One of those tremendously satisfying, 'total'-feeling shows. I'd actually been in two minds about going, mainly because, relative to the tremendously high bar set by her earlier records, I'd been thinking that Williams' last three records have been kind of underwhelming (more on that later), but I'm really glad that I did, not least because she drew on nearly the whole of her back catalogue (only her debut, Ramblin', was left unrepresented by at least two or three songs) in putting together her two and a bit hour set - at one point, she said that she was trying to fit as many songs in as possible, and that's how it felt, even though each individual song had plenty of room to breathe...
I still haven't listened to her first two albums (the abovementioned Ramblin' and Happy Woman Blues - both, I might mention in passing, released before I was born), but here's how I tend to think of the others:
There's Car Wheels, a flat-out classic, and at this point almost dead centre in her recording history - and then there's Essence, which came next and sounds entirely different from its predecessor while also being genuinely great. Before those two, the self-titled record that she referred to as her Rough Trade album throughout the show (presumably to avoid the awkwardness of saying 'this song's from my Lucinda Williams' album) and Sweet Old World, both wonderful and both absolutely critical to my overall sense of 'Lucinda'; and after the pivotal pair of Car Wheels and Essence, three solid but unmemorable albums which haven't made anywhere near the impression on me that the others have, World Without Tears, West and Little Honey. (Also, the live record.)
Laid out like that, it has something of the pattern of a slightly asymmetrical bell curve - the joys of the earlier records followed by the heights of the middle two in turn followed by a tapering off in more recent times. But I kind of suspect that my responses can be at least partially explained on personal grounds, rather than being referable to any intrinsic quality of the albums (except insofar as the time at which they were released can be said to be intrinsic to them); looking back at my initial impressions of West, for example, I'm surprised to see that at the time I was excited enough about it to suggest that it might be close to her best...perhaps, then, it's really with the passage of time that those earlier ones have loomed so increasingly large.
This all came through a fair bit in her live show. The fact that she was doing songs from nearly all of her albums, each of which has quite a different sound from the others due to the vagaries of song-writing style, instrumentation, production, etc, with the same country-edged rock and roll band, and in the style that she has arrived at in this, her graceful oldish age (she's pretty darn spry, and in pretty great voice, for a 56 year old), which had the effect of effacing some of the divisions between the various albums which hold such sway in my mind; in so doing, her set made it clear that the her song-writing has remained very consistent right up to the present day, not only in quality but also in style and motifs. Indeed, some of the highlights - I'm thinking of the epic "Little Rock Star" and the blast of "Come On" - came from those more recent albums...songs which I'd always previously given fairly short shrift.
That said, as I started off by kind of saying, what I really wanted to hear were songs from that five album Lucinda Williams-Essence run, and it was those which really made the show for me; she rocked a lot of them pretty hard, did others in more pensive style, and even pulled out an acoustic "Passionate Kisses" sans band. It was really quite something, a reminder and affirmation of her talent and brilliance.
(w/ M)
