Groove Is in Her Heart
Lucinda Williams has got the blues again on her new album. But this
time it's a different shade.
By Mikael Wood
Lucinda Williams knows the blues. For nearly three decades, this
54-year-old native of Lake Charles,
Louisiana, has served as one of
modern country music's most incisive chroniclers of heartbreak. But
though she's made her mark with a raspy brand of bar-band folk rock
- see 1998's Car Wheels on a
Gravel Road
for the most potent example - Williams says she's found a new blues
in the electronic groove music of hipster dance acts such as
Thievery Corporation, Kruder & Dorfmeister, and the Gotan
Project. West, Williams's latest album, isn't a techno record. But
it does find the veteran singer-songwriter delving into a murky -
and intoxicating - world of textures and beats.
How'd you get into the electronic music you've
been digging lately? It's not necessarily what we'd expect from a
rootsy type like you. I don't know - I've just been in the
mood for that kind of stuff lately. I love the rhythms in Brazilian
music. I love Sade. And when I heard Thievery Corporation, it just
made sense to me. It was like a natural progression from the soul
and funk and Delta blues I grew up listening to. It's kind of the
same thing as what the White Stripes do and as some of the stuff
that Moby's done - taking an older sound and adding beats to
it.
It reminds you of stuff you heard when you were
young. It's like the blues of now. As far as groove music,
for years I listened to almost nothing but
John Lee Hooker and
Muddy Waters and ZZ Top and
James Brown and Wilson Pickett. There
wasn't anything else like that to listen to. This stuff is like a
new version of that music.
West seems less about songwriting and more about
performance than many of your previous records. It's really
stripped down and raw, and some of the tunes don't have a lot of
parts. I wanted to use songwriting as a basic structure but
then put all this other stuff around it. That's why I think Hal
Willner was the right choice to produce this record; that's what
he's been doing with the other projects that he's been working on.
He brought in [jazz guitarist]
Bill Frisell. He knew who to bring
in to get that kind of sound.
Did the two of you talk about what you were
after? A little bit. Mostly it was instinctive. We just kind
of went song by song and tried different things. We let everybody
do their thing. That's pretty much always the way I've done
records, but the thing that was different this time was that I had
an actual producer producing the songs as opposed to my just going
in and laying them down. I've never worked with a real producer
before. Everybody I've worked with before has done some producing,
but they've all been musicians-slash-producers: Gurf Morlix and
Steve Earle and Charlie Sexton and Bo Ramsey.
Were you comfortable letting someone else share in
the decision-making process? Yeah, because I like the fact
that Hal wanted to go in and experiment and kind of tinker around.
That's usually what I've been accused of doing that drives
everybody else crazy. Finally, I had somebody who was into that
too.
It sounds like the kind of album you can make only after you’ve made a bunch of other ones. There’s something very confident about it. I know exactly what you mean. I think I really grew into this album. If there was anything that I said before Hal and I went in, it was that I wanted to make a mature yet hip album — a little bit more sophisticated, a little bit more produced. The record of his that really kind of made sense to me in terms of that was Marianne Faithfull’s
Strange Weather. I listened to that and just went, “Okay, he’ll get it.”
Do you think West might appeal to listeners who aren’t really aware of your old stuff or even of country music in general? I hope so. I don’t really ever think about that much, but it’s funny: I got a lot of criticism for Essence (2001) and for
World without Tears (2003) because I was trying to do some different stuff. And people really had a hard time accepting it after
Car Wheels. I think it took a couple of albums to get to the place I am at now, where people are finally just accepting what I’m trying to do instead of comparing it with everything before.