by Jewly Hight

Life often moves at a different pace than art. Album releases—imperfect containers for self-expression that they are—seldom keep up with the continuous flow of events in an artist’s life. It’s certainly true for Lucinda Williams: as she prepared to release West—a pilgrimage out from the epicenter of loss, which ironically appeared the day before Valentine’s Day—she was also engaged in the intimate act of nesting.

Williams once detailed the stab wounds of love: on 2003’s World Without Tears, the visceral lyrics of “Minneapolis” depict snow, stained by her gushing blood. “You can’t light my fire, so fuck off,” she roars on her latest album during “Come On,” getting off on slamming a bad lover. So it’s striking to now hear her relishing simple pleasures, like finding an Ikea dresser to match the bed. The contrast between trading blows and cozily furnishing a home is sharp indeed.

“I’m engaged now to my soul mate,” says Williams. “These songs were written before him. I’d probably say there’s ‘before Tom [Overby]’ and ‘after Tom.’ So this record represents that last chapter before everything kind of turned around. I look at it as different chapters in my life, like my mother’s death, and then this really difficult abusive relationship I was in. Then I got out of that and I was in this one last little unrequited love affair thing. And then I met Tom.”

Williams could have titled her ninth album something other than West—say, Unsuffer Me—and left off with a plea for relief from existential anguish. (With its searing wail of guitars, serrated string runs and heavily breathed groans, the song of the same name ushers a new family of words—“unsuffer,” “unbruise,” “unbloody”—into the popular music lexicon.)

“At first glance, somebody might go, ‘Oh, unsuffer me—that’s about suffering—that’s dark,’ ” she says. “I was gonna call the album that, but then I thought people might misinterpret it and it might seem too self-indulgent or something, like ‘poor me.’ ”

West and its cover photo—in which Williams stands before an expanse of blue sky, arms folded and cowboy hat in hand—suggest dwelling with ambiguity and possibility. “My manager, Frank, and Tom and I, we all three talked about the title, and everybody felt like West was kind of a look towards the future,” she says. “But it also kind of reflects where I am right now. I’m in the Southwest [Los Angeles] and I love this area out here. This is where I met Tom. It’s sort of like the end of one part of my life and the beginning of another.”

Williams’ mythology—from Happy Woman Blues (her first album of original material) on—has continuously drawn upon the importance of place. First it was mainly southern locales, especially those of her native Louisiana—“Lafayette,” “Crescent City,” “Pineola” and others. More recently, the geography expanded to include “Minneapolis” and “Ventura.” Her habitual place-dropping—part and parcel of her unabashed Southernness—maps out where she’s planted her roots and where she’s ripped them from the ground.

“A lot of people are asking me, ‘Why are you calling the album West? What does it mean?’ ” she says. “I haven’t really known what to say, and that’s a good way of putting it. Because in a lot of my songs over the years, if you go back and listen to them, everything I write about deals with place. You know, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road—I’m talking about traveling. And ‘Lake Charles,’ ‘Jackson’ and ‘Greenville.’ It just shows kind of where I am at that moment. I’ve always thought roots are important.

“When I was growing up, that was always instilled in me, the importance of the roots of my family, being Southern and being proud of being Southern,” she continues. “It seemed like some people went through a period there where it wasn’t cool to be Southern. I remember when my dad [Miller Williams] was a struggling poet, and he was trying to get a job with some publishing company or something in New York City. I remember him going through that as a Southern writer, that he wasn’t as accepted. And then there was this point where everybody was trying to be Southern, and they wished they were from the South.”

Williams’ musical trajectory suggests a wide open, westerly landscape. Since Car Wheels, she’s loosened her once white-knuckled grip on the recording process, shedding orthodox verse-chorus-verse song structure in favor of more abstract and hypnotic meanderings, and this time opting for an adventurous sonic palette that—aside from her towering reputation in the genre—might take a bit of imagination to construe as Americana. It’s the fruits of her production partnership with Hal Willner.

Overby—who, as Williams is quick to point out, isn’t a bass player (though she’s dated her share of those) but “a music lover” who “happens to work at a record company [Universal Music Group]”—suggested Willner might be just the producer to get her the “mature yet hip” sound she wanted for her new album. Willner’s résumé passes through some eclectic terrain—music supervisor for Saturday Night Live, a tribute to Disney’s animated films, complete with Tom Waits’ rendition of “Heigh Ho (The Dwarfs’ Marching Song),” and Marianne Faithfull’s Strange Weather—the latter of which sold Williams on working with him.

“I really wanted to go in and work with someone who just was a producer—not a musician/producer,” she says. “In the past, I’ve worked with great people, but they’ve always been musicians first and then producers, you know, like Gurf Morlix and Steve Earle and Charlie Sexton and Bo Ramsey. Most of my records in the past have been pretty much ‘go in with the band, play the songs, have a few people come in and do some overdubs,’ but not really that much producing, pretty much just the organic ‘let it fly’ sort of thing. And I didn’t want to do that this time. I wanted to kind of refine it a little bit more.”

Willner took the 20-plus songs Williams had demoed with her band, stripped them down to just Doug Pettibone’s guitar and her raw, carnal drawl, and added electronic samples, the watery jazz guitar of Bill Frisell and violin—not fiddle. “I wanted to have strings on the album,” Williams says. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

As a result, nine-minute, sinewy talking-blues “Wrap My Head Around That” has far more musical eccentricities than previous sung-spoken songs like “Sweet Side,” “American Dream” and ‘Righteously.’ “On “Righteously” I got, ‘Oh, she’s trying to do hip-hop,’ ” she says. “I think now with this one there hasn’t been any of that.” The track is colored by twittering electronic flourishes, drifting reverb, erratic here-then-gone guitar and a pastiche of samples, from the announcement of the moon landing to a series of “mm-hmmm”s in Williams’ own voice.

The final mix of mercurial raunch-rocker “Come On” required a bit of negotiation. “Hal’s a big fan of violins and I’m a big fan of guitars,” she says. “We had two different mixes and on one the guitar was more prominent—Doug Pettibone’s guitar—and we were trying to decide [between them]. Hal liked the one with more violin, and I liked the one with more guitar.”

When it comes to romantic love, Williams’ new album has songs that radiate violent, still-fresh anger (“Come On,” “Wrap My Head Around That,” “Words”) and songs of cold sadness or empty loss (“Learning How to Live,” “Are You Alright,” “Everything Has Changed”). There’s a reason—besides horrible luck with men in the past—why she so often has written about relationships disintegrating. “I mean, you can ask any songwriter—those are the easiest kind of songs to write—breakup ballads,” she says. “Those are a dime a dozen.”

In conversation with Williams, it’s a different story—Overby’s name keeps popping up. “I think if you’re with the right person, they inspire you,” she says. “That was the big test for me with my relationship with Tom—whether I was still going to be able to write good songs. And I’ve written songs since I met Tom, these really cool, uplifting love songs that are not sappy and sugarcoated or anything.”