Personnel: Lucinda Williams (vocals, acoustic guitar); Bill Frisell (acoustic guitar, electric guitar); Doug Pettibone (acoustic guitar, baritone guitar); Jenny Scheinman (violin); Robert Brophy (viola); Timothy Loo (cello); Rob Burger (accordion, piano, Wurlitzer piano, Hammond b-3 organ); Tony Garnier (double bass, electric bass); Jim Keltner (drums, percussion).
Like Billie Holiday, John Lee Hooker, and Kurt Cobain, among others, Lucinda Williams is an artist with that certain difficult-to-define quality, the ability to channel the collective soul through a voice that is intimate, personal, and entirely her own. WEST, Williams's 2007 release, bears all the hallmarks of her best work: excellent songcraft, poetically tough lyrics, and her angel-on-morphine voice. As an album, it is her most consistent and appealing since 1998's CAR WHEELS ON A GRAVEL ROAD.
Williams's seemingly odd choice to work with mainstream pop producer Hal Willner works wonderfully. Willner built the album up from Williams's demo recordings, keeping her original vocals, and creating a sound that shimmers but never loses sight of the music's tough rootsiness. Yet it's Williams's searingly honest songwriting and achingly beautiful performances that make WEST so brilliant. Whether it's gutbucket blues ("Wrap My Head Around That"), bittersweet lilt ("Learning How To Live"), or harrowing confessionals ("Unsuffer Me"), Williams knows how to scrape the bottom of the human heart and put it into song. The result is one of the finest albums in her already sterling discography.
The title of West reflects the change in Lucinda Williams' life as she moved to Los Angeles. It also reflects what had been left behind. Williams is nothing if not a purely confessional songwriter. She continually walks in the shadowlands to bring out what is both most personal yet universal in her work, to communicate to listeners directly and without compromise. If Essence and World Without Tears took chances and stated different sides of the songwriter and her world, West jumps off the ledge into the sky of freedom, where anything can be said without worry of consequence and where anything can be said in any way she wishes. It's entirely appropriate that West was released on the day before Valentine's Day 2007, for it's a record about the heart, about its volumes of brokenness, about its acceptance of its state, and how, with the scars still visible to the bearer, it opens wider and becomes the font of love itself. But the journey is a dark one. First there's the music and the production. Williams chose Hal Willner to produce West. Williams, who'd been writing a lot, demoed some songs before she brought in Willner. He stripped down the demos but kept the scratch vocals. From there, the pair created the rest of the album together, never re-recording Williams' initial vocals. The vocals were accompanied by her guitar playing; Willner wanted her inherent phrasing and rhythmic flow. Willner also brought his own crew to play with Williams. This collaboration -- as unlikely as it might seem on the surface -- results in something utterly different and yet unmistakably Lucinda Williams. West is a warm, inviting, yet very dark record about grief, the loss of love, anger at a lover who cannot deliver, and embracing the possibility of change. In other words, it's not without its redemptive moments. Williams has put all of her qualities on display at once with an unbridled and unbowed sense of adventure here on her eighth album. She, her bandmates, and Willner have come up with exactly what pop music needs: a real work of art based in contemporary forms and feelings. West is Lucinda Williams' magnum opus thus far, an album that will no doubt attract more than a few new fans, and will give old ones, if they are open enough, a recording to relish. West is flawless; it is actually destined to become a classic. ~ Thom Jurek minimize