was disturbingly lousy, with Williams offering up 13 mostly sappy odes to Love and that's with a big fat fucking capital L. It was everything fans thought Williams could never be: maudlin and melodramatic. The nausea countless listeners experienced wasn't due to a bad fish taco.

In interviews Williams has often bristled at such criticism, attributing the poor reception that greeted most of her albums this decade to a variety of reasons, commonly suggesting that fans and critics haven't given the albums a fair shake and simply want her to create Car Wheels on a Gravel Road Part II. It's a trite yet common complaint from musicians with lengthy careers - Dylan and Costello could pen on a book on this - but it's little more than a smokescreen. Few fans (or critics, for that matter) with an active interest in an artist's work want to hear mailed-in rehashes of that artist's masterwork. Of course there will always be musos stuck in a particular time and place; these are the people who keep nostalgia tours in business. The hard truth is that while Williams has admirably refused to settle into a particular style, most of her releases from this decade have been mediocre at best and inessential at worst. - Eric Dennis

Music Review – Lucinda Williams – Little Honey

How do I put this? The latest release from Lucinda Williams, Little Honey, drips with enough romantic schmaltz to make Romeo seem like a lightweight and to keep Pepto Bismol in business well into the next millennium. It's the second consecutive underwhelming album from the normally reliable musician; her previous effort, West, was the first real dud of her career and one of the worst directionally-named albums this side of Elvis Costello's pseudo-jazz groaner North. Though Williams bristled in various interviews that fans and critics never really gave that album a fair chance, to these ravaged ears the criticism was mostly well-founded. West was simply a dull and listless album.

As Williams readily acknowledges, many of the songs on Little Honey are unabashedly borne out of recent positive events in her personal life: specifically, she's cuckoo for producer and fiancé Tom Overby. Which is wonderful news; as the old bluesman once sang, everybody needs somebody. But make for an outstanding album it does not.

Opening track "Real Love" kicks off this saccharine fest with rollicking guitars reminiscent of other songs from Williams' back catalog. Throughout the album, the band gives it their best shot (badass drummer Butch Norton in particular), but the song's maudlin sentiment kills any momentum the music attempts to establish. As if to make the song's message painfully clear (for those of you who weren't paying attention), Williams uses the big L word a whopping 28 times.

Other songs also reflect this theme but take a much more deliberate musical approach. "Tears of Joy," "The Knowing," and "Rarity" each plod along at an agonizingly slow pace, with no real payoff. In particular, "Rarity" seems much longer than its already hefty eight-minute running time and ensures that the album's overall pace remains sporadic and dodgy. The three songs also sound remarkably similar, with only the occasional instrumental flourish or background vocal (including some truly over-the-top ones on "Tears of Joy") to distinguish one from the other.

What also makes this album so frustrating is that there are some solid songs scattered amongst the detritus. "Honey Bee" is perhaps the most ballsy and aggressive song Williams has ever recorded. It's damn loud - drums and a whole mess of guitars flail away as the singer practically shouts some suggestive lyrics that would make puritans in the audience blush. "Jailhouse Tears" is a humorous and somewhat poignant story of a "three-time loser" and his long-suffering significant other. Sung as a duet with Costello and wearing its country music influences proudly, the singers each offer their side of the story; Costello's assertion of "Look at me/ I'm clean now" is wryly dismissed by Williams' unconvinced female character: "You're so full of shit."

Other songs such as"If Wishes Were Horses" and "Circles and X's" are supported by gorgeous melodies and deal in the usual topics of broken hearts and fractured relationships that Williams has mined on previous albums. "Circles and X's," written all the way back in 1985 is a moving snapshot of a relationship on the skids and is the album's standout track. "The vows have all been broken" the narrator laments as her man heads for the door, poetically noticing how "sunlight reflects off the silver" on the man's finger.

These moments are unfortunately rare on Little Honey; its meandering and lovey-dovey songs are always lurking around the corner like the crazy uncle you're trying to avoid at the family reunion. And like that crazy uncle, once you run into these songs it's a total buzzkill. This isn't to say that Williams should create Car Wheels On a Gravel Road II either, nor does it mean criticism of this release is nothing more than complaining by Gravel Roadites clamoring for such a sequel. Certainly it's always nice to see an artist with an established reputation and musical style attempt new things, both musically and thematically. But sometimes those attempts fall short of the mark and the results are underwhelming. Little Honey is such an album.