Lucinda Williams

Item: Essence
Author: Jeffrey Overstreet

Essence

(2001)

Reviewed by Jeffrey Overstreet

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Label Lost Highway RecordsThe Phantom Tollbooth2001

alternative country americana blues rock folk rock

Just the first few lines of "Lonely Girls" and she's got you. Lucinda Williams doesn't need many words to convince you that she knows what she's talking about. It could be loneliness (and it probably is). It could be longing (and yeah, it most likely is). It could be pain, a heart in pieces, or those embarrassingly blunt words of desire that you've always wanted to say to someone but dignity won't allow it. She says it for you. For us.

Essence, the new release, goes even deeper than Williams' past efforts. It's aptly titled. The award-winning, fantastic alt-country collection Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was packed with songs for just such an occasion; you sing them while in motion. Essence, on the other hand, is the blood and bone emotion, the stuff that's true whether you like it or not. This is what you feel, under the eloquent evasions. These aren't the songs she wrote with a band out on tour; they sound more like the songs she'd sing to herself at the end of a long hot day, a cigarette in hand and a drink lightening the head and loosening the tongue.

Her father's daughter (Daddy is the acclaimed poet C.K. Williams), Lucinda's poems aren't riddled with double-meanings or allusions. They wear their hearts on their record sleeves. Loneliness and need seem to be a pressing theme, a personal issue in some songs, an epidemic in others. "Out of Touch" holds up a mirror to modern society, addressing our suffocating solitude in an overcrowded world: "We may pass each other on the interstate/we honk and cross over to the other lane/everybody's going somewhere, everybody's inside/hundreds of cars, hundreds of private lives..." It's quid pro quo: if Lucinda's gonna open up to us, she's gonna challenge us to open up to each other.

And she does open up, dressing her wounds in stories of broken women, escapees from bad love, survivors, students of life's tougher lessons. She's famous for her lusty love songs like "Passionate Kisses" and "Right in Time"; this time it's the fiery title track and a soulful confession called "I Envy the Wind," which is made of those lyrics that are so beautifully simple you can't believe someone hasn't written it before. "I envy the rain/that falls on your face/that wets your eyelashes/and dampens your skin/and touches your tongue/and soaks through your shirt/and drips down your back..." On the flip side, "Are You Down" is a tough-love diatribe to an ex-lover, a resolved remark that he had better just let bygones be bygones and get on with his life. This smoky progression sounds influenced by the smoky, late-night blues-rock sound of Bruce Cockburn's Nothing But a Burning Light or The Charity of Night; I found myself waiting for Bruce to jump in and solo.

Fortunately, the songs aren't all about loves won and lost. She knows you can't get to the essence of things without talking about faith and its own vital longings. "Get Right With God," one of only two songs that step into rock-and-roll territory, is an energetic anthem of starting fresh: "I would burn soles of my feet/burn the palms of both my hands/if I could learn and be complete/if I could walk righteously again...". And "Broken Butterflies" sounds like the diary of a person who has blazed her own trail to an understanding of Christ; now she rails against the Pharisees who know nothing about suffering for love. Without sarcasm or spite, she appeals: "Will you ever learn to just forgive/will you open your beautiful eyes/and bleed the way Christ did/and fix the broken butterflies...?"

One critic compared this effort to Dylan's bare bones classic Time Out of Mind. I don't think it works quite so well. Williams is an excellent and unique voice, and it is nice to hear an album that lets her whiskey-sour voice hold center stage. But it seems to me that some of these songs (with the exceptions of the title track and "Are You Down") haven't quite become familiar enough territory for the band; the musicians' work here is adequate, but I think after taking these songs on the road they'll dig deeper and find richer directions to explore, giving Williams the music her voice deserves. While this quieter, more contemplative Williams doesn't have as many songs you'll find yourself singing as you sail along the road, it does offer us stories with more heart, deeper emotion, and perhaps more substantial hope. You'll find yourself singing Car Wheels at the top of your lungs. These will sneak up on you, and you'll whisper them under your breath.

4.5 tocks