What does it sound like?:
On her twelfth studio album Lucinda Williams sounds more world weary than ever. That familiar cracked voice is slurred and sorrowful. Her big subject has always been loss – loss of love, loss of passion, loss and memory of childhood, and the incomprehensible loss of loved ones.. They’re all here, but given that both Williams’ and husband and producer Tom Overy’s fathers died recently, it’s hardly surprising that it’s this loss that runs right through the record. The record opens with ‘Dust’ which sets the tone with the first lines – ‘There’a a sadness so deep/The sun seems black’. It’s one of two songs dealing with her father’s Alzheimers – ‘Even your thoughts are dust’. There are songs here in which ‘Death came and gave you his kiss’; in which she begs for the doors of Heaven to open, in which she rails against the disease that afflicted her father – ‘destroyer of brilliance, destroyer of hope/Invader of skin, invader of bone’; in which she asks someone dying to ‘let me know if there’s a heaven out there’.
You get the picture. But it’s not as bleak a listen as that makes it » Continue Reading.
