Lucinda Williams
World Without Tears (Lost Highway)
On the title track to her new album World Without Tears, Lucinda Williams makes a powerful case for gloom. In so doing, she also makes the case for her career. With a voice as forlorn as a handful of pills at midnight, Williams argues a place for sorrow and despair: “If we lived in a world without tears / How would bruises find / The face to lie upon? / How would scars find skin / To etch themselves into? / How would broken find the bones?”
How also, it’s fair to ask, would Williams find a song to sing? Not since Marvin Gaye has a singer so consistently mined world-weary despair and dissatisfaction to greater effect or critical success. With all the categories she’s been lumped into over the past 20 years—folkie, singer-songwriter, alt-country roughneck, roots-rocker—the truth is that, at heart, she’s both a blueswoman and a poet. When it comes to sadness, that’s a lethal combination.
It’s mystifying, then, that this blues poet’s darkness can still come as a surprise to anyone (including, sometimes, herself). It’s been there since the beginning. There as she stood by the side of the road, conflicted about love: wanting to be together, wanting to be left alone. It’s there too in the Subiaco Cemetery and the concrete and barbed wire of a Louisiana prison. There as she sent a lover packing back to Greenville, or as she looked for joy in Slidell. We’ve been traveling this troubled road with Williams through the years, a partner in time to her worried woman blues. We may not always know or understand the root of her agony, but we’ve come to accept it as her hallowed territory.
In a spate of recent interviews, Williams has insisted that World Without Tears isn’t a dark record. It’s an odd assertion. Maybe she just doesn’t want to acknowledge the darkness. Maybe she can’t hear it. Maybe it’s a sales pitch. Maybe she’s trying to pull the wool over our ears. Maybe she’s flat-out lying.
Because, if it is anything, World Without Tears is certainly a dark record. It’s wracked with pain and punishment. It’s pocked with anger and regret. It seethes with resentment. It hurts.
On “Those Three Days,” Williams sings with fury about a fling that ends in abandonment. On “Sweet Side,” she defends a lover who was abused as a child. On “Ventura,” she battles through depression. On “American Dream,” she itemizes every one of the country’s myriad failings. On “Minneapolis,” she tells us of yet another love affair that has ended disastrously. And on “People Talkin’,” one of the album’s lovelier-sounding tunes, Williams recites a litany of ills. “Living is full of misery and pain,” she concludes.
Even the gritty rocker “Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings” and the sexy single “Righteously” can hardly be termed upbeat, at least not lyrically. On the latter, the singer expresses desire and longing for playful romance while hinting at deeper problems: “Flirt with me, don’t keep hurtin’ me / Don’t cause me pain / Be my lover, don’t play no game / Just play me, John Coltrane.”
Williams has also said recently that she’s an optimist and that she views the glass as half-full. Longtime fans can only roll their eyes. It’s hard to listen to a song like “American Dream” and its repeated chorus of “Everything is wrong,” and imagine the glass as anything but empty. “My American dream almost came true / But the things they promised me never came through,” is not a line written by a Pollyanna. On “Ventura,” when she sings, “I wanna get swallowed up in an ocean of love,” it’s expressed so mournfully, so full of despair, that you believe she’d actually prefer to just get swallowed up in an ocean, period.
Because of her notorious difficulty and, well, crankiness, it might be tempting to dismiss Williams’ songs as the art of a complainer: Will you just get over it already, Lucinda? Would you give it a rest? Haven’t you put us through enough of this already? But it’s a mistake to conflate the public persona and the artist. Because Williams—knowingly or unknowingly, but probably the former—is making more meaningful statements. In these world-gone-wrong times, her bitter, beaten-down, but still battling take sounds just about right.
Nowhere is that more evident than on the primitively rocking, apocalyptic “Atonement.” With lines like, “...emotional rape / Hellfire scorched lungs,” the song is a warning of biblical proportions, perhaps inscrutable, yet alarming nonetheless. There’s something going on here, and we don’t want to know what it is. Listening to Williams sing it is to listen to barely checked rage, to know that a day of reckoning is at hand.
That rage can get inside you. In fact, the emotion of many of these songs becomes visceral. Recorded live in the studio with her current band—guitarist Doug Pettibone, drummer Jim Christie and bassist Taras Prodaniuk—the album has an immediacy that allows all of the pain, anger and sorrow to emerge unmasked and unfiltered. It’s this immediacy that pulls you in. And if you’re not careful, it’s this immediacy that can suck you under.
Because it was recorded live, the burnishing on World Without Tears feels minimal. The production is stripped-down rather than layered on. And the band, as always, takes a backseat to Williams’ thick-as-tar drawl. The voice is no doubt irksome to some listeners who assume, probably rightly, that it’s affected or at least exaggerated. But Williams has always sung from her gut. It’s what makes her songs so wrenching—and so hard to ignore.
In troubled times—personal or global—artists can choose avoidance or immersion. Williams plunges in, embracing hard reality over camouflaged fantasy. The alternative shakes her to her creative core. “I’ve been tryin’ to enjoy all the fruits of my labor,” she sings on the languid opening track, “Fruits of My Labor.” “I’ve been cryin’ for you, boy, but truth is my savior.”
And so even while there are shards of inelegant beauty on this record, loveliness even, the darkness keeps tamping down the flickers of hope. It’s the grimmer images that remain with us: images of the singer puking up confessions, being ravaged by scorpions, spitting out lovers, listening to bitching, watching people suffer, being called dirty names.
A world without tears is a numb, numb place, and it’s not a world Williams can abide. So she chooses songs that slide deep into dark and lonely souls and, ultimately, find a home for sorrow. This is not a joyride. With Williams, it never has been.
