Though Lucinda Williams titled her new album “Blessed,” and she counts the many ways in which blessings come in that particular track, she’s still far from the soft and mushy fool in love some feared she’d become after finally finding domestic bliss. Not our Lucinda.
In fact, she starts out the album, which was released March 1 on Lost Highway Records, with a rather vicious kiss-off, “Buttercup,” then moves into “I Don’t Know How You’re Livin’,” another song about her troubled brother a la “Are You Alright,” from 2007’s “West.” The third track is “Copenhagen,” which begins with the line, “Thundering news hits me like a snowball striking my face and shattering.”
“I wrote that about my late manager, Frank Callari, who died suddenly when we were touring over in Europe,” Williams explained, actually rather cheerily, via phone from her Los Angeles home. But clearly, she hasn’t lost her talent for using vivid imagery to express pain – or the need to get it out in song.
“I don’t sit down and think of a theme before I go in to write,” she continued. “It’s whatever’s goin’ on in my life at that time. Unfortunately, there’s sad stuff that goes on. I mean, that’s why I’m an artist to begin with. It’s like writing a journal for me or something; I just have to get it out of my system.”
Another song, “Seeing Black,” was inspired by her friend Vic Chesnutt’s suicide; he died on Christmas Day of 2009. Its opening verse:
How did you come up with the date and time?
You didn't tell me you changed your mind
How could I have been so blind?
I didn't know you changed your mind.
“I think I found out about it when I was in the middle of writing songs. It was very sudden and startling and upsetting,” she admitted. “Of course, I’ve dealt with that subject before, on [her 1992 album] ‘Sweet Old World,’ [in] ‘Pineola.’”
Yes. But thoughts of mortality do permeate “Blessed.” Even the closing love song, “Kiss Like Your Kiss,” contains finality in its words, as she recounts the special nature of each passing season with lines like “We’ll never see a yellow so rich. ... There will never be another kiss like your kiss.” (The song also appears on the Grammy-nominated album, “True Blood: Music from the HBO Original Series – Volume 2.”)
“These things are gonna happen and of course, the older you get, the more strange or different things you’re gonna experience in life,” Williams observed. “I just turned 58 [in January], so of course, I’m gonna see life differently than I did when I was 48 and 38 and 28.”
“Blessed” is a departure in one respect: except for one incendiary Elvis Costello guitar solo on “Seeing Black,” there’s no barn-burner cut, no “Get Right With God” or “Joy.” It wasn’t intentional, she said. Just happened that way.
“I just go where the song wants to go,” Williams said. But despite the lack of rockers, there is, she noted, an intensity to this CD.
“It kind of reminded me of a Jim Morrison vibe, almost, with some of [the songs],” she said. “‘The Awakening’ sort of reminds me of ‘This is the End.’”
Morrison, of course, thought of himself as a poet. Williams has the same gene; her father is renowned poet Miller Williams. But she said writing lyrics really is different than writing poetry; every time she tries to pen a poem and shows it to her dad, “He says, ‘Honey, I think it wants to be a song.’”
They have done a few evenings of shared poetry and song, however, and he wrote the vows for her 2009 wedding, which took place onstage at the First Avenue nightclub in Minneapolis, husband Tom Overby’s hometown. After she and Overby came up with the idea, she wasn’t quite sure whether she wanted to go through with it — the onstage wedding, that is; the marriage part, she had no doubts about — and mentioned it to her parents.
"My dad said, ‘You know, Hank Williams got married onstage.’ I said, ‘OK, that clinches it then. I know we’re doin’ the right thing.’” There’s no relation, but that late lonesome troubadour is one of her biggest influences.
She and the band did a regular concert, then, after she did a couple of songs solo as an encore, her dad came out and read a poem. Then the wedding party came onstage for a short ceremony, and the band came back and rocked out.
“It was really fun, really fun,” she recalled. Then they got back on the tour bus and continued to the next town.
By then, Overby, who had retail and record-label experience in marketing and A&R, had “passed the test” with two longtime Lucinda associates: her booking agent, Frank Riley, and lawyer, Rosemary Carroll — earning their blessings as both management and husband material.
Williams admits they occasionally butt heads, just like any married couple.
“You work through it,” she said.
And then you count your blessings. And maybe put them in a song.
-- Lynne Margolis, of Last Word Features for the AJC
Concert preview
Lucinda Williams
8 p.m., April 29, $38, $28, $23. Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center, 2800 Cobb Gallaria Parkway, Atlanta. 770-916-2800, www.cobbenergycentre.com/
