Lucinda Williams
Issue #31
West (Lost Highway)
By Sheba White
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
With her last four albums, Lucinda Williams established her musical territory in literary songs of emotional trauma told mostly from a first-person perspective. West, the singer-songwriter’s ninth album, picks up this thematic trail with guitar-slinger assaults on tracks like “Unsuffer Me” and “Come On,” next to strumming, mournful odes “Where is My Love” and “Learning How to Live” — all songs that will be immediately recognizable to fans of her Grammy-nominated World Without Tears.
Where West differs from past albums is in its overall pastoral feel and Williams’ increased mastery of literary forms, as in “Mama You Sweet”’s modified sestina. Here, she sings, “Ocean becomes tears / That ebb and flow / Over the lines in my face / And in the pain in my soul,” and follows in the next stanza with “Pain hits the wall / And doesn’t know which way to go / And ocean says I’m crying now / And tells pain to follow.”
In the middle of the trauma, Williams becomes the overall narrator, stepping into the scenes she pens, then rolling along after the dust settles. As emotionally unsettling as each scene’s content is, there’s still a narrative distance that’s oddly voyeuristic at its core. But overall, Williams’ voice is heartbreakingly intimate: gritty and tanned like a cowgirl who’s been on the trail a while, a cowgirl who knows sophisticated ways to tell us about a familiar journey.
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