98. Lucinda Williams, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road"
Listening to this album again (an absolute joy, btw, I was almost laughing at how good some of these songs are), I was struck by the number of specific places Lucinda Williams mentions. Just in the song "Jackson" alone, the final track on the album, she mentions Lafayette, Baton Rouge, Vicksburg, and finally Jackson (obviously Jackson, Mississippi). That's not even the only song titled after a place - there's also a song called "Greenville," which could be any Greenville because every Southern state (maybe every state, I don't know) has a Greenville (a fact immortalized by R.E.M. in their song "Little America" - "another Greenville/another Magic Mart," but we're getting off-topic), and a song called "Lake Charles," and on and on.
As the cover and the title and the overall mood suggests, this is an album rooted in the South and the particular connection of Southerners to the land, connected to it but also itinerant upon it. Williams' characters are constantly in motion, whether it's the narrator of "Jackson," fleeing a bad relationship and marking her distance from it town by town, or the lost love of "Lake Charles," about Williams' ex-boyfriend who died from drinking while Williams was on her way to say goodbye. In the song, sung in Williams' tired warble, she and the man are constantly driving around, looking for something.
Retrospectively, this album is in the Americana genre; in fact, it's one of the foundational albums of the form. By this time, Williams had already had a multi-decade career, teetering around the edges of success, refining her sound, blending rock and country and blues and Texas twang. The opening song, "Right In Time," sounds immediately familiar but also unique. There's a great guitar riff and a country swing but the chorus could be a Soul Asylum song. Maybe because Williams worked in the indie rock world just as often as the country world, she picked up some of its mannerisms.
"Drunken Angel" is about another doomed soul, the underground country artist Blaze Foley, also beset by drink and shot in the chest after an argument about money. If Blaze hadn't been a real person (and he's since become a legend since his death), he would already be a character in a Williams song:
A derelict in your duct tape shoes
Your orphan clothes and your long dark hair
Looking like you didn't care
Drunken angel
Over the strings of your guitar
The worn down places in the wood
The ones that made you feel so good
Drunken angel
The recording process for this album has attained a kind of mythic quality as it's been told and retold, and in fact the entire album was recorded at least twice, once with longtime collaborator Gurf Morlix, and then, after those initial recordings were scrapped, it was recorded in its entirety again with Steve Earle in Nashville. The sessions were famously contentious, as Earle is not known to be the easiest man in the world to work with. But the result, oh man.
[I hate to do this, but this is the last entry for this week. I'm going to LA tomorrow and won't really have a chance, so I'll be back Tuesday with number 97. Have a great holiday weekend!]
Is this album in my personal Top 500? Absolutely, yeah.
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