For Those About To...

An established artist's output isn't all that different from a trusted brand-name product. There's a certain appeal to knowing what quality you can expect. And Lucinda Williams and Amy Ray have both been releasing noteworthy albums long enough to give us a taste of that luxury—Ray as one-half of the Indigo Girls, Williams on her own.

Ray's two-plus decades of collaboration with Emily Saliers have often yielded introspective folk-rock with lush, even-keeled harmonies and social consciousness organically woven in. Williams, on the other hand, after making her name with Car Wheels on a Gravel Road 10 years ago, has turned out three albums full of subtler mood pieces conveying pained, visceral impressions.

But there's something to be said for injecting a bold new flavor into a tried-and-true brand, and both Ray and Williams decided that 2008 would be a good year to rock a little harder—Ray on Didn't It Feel Kinder, Williams on Little Honey. Just as "rocking out" has a different meaning for each of them, it took a different kind of spark to set each of them off: Ray followed her own instincts to the doorstep of riot grrl raw; Williams' newly happy home life gave rise to energized, back-to-basics rock, blues and country.

You might say Ray's solo work captures her musical and political sensibilities in their most concentrated form, since she's generally thought of as the Indigos' earthier element. "It's not that it's my vision in a compromised way with Indigo Girls," she says. "It's just that this is the side of me that is purely just me, without considering harmony and compromise and a duality that me and Emily have. In fact, I know that with Indigos, after I started doing solo stuff, I sort of understood my part of that better, too."

"Who Sold the Gun"—a song that connects violence-encouraging culture to the Virginia Tech shootings—is a good example of Ray au naturel. It's got doo-wop backing vocals, a chunky, three-chord pulse and new wave synth—not a combination likely to make it onto an Indigo Girls track any time soon. Plus, she sings it with a punkish sneer, and not a trace of folk earnestness. Both that song and "SLC Radio" (an ode to bucking censorship that has a pop-punk hook and itchy, serrated guitars) do something else Ray's contributions to Indigo albums typically don't—use the word "fuck" freely.

"It's funny, because Emily uses ['fuck'] more than I do," she says. "I think there's a sort of rawness and focus that I have that I don't do the same way in Indigo Girls. But it's not because I'm afraid that Emily doesn't agree with me.... I think when I know I'm going to be singing alone, when I write the lyrics it just comes from that very graphic, singular place inside me where I don't even have to think about what another voice is going to do to the song."

Boiling ideas down to a message and sound that's loud, politically brazen and playful—one of the impulses evident on Kinder—is very riot grrl-friendly. And so is Ray's choice of musicians—especially drummer Melissa York and guitarist Kaia Wilson, both formerly of The Butchies, and Le Tigre producer Greg Griffith, who also supplied the album's sly, sinuous bass lines.

"With my own stuff it's a community of people that I'm around that are more from the—I guess for a lack of a better word—more from the punk community," Ray says. "It's not something where people are studio players, so to speak. Their gifts are a little different. And some of those people wouldn't fit in the same way on an Indigo Girls project."

To Ray, the symbolism of working with, as she puts it, "left-of-center" friends is just as important as the rough, spirited sounds they help her get. "I'm comfortable with my friends being who they are from different walks of life and different expressions of their gender and their sexuality, and that's not something that fits in with the mainstream world," she says. "I mean, hopefully it will at some point, but it just doesn't now."

Lucinda Williams' recent shift is just as ear-grabbing as Ray's. When Williams spoke to the Scene a year-and-a-half ago to promote West, she apologized amusedly for loading up that album with songs expressing hurt and anger: "I've got some life-affirming songs. You know, they're just not on this record. Sorry. You'll just have to wait for the next one."

At the time, Williams was excited enough about her "really cool, uplifting love songs that are not sappy and sugarcoated or anything" to share a few a cappella previews over the phone. She sang snippets of "Tears of Joy" and "Jailhouse Tears," and talked about two other songs, which together make up a third of Little Honey.

But most significantly, Williams gushed about the development in her life that inspired the songs: finding a "soulmate" in Tom Overby and settling into a stable relationship: "I think if you're with the right person, they inspire you. You don't feel trapped in the relationship. I used to feel like I was losing part of myself—it's just that I hadn't quite found the right [person]." So she divided her life into "before Tom" (B.T.) and "after Tom" (A.T.). (Overby has begun acting as her manager and co-produced Little Honey with Eric Liljestrand.)