If every accomplishment has its price, Lucinda Williams has paid in full for making “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” one of the year’s most acclaimed albums.
“I went through hell to get this record made, at the expense of alienating everyone around me,” says Williams, calling from a hotel room in Seattle on a tour that will bring her to the Park West on Thursday. “I had 10-year friendships that just … ended. I don’t know where things stand now. Hopefully, they will be mended somewhere over the years, but …”
She lets out a deep sigh and falls silent. Sometimes words fail even a gifted lyricist. And sometimes the demands of great art strain the bonds of friendship beyond repair.
Though “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” (Mercury) is only the fifth album in a career that stretches back nearly 20 years, Williams is among the most respected singer-songwriters of her time. Her literate but tough-minded country-blues songs have been covered by an all-star array of artists, including Tom Petty, Patty Loveless and Mary-Chapin Carpenter, whose 1992 hit version of “Passionate Kisses” won Williams a songwriting Grammy.
But writing wonderful songs is one matter; transforming words on scraps of paper into great musical performances is another. In trying to animate her lyrics with feeling and texture on “Car Wheels,” Williams went through three producers, including Gurf Morlix, her longtime guitarist, collaborator and confidante.
“I must have sung this one song (`Jackson’) 40 or 50 times with Gurf, and I couldn’t get it,” Williams recalls. “I started questioning the track: `If I can’t go in and sing my own song, something is wrong.’ And he was like, `No, no, try it again.’ After a while, you think you’re losing your mind.”
Instead, after failing at two attempts to record the album in Nashville and Austin, Texas, Williams lost Morlix. “Everything was kind of hanging in midair and it was at that point that I ran into Steve Earle, who asked me to sing a song on his album,” Williams says. “I was really impressed with the way he and Ray Kennedy (Earle’s co-producer) recorded my voice and I asked them if I could go in and try to record some of my album with them. We ended up redoing all the tracks, much to the dismay and disappointment of Gurf, who couldn’t seem to separate himself personally from the record.”
Yet after the Earle-Kennedy sessions, Williams was still not satisfied, taking the record to Bruce Springsteen sideman Roy Bittan in Los Angeles for a final touch-up. Then another year went by as Williams’ former label, American, went looking for a new distributor. She was eventually released from her contract and picked up by Mercury, but by then it had been nearly six years since the release of Williams’ previous album, “Sweet Old World” — a lifetime in the fickle music industry.
There were rumblings among industry insiders that the record couldn’t possibly be any good after taking so long to make. But upon its release, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” was greeted with ecstatic reviews, many proclaiming it a front-runner for album of the year.
“It’s vindication,” Williams says. “I have good instincts about things. Sometimes it just takes me a while to get there. I don’t make decisions real quickly, so it causes frustration for the people I’m working with. But that’s my style. I don’t know any other way.”
Indiana rocker John Mellencamp, who admires Williams’ work, says, “The fact that she spent five years on the record tells me the girl poured her heart out on it. Just because I read the liner notes and see all these guys produced 13 songs doesn’t mean anything. My first natural response was, `I wonder if there’s any consistency to this record or if it’s just all over the joint?’ But she was able to pull it together.”
It wasn’t the first time Williams has struggled with her music or the music business. There was an eight-year gap between Williams’ first album of originals, “Happy Woman Blues,” and “Lucinda Williams” (1988), after which the label she was with, Rough Trade, went bankrupt. Then, after releasing “Sweet Old World” in 1992 on the Chameleon imprint, it also folded, once again leaving Williams in search of a home.
Living a hard life
Those professional setbacks are nothing compared with the personal travail described in Williams’ songs, however. Many of her luminous but unsentimental lyrics are based on relationships that she has experienced, none of which have ended in the eternal bliss promised by romantic novels and feel-good summer movies. “Once I was in your blood/And you were obsessed with me,” Williams sings of one former suitor on “Metal Firecracker,” one of the best songs on her new album. But, in the chorus, she is left clinging to a single wish: “All I ask/Don’t tell anybody the secrets/Don’t tell anybody the secrets/I told you.”
It’s the kind of life that should bolster Williams’ credentials as a blues singer. She laughs ruefully.
“I have to have a sense of contentment to write. Suffering is good for my art, but I think I’ve already had enough to last me the rest of my life,” she says, laughing again. “I’ve never been able to write in the middle of it. I have to get away from it, stand back and get a perspective. `St. Charles’ (a song on the new album) is about a guy I used to live with for four years who died of cirrhosis of the liver, but I didn’t write that when he was dying. I had to wait. I had to stand back and look at it. I’ve had plenty of experiences like that in my lifetime.”
Williams, 45, has spent her life on the road. Her father, Miller Williams, a published poet, taught writing at various universities throughout the South when she was growing up as the oldest of three children. Her godfather is George Haley, brother of Alex Haley, and through her father’s social circle she got to meet notable authors such as Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, James Dickey and Charles Bukowski.
“As soon as I could write I was making up stories and poems,” she says. “In first or second grade I had this little collection of seven poems and a short story, and I brought them in for show-and-tell. Most of the kids brought in stuff like rock collections and bird nests, and here I had my little folder signed `by Cindy Williams,’ which is what everyone called me then. Even at that age, I felt I was different, a bit outside of things.”
But Williams says it didn’t come clear to her what she wanted to do until she was 12, soon after she got her first guitar.
“My mom studied piano at LSU (Louisiana State University), and she and my dad were always bringing records into the house: folk, blues, jazz. It wasn’t your typical Ozzie-and-Harriet-type family, but more artistic, open-minded,” Williams recalls.
“Later I would get out my guitar and play songs for my father and the other writers at parties. I got encouragement and constructive criticism — it was like being in a lifetime creative writing class. So I had knowledge of Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, and knew about the literary world through my father, and then Bob Dylan’s `Highway 61 Revisited’ came out (in 1965) and brought those two worlds together. I was blown away by how these incredible lyrics were placed against this more traditional music.”
In a sense, Williams has been trying to make her own “Highway 61 Revisited” ever since, combining literate wordplay with music that draws on folk, rock, country and blues. As part of that quest, she has carried around a folder full of notes and unfinished songs for more than 20 years.
“I never throw anything away,” she says with an embarrassed chuckle. “I save everything till I use it, because there might be one little line here or there that I might be able to use.” For example, “Greenville,” a song on the new album, started out 20 years ago as a track she then called “Troublemaker.”
Twenty years to write a song? Five years to make an album? One might call that sort of behavior obsessive. Or just determined.
In 1980, Williams cut a song called “I Lost It,” which contains a line that tells listeners almost everything they need to know about Williams as an artist: “I don’t want nothin’ if I have to fake it.”
A newly arranged version of that song appears on “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” but the lyrics remain unchanged.
“My band wanted it on the album more than I did,” Williams says. “A lot of my earlier songs I wouldn’t feel comfortable playing today because they sound so innocent, but I guess that’s why the song appeals to people. There comes a time when you have to let go of your stuff, to kind of disconnect from your art for a while and let other people have it. I’m still learning how to do that.”
LUCINDA WILLIAMS DISCOGRAPHY
“Ramblin’ ” (Folkways, 1978): Williams covers blues, country and gospel standards with a melancholy authority beyond her years.
“Happy Woman Blues” (Folkways, 1980): Her precise lyrical imagery emerges on this first batch of blues- and country-flavored originals.
“Lucinda Williams” (Rough Trade, 1988): One of the landmark albums of the ’80s, original home of “Passionate Kisses,” for which Williams won a songwriting Grammy after Mary-Chapin Carpenter covered it years later.
“Sweet Old World” (Chameleon, 1992): Doesn’t quite match the standard set by “Lucinda Williams,” but still distinguished by gems such as “Something About What Happens When We Talk.”
“Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” (Mercury, 1998): Williams has always been a supremely gifted songwriter; here she emerges as a marvelously nuanced singer.
