Can it really be possible to know exactly how someone else feels? It might just be one of the most oxymoronic – emphasis on the moronic – declarations in the English language. A common experience or two might just get us a ticket in the “nose-bleed” section of the Empathic Theatre. But those front row seats are mighty hard to come by.
And that is exactly why Lucinda Williams is such an extraordinary artist. Because the intuitive singer/songwriter has a matchless natural ability to convince us through her insightful music that she does know just how we feel.
There’s no better testament than this small taste of the title song from her most recent album, Blessed:
“We were blessed by the blind man / Who could see for miles and miles / We were blessed by the fighter / Who didn't fight for the prize.”
“We were blessed the mother / Who gave up the child / We were blessed by the soldier / Who gave up his life.”
“We were blessed by the teacher / Who didn't have a degree / We were blessed by the prisoner / Who knew how to be free.”
“We were blessed / Yeah, we were blessed.”
Blessed’s superb storytelling earned the rock/folk/blues/country music artist her 15th Grammy nomination – and with any luck, 4th Grammy win – at the 2012 awards. The record is up for Best Americana Album.
Williams recorded her first album Ramblin’ in 1979, receiving very little attention from radio, the media, or the public for the traditional country and blues effort. That all changed with the 1988 release of the self-titled, Lucinda Williams.
The release featured “Passionate Kisses,” later recorded by Mary Chapin Carpenter, which garnered Williams her first Grammy Award for Best Country Song in 1994. The thoughtful artist’s greatest success came with 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, earning her another Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album.
Picking up a 2002 Best Female Rock Vocal Performance Grammy for Essence’s “Get Right With God,” Williams continued her amazing musical march through the Grammy genres. That same year TIME magazine named her “America’s best songwriter.”
The incomparable artist chatted with Examiner.com recently about her brilliantly diverse career and her instinctive songwriting.
Given Blessed’s songwriting excellence and superb musicality, few will be surprised if the record picks up an award on Sunday. But there has been at least one Grammy surprise for Williams.
“Well one got a Grammy that really surprised me. It was for (2002) Best Female (Rock) Vocal (Performance) and it surprised me in a number of ways because it was for that song, ‘Get Right With God.’”
“You know, it was anything but a rock song and it was in a category of female vocals. Not only that, at the time I was up against Melissa Etheridge and Stevie Nicks. So, I remember thinking, ‘Well, this is a nice nod, but that’s as far as it’s gonna go.’”
“And then when they announced my name, I was just completely, utterly stunned – almost as much that it was in the female rock category. The category thing is really askew at times, you know?”
Williams’ fans have come to expect carefully crafted musical creations from the songwriter, a much-appreciated corollary to her precise – and sometimes painstaking musicality. A fact that makes the gap between records a little easier to take.
“Yeah. It’s more of a deliberateness, exactly. It helps if you’re working with one or two people who have the same standards as you do and who you can trust. That was certainly the case for this last album.”
“When (Grammy-award winning producer) Don Was stepped into the picture, I already had (husband and manager) Tom (Overby) who I trust implicitly, who has very high standard. And we brought Don in the picture and I wouldn't have brought him in if I hadn’t also thought that we were kind of all on the same page.”
“So that really helped. It really helped having those extra set of ears. Of course, I have to feel good about it and if they also do, then that’s the best way for me to work.”
Was’ experience working with rock musicians was (no pun intended) a real blessing (no pun intended again) for Williams with the Grammy nominated effort.
“Yeah. He did a lot of work with the (Rolling) Stones. And then he also did a couple of recent Kris Kristofferson albums that are just beautiful. I say recent – I think that came out in the last five or so years, I'm not sure.”
“But I hadn’t heard ‘em before. And we got copies of those and I was just blown away by how Kris’ voice came across and the songs and all. There were a couple of albums that came out after Kris hadn’t done anything for a while and Don went in and worked with him and they’re just beautiful.”
“We listened to a variety of stuff before we went in with him, brought him in. He saw something in me. He got me right off the bat, you know? We just clicked. One of the first things he said before we went in to record was, ‘I wanna make sure everything revolves around Lucinda’s vocals.’”
“And that’s my big thing too. I want the words to come through. And I want the song, the lyrics and everything to come through and not be muffled.”
Throughout her unbelievably rich career, Williams has collaborated with a number of special artists. Steve Earle, Nanci Griffith, John Prine, Elvis Costello, Ray Davies, Flogging Molly – the list is endless – making it difficult for Williams to single out any of them as the most special.
“Wow. That’s kind of a tough question. I just haven’t thought in terms of one particular person, because there have been so many great people that I've worked with. But I would have to say again, Don Was. I love working with him in the studio.”
“He’s very unusual in that he’s very deliberate, much like me. He doesn’t get stressed out and he waits ‘til it gets right. He doesn’t make me feel rushed and he appreciates my deliberateness. Plus, just his history – he’s just done so much stuff. He’s had so many successes.”
“He’s the first person I’ve worked with who’s achieved a nominal amount of success as a producer, the first big name producer. You mention Don Was and people say, ‘Oh yeah!’”
Williams’ (and Was’) perfectionism must mean that there’s a vault somewhere with thousands of unpublished songs. Well, close but not quite.
“I've got a bunch of songs that nobody’s heard. I've got a tub full of cassette tapes and old songs that I started and didn’t finish – or finished and forgot about. And he’s (Tom) been going through and researching all this old stuff.”
“He’s been surprising me saying, ‘What’s the song that you wrote, the early song?’ And I say, ‘Are you kidding me?’ And he’ll say, ‘It’s great, it’s great.’ But I've got some songs that I was working on when I was working on the Blessed songs that I thought were finished and I've gotta go back and work on them some more. That’s what’s good about Tom. He’s my best critic when I'm writing and working on songs and stuff.”
It may take a great effort for Williams’ to perfect a song – but she has an inimitable innate talent for creating new tunes.
“There’s no lack of inspiration, that’s for sure. I'm constantly inspired – and maybe more so than ever. I'm just constantly jotting lines down. Something I see, or something somebody says, or I wake up and something’s going around in my head. I’ll write it down and then when I get in the right space – I don’t know what that takes, I don’t know what that is, the muse hits me or something, I don’t know.”
“I’ve gotta be in the right mood. And then I just get everything out that I've been doing – all my notes and half written songs and the songs that I need to go back and re-write – and get all that stuff out.”
It’s no wonder that Williams is a master at her craft. She’s been writing songs since she was six. But as with the best songwriters, she admits that she’s still evolving.
“Oh yeah, absolutely. I'm still growing and still learning. After Car Wheels, that was the album that kind of set the standard, I guess. And it was real hard for me to dive into the next set of songs and figure out what I was gonna do.”
“That was probably the biggest turning point for me. Because I learned to just let go and give myself permission not to feel like every song had to be the same kind of thing that I was writing on Car Wheels – the narrative masterpiece, you know?”
“That was really scary because I knew there were gonna be comparisons right off the bat. And of course there were and they weren’t all good, between Essence and Car Wheels. But I kind of got over the hump – everybody else got over the hump of. It took a while for people to see and just let me go and do what I'm gonna do.”
Ask most artists and they’ll tell you that one of the things that they hope for – if not the main thing – is a long career. Longevity has a lot of things going for it. But it also invites the inevitable comparisons from music “experts.”
“I think it’s the nature of the beast. You see Neil Young and people still compare everything to a lot of his early stuff. The same thing when Bob Dylan’s album Time Out of Mind (1997) came out.”
“I was still living in Nashville at the time and I remember the local paper in Nashville just slammed it and said ‘This isn't any good. The lyrics are real simple and kind of silly.’ And I loved it. I loved the sparseness of it and the production of it and everything. And that gave me a lot of courage.”
“Then the other album that came out right around the same time was the Stones’ album (Bridges to Babylon) that came out – I forgot the name of it but it came out the same year. So of course, when I was getting ready to do the Essence album and I was writing songs for the album, the paper slammed it (Bridges) too.”
“That gave me a little shot of courage. And I said, ‘Well, they’re going through it too. So you can't make everybody happy all the time.’ It allowed me to move in different musical directions. Songs like “Steal Your Love” – I never would’ve let myself do that before. I was so serious.”
“I just wanted to have fun and be able to write different kinds of songs. And not have to be this serious folk singer, song writer kind of thing. It’s sort of like the revolutionary Emma Goldman said, ‘If I can't dance, I don’t want to be part of the revolution.’”
Well, I may not speak for all of the musical revolutionaries out there Lucinda. But as for me, please keep on dancin’….
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