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BARRY'S NOTES - JUNE 10, 2001

Lucinda’s new CD is in the stores & her summer tour is underway.  The first gig was in Knoxville, Tennessee, & here is a review from The Daily Beacon, the student newspaper of the University of Tennessee:

Folk singer promotes new album on tour

Laura Beth Ingle
Staff Writer Daily Beacon Volume 87 Number 1
Friday, June 01, 2001

Country-folk singer Lucinda Williams kicked off her summer tour with a concert at the Tennessee Theatre on Tuesday night to promote her new album, Essence.

Williams started the show with Metal Firecracker and Right in Time, two favorites from her Grammy-winning Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, getting the crowd excited. Then, she played mostly new songs for the remainder of the show, disappointing many in the crowd who hoped to hear more of her powerful songs about heartbreak and pain.

Her new CD does not come out until June 5, so no one really knew the songs she was testing on the Knoxville crowd. Nonetheless, the songs were still enjoyable.

The new songs seem to be in the same stride as many of the older ones. With titles like Lonely Girls and Reason to Cry, fans can look forward to another album about heartache.

The show had a very casual atmosphere. Williams talked to the crowd throughout the concert and said repeatedly how much she loved Knoxville. She even stopped her band twice to start songs over, saying, It's always better the second time around.

Williams and her band played for about an hour and left, only to return and play an hour-long encore.

During the second half of the show, Williams got the crowd involved and many people were dancing in the aisles. She said she loved seeing movement in the audience because she didn't want to think of herself as a folk singer.

She played several more of her old songs, including 2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten and the title track, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Then she belted out a powerful version of the angry song Joy, shouting out You took my joy, and I want it back to get the crowd going.
Williams' voice is full of twang and her lyrics are so much from the gut, it's hard not to sing along. She put on an incredible and moving show for her fans.

The Australian singer-songwriter Kasey Chambers, who is Williams' opening act on this tour, enchanted the audience with her folky tunes as well and received a standing ovation from the crowd when she finished her set.

For anyone who missed the show or just wants to see more of Lucinda Williams, she will be the musical guest on Late Night with David Letterman on Monday, June 4.

©Copyright The Daily Beacon

The second stop on the tour was in Hampton, Virginia. A fan sent in the following report: 

From: Lawrence Lucas, Norfolk, VA
Date: May 31, 2001
Subject: Lucinda in Virginia

The show Lucinda and Band put on last night at Mills Point Park in Hampton, Va was absolutely wonderful. The songs she performed from the new cd sounded great, the 15-second sound clips on amazon.com just don't do them justice. A good crowd and nice weather all amounted to a very enjoyable time. Kasey Chambers was fantastic, after her set, she signed autographs for fans, very friendly person to talk with, I asked her how she felt about on of her songs being used to close the HBO show the Sopranos, she just laughed and said she had not seen it yet. I had a chance to meet Lucinda after the show where she was kind enough to also sign autographs for some fans who were waiting near her tour bus. I told her how much I loved her music and that I think the new songs will be classics soon enough and wished her luck with this tour. Overall a night that will linger in my memory for the rest of my life.

I’d like to add that Lucinda has always presented herself in a very dignified manner, she has never sacrificed her artistic integrity for commercial success and as an adoring fan, I feel that Lucinda has always remained a modest individual, something that would be impossible for most people if they had the monumental talents that she has been blessed with. I just can't say enough good things about Lucinda.

The next stop on the tour was Wolf Trap in Virginia, & then on to New Jersey, where Steve Bornstein sent the following report:

Set List from Appel Farm Festival, Elmer, N.J. - Saturday June 2:

Metal Firecracker
Right In Time
Lonely Girls
Blue
Reason To Cry
Are You Down
2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten
Out Of Touch
I Envy The Wind
Changed The Locks
Essence
Joy
Down The Big Road Blues (duet with Bo Ramsey)

Starting with Metal Firecracker was appropriate, as her bus broke down on the way there. People waited for her, and were glad. She played for about 1:20, as if to make up for the delay. But I see from the set list this was planned already (unless they are carrying a printer). I also see that Are You Down was added on, Car Wheels was replaced by I Envy The Wind (which was my mental request), and the closer Get Right With God was scratched.

The band seemed together but a little hesitant, as thought they were still getting used to either each other or the material. They didn't stretch out as long as the old band did on numbers like Changed The Locks and Joy.
There wasn't a whole lot of interaction or chit chat from Lu, though the mechanical difficulties and intermittent rain may have dampened her enthusiasm. Still, once they got going they got into a groove, and I daresay most people were satisfied. The "VIP section" to side of the stage was packed, and several of the other performers at the festival were there, very attentive. I ended up in front of the stage off to one side, behind the main speakers, about twenty feat from The Artist, a great location from which I could see her range of expressions and also Bo's antic stances. The set ran smoothly, very few glitches or lost moments, as the guitar tech kept the instrument changes real quick. What I remember the most from this are the crooked smiles that sneaked across her face more often than I'd expected, and the welcome relief of hearing this extraordinary artist live again after a year.

Afterward, I asked Bo why there were so many slow songs and the album. He said something like, "Well, that's the way the songs go that she wrote." Well, that about says it all. I still wish that she'd come up with at least one song that really kicked, or covered something like Can't Let Go. I fear that this album is too mellow or dreamy to capture the public's imagination, and she will lose the momentum she gained from Car Wheels. If so, I still hope that Lost Highway will stick with her. Lord knows she could use some support.

Steve Bornstein

Lucinda had 4 days off before doing her next show, but there were many magazine & newspaper articles & reviews that appeared around the country.  Here are some of them:

MUSIC.COM – Spring 2001 – Premiere Issue – “Life through a passenger-side window” by Jim Walsh. Two-page nostalgia piece revolving around Lucinda’s “Side of the Road.”
BLENDER – Jun-July 2001 – Premiere Issue – “Dissatisfied Customer” by Keith Harris.   Review of “Essence” (4 stars) – two pages with 5 color photos.
GENTLEMEN’S QUARTERLY – June 2001 – “Pop Goes Lucinda” by Smith Galtney.  Three page article with 2 color photos.
COUNTRY MUSIC INTERNATIONAL  (UK) – June 2001 – Pick Of The Month – “Essence” reviewed by Alan Cackett who gives it 4 ½ stars.
BILLBOARD – May 26, 2001 – “Williams Reveals Her ‘Essence’ On New Lost Highway Disc” by Phyllis Stark.  Full page with color photo.

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment – May 31, 2001 – "Lucinda Williams’ psychosexual murk” by Don McLeese.  Online in-depth review of “Essence” with color photo (above).
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY – June 8, 2001 – “Williams & Grace” by David Browne.  Half-page review of “Essence” with color photo.
PEOPLE  WEEKLY – June 11, 2001 – “Essence” reviewed by Steve Dougherty, with color photo.
US WEEKLY - June 11-18, 2001 - Review of "Essence" by Tom Moon. Color photo.
NEWSWEEK - June 11, 2001 - "Lucinda Straight Up" by Lorraine Ali.  Two-page article & review with color photo.

Here are two photos sent to me by Tom Brooks, who took them in Atlanta in May:

Here are some newspaper articles of interest:

The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 31, 2001
After a songwriting frenzy, she doubted works' quality
By Dan DeLuca
Philadelphia Inquirer Music Critic

NEW ORLEANS - Lucinda Williams is thinking about how she was thinking of Neil Young when she wrote "Steal Your Love."

"His stuff is so simple: very unashamed and brave and open," says the Southern gothic songwriter, with admiration.
She leans back in her chair in the Louisiana city where she "went through all of my changes" - and where she's just given a recent New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival crowd a preview of the moodily beautiful Essence, which comes out Tuesday - and sings a wistful Young melody in a quavering twang. " 'One of these days, I'm going to write a long letter. . . .' "

"It's so innocent and sweet, and yet it has a real edge to it," says Williams, who will play the Appel Farm Arts and Music Festival in Elmer, Salem County, on Saturday. "He has that naturalness and instinctiveness about everything he does. That's what I want to keep doing. I want to stay with that."

Since her 1979 debut, Ramblin', Williams has won over an ever-growing flock of followers - the Grammy-winning Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998) was her first album to sell more than 500,000 copies - with roots-music story songs that tell their passionate and pained tales with elegant simplicity.

"I drove my car in the middle of the night," she exulted on 1988's Lucinda Williams. "I just wanted to see you so bad."

"I don't need a knife, I don't need a gun," she boasts on Essence's "Steal Your Love." "I know how to steal your love."

But while Williams has always worked with the uncomplicated vernacular music of the American South, bringing her stew of country, blues, folk and rock to market has never come easy. As loyalists waited four years for Sweet Old World (1992) and then six more for Car Wheels, she suffered bad record-company karma and acquired a reputation as a neurotic perfectionist who went through producers like guitar strings and couldn't let go of her own work.

Essence, by contrast, came quickly and easily, though not without personal cost.

"When I broke up with Richard," says the singer, 48, "I hadn't finished a song in five years."

14 songs in 2 weeks

Richard is Richard "Hombre" Price, the most recent in a series of Williams' bass-player boyfriends. She lived with him for five years.

After the couple split last summer, Williams got out her guitar, opened her notebook on the kitchen table of her Nashville condo, and turned on her tape recorder.

In two weeks, she wrote 14 songs.

"I went through this writing thing that was just amazing," she recalls, sipping a glass of red wine. "Five years! A lot of stuff was bottled up in there, I guess. It was like pulling the cork out, and it just flowed. . . .

"I really got into this frenzy where I didn't leave the house for 10 days. I didn't take a bath - you know, nobody was around so you don't care what you look like. You just wake up and make coffee and have some toast, maybe. And you're just so driven."

The first songs that came were "Lonely Girls" and "I Envy the Wind," both extraordinarily precise, even by Williams' standards.

The former, which opens Essence, rings gently with a sweet sadness that's amplified later on the album by "Blue." "Wind" is a slow burner suffused with erotic energy, expertly aided by the production work of guitarist Charlie Sexton, who's done the best job yet of recording Williams' richly imperfect voice.

Paternal approval

After Williams' burst of creativity, she went through her normal ritual of playing her new songs for her father, poet Miller Williams.

For Essence, she says, the University of Arkansas professor suggested only minuscule changes in two songs, "Reason to Cry" and "Broken Butterflies" - each of which, coincidentally, she wrote about her former guitar player Gurf Morlix, from whom she is estranged.

"I said to [her father] one day, 'Have I graduated yet?' He's so sweet. He said to me: 'Honey, I'm not going to always be around to do this.' I can't stand the thought of that!"

Once paternal approval was secured, Williams and guitarist Bo Ramsey went in to record with Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier from Bob Dylan's band, and drummer Jim Keltner.

And she tried not to doubt herself.

"I thought, 'I don't have enough narrative songs' " - "Bus to Baton Rouge," about a visit to her grandmother's old house, is the only Southern-place-name-strewn saga - "and so many of the songs are simpler and kind of introspective, and so different from Car Wheels. And how could I have written so many songs in such a short period and have them all be good enough? I was very suspicious of myself."

She succeeded, however, in recording the album in two weeks in the dead of winter in Minneapolis, and believes the immediacy comes through on the album.

"The songs are pure and direct, and very erotic," says the once-again blond Williams. She is wearing white jeans embroidered with orange and red flames, a black tank top, and a necklace with Mexican painter Frida Kahlo's image on the inside of a bottlecap. "I feel like this is really a woman's record. A mature woman's record. This is how I feel. This is what I want. I'm not beating around the bush. I'm getting right to the point."

Williams' JazzFest performance was her first since 1984, when she was accompanied by bassist Clyde Woodward, who was memorialized on Car Wheels' "Lake Charles." (There are no dead-ex-boyfriend songs on Essence.)
She graduated from high school in the town she has celebrated as "the Crescent City, where everything feels the same" and played her first coffeehouse gigs here. "I fell in love for the first time here. First smoked pot. Did LSD for the first time. Saw Jimi Hendrix here."

Because of Woodward, though, returning is "sweet and sad. It's a heavy feeling." She shakes her head and adds, "I'm just like a walking sponge," laughing at herself. "I'm so sensitive. I'm really sensitive."

Though Williams, who has never married, and Price broke up, they've remained friends. "I'll always love Richard," she says of the bassist who's now in a blues band in Sarasota, Fla. "He made me his daughter's godmother, and I grew very fond of her. I don't ever want to lose that connection."

Besides a full schedule of recording and touring, Williams has kept busy working out by boxing in a gym, and reading the Bible, the influence of which is apparent on "Broken Butterflies." She's an enthusiastic booster of fellow Nashville acts Hayseed, Malcolm Holcolmbe and Joy Lynn White. But her favorite band of the moment is the feminist electro-punk outfit Le Tigre.

Williams - who'll perform the hard-driving Essence title track Monday on The Late Show With David Letterman - is trying not to be distracted by the pressure of following up on Car Wheels.

"This album could sort of catapult me over into the Sheryl Crow category, I guess," she says. "But personally, I don't really care. I sort of like where I am right now. . . . I don't know what it would be like to sell two million records. I might hate it. Already there's enough pressure to get everything done. The touring, the press and the photos. . . . It's all I can do to handle that."

More important than record sales, she says, is to hang on to her creative spirit.

"When I was growing up, my dad told me that I should never lose my sense of wonder. And I think that's the greatest thing I ever learned. I still have that, and I always will. Just a sense of wonder about the mystery and beauty of life. Not to be jaded and cynical. I hate to be around people like that."

© Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.

Here is a pre-gig article in a Jersey paper:

Lucinda Williams' new album came easy
The Bergen Record, Friday, June 1, 2001
WHO: Lucinda Williams and Kasey Chambers.
WHAT: Pop.
WHEN: 8 Wednesday.
WHERE: Roseland Ballroom, 239 W. 52nd St., Manhattan, (212) 247-0200.
HOW MUCH: $25, $30.
By JERRY DeMARCO
Staff Writer
Lucinda Williams was moments away from debuting songs onstage from her new album, "Essence," when she had to make a decision. Compiling a set list before a show at a theater in Fort Worth, Texas, earlier this year, she considered including the snappy kiss-off "Are You Down?"

"The guys in the band were trying to get me to put it in the set, but I wasn't sure," Williams said recently by phone from her home in Nashville, where she was preparing to launch a tour that comes to Roseland in Manhattan next Wednesday and the Count Basie Theater in Red Bank next Friday.

"At the last minute, I decided to use it -- and it got the biggest applause of the whole night," she said. "I want my fans to like what I do, so it was kind of liberating to have that be OK."

Life promises to be better than OK for the 48-year-old singer-songwriter from Lake Charles, La. Now if only she'd believe it.

After years of critical appeal but relatively little mass recognition, Williams broke through in a big way in 1998 with "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road." The album brought her second Grammy Award (to go with the 1994 country hit "Passionate Kisses") and an expanding following.

Williams spent nearly two years on the road supporting "Car Wheels," then pulled back to work on "Essence," which is due in stores next week.

"I have to admit I felt self-conscious about competing with myself," she said, in a soft Louisiana drawl. "This record is not as narrative as 'Car Wheels,' and at first I was worried how people would respond to that. I thought that maybe the songs were too simple."

That sense of unease is somewhat surprising from a rebel who refuses to sell out -- and even tells you right off, "I really don't want to be a star." But "Essence" is more personal than its predecessor.

"I literally was just going through a breakup with the person I'd been living with for five years [her former bassist, Richard Price]," Williams said. "That was happening, and other personal stuff in my life was going on. That came out in some of the songs."

"Essence" is populated by men whom Williams' fans have come to know and hate -- handsome but heartbreaking charmers, including one who spends time "choking on words, coughing up lies, a flurry of broken butterflies." The songs' desperate yearnings are as touching as anything she's done before.

Unlike her previous recordings, however, "Essence" doesn't concern itself as much with language and image as it does melody and deep, languid grooves -- from the lusty title track to the aching, countryish "Reason to Cry." Subtly seductive, they find Williams modulating her singing, in a way sounding like Nina Simone, Dusty Springfield, or Aimee Mann.

The album came quickly, too, at least by her deliberate standards.
It took Williams nearly six years to produce "Car Wheels" but just months to produce "Essence." Although she hadn't written a tune since 1995, she quickly crafted a new batch, most of them at home.

"I thought it was almost too good to be true," she said. "There were a few songs that I had either written or began writing years ago, but I ended up writing about 14 more songs in a two-month period. I thought: 'There's something wrong with this picture.' "

Not by listeners' standards.
Williams has it all right now -- admiration from peers such as Tom Petty, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and others who've recorded her songs, adulation as one of the finest artists of her time, and a healthy, balanced approach to both.

"I take pretty good care of myself. I eat healthy foods and take vitamins and herbs and try to get enough sleep," she said. "And I've been doing this for so long that I'm not impressed by the trappings of success."

So why this undercurrent of uncertainty?

"Happiness is relative," she said. "It fluctuates from day to day, moment to moment. Being a star is just other people's perception of me. From a purely practical standpoint, things are a lot better. It's easier not having to work a day job or worry about how you're going to pay the bills. But I'm still the same person I always was, with the same problems. I'm still who I am."

Copyright © 2001 North Jersey Media Group Inc.

The Boston Globe reviewed the new CD:

CD REVIEW
Williams produces 'Essence' of songcraft
By Joan Anderman, Globe Staff, 6/5/2001

Lucinda Williams has a long history of passing through. She lived in eight Southern towns growing up, and as an adult, the alt-country singer-songwriter just kept going: New Orleans; Berkeley, Calif.; Houston; Austin, Texas; New York; Los Angeles; and now Nashville.

Williams's breakthrough album, 1998's ''Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,'' was a testament to taking off - a shredded patchwork of hastily packed suitcases, endless expanses of road, and the loused-up relationship that started her motor in the first place.

Next stop: heaven. Williams's much-anticipated follow-up CD, the subtler but deeply gratifying ''Essence,'' in stores today, features a photo of a large white cross painted with the words ''Get Right With God'' on the inside jacket cover. Track nine is a scruffy Delta blues by the same name. Just how far would she go, Williams wonders, to reach the pearly gates? Risk the serpent's bite? Sleep on a bed of nails? Because she sure as sin wants to get out of Nashville.

There's a reason Lucinda Williams can't find a comfortable place for herself in a city, or in the music business, or in her life, for that matter. She's a rebel who craves approval. Brazen and easily bruised, a maverick with paper-thin skin, Williams cares intensely about making art that matters - ''Essence'' is proof of that - but can't abide being judged. She wants to be loved. She wants to be left alone.

It's no great surprise that about three minutes into a phone conversation - she's in Vienna, Va., a stop on the tour that brings her to the FleetBoston Pavilion Sunday - the subject of reviews comes up. Williams takes issue with a Rolling Stone writer who compared the new album to the last one.

''It's really a moot point,'' she says. ''These are two different records. If I'd made an album that was more similar to `Car Wheels,' one that was more narrative, then they'd have said I'd done the same thing. Really, my worst fear was that the critics would compare the two.''

There isn't a trace of irony when, several minutes later, Williams describes the process of choosing tracks for ''Essence.'' ''I constantly questioned myself,'' she says, ''comparing the songs. People feel connected to `Car Wheels.' I thought, `I don't have anything like `Lake Charles' or `Concrete and Barbed Wire.' I felt I needed to balance it with familiar things from `Car Wheels.' But I wanted to be present, and in your face.''

Despite the convoluted mash of sheer will and paralyzing vulnerability - or perhaps because of it - Williams was able to make her move. ''Essence'' is a strikingly simple album. Mournful and slow, it inhabits the cracks between country and rock, folk, and blues, with a deep intimacy that may take a few spins to sink in.

The narrative storytelling that defined ''Car Wheels'' has been replaced with stripped-down, first-person poetry of the heart. Williams's singing, too, is remarkably open and intimate; most of the vocal tracks were first takes, a sea change for a notorious perfectionist. It's part and parcel of growing up and growing braver, says Williams, who at 48 finally feels ready to get down to the fundamentals.

''When we're younger we try to be analytical and cerebral. You know, I never wanted to write too many unrequited-love songs,'' she says with a laugh. ''I was always looking for other stuff to write about: towns and people. This time I just said, `This is what I want. This is how I feel. I'm gonna spill my guts.'''

The gut-spilling occurred in record time, by Williams standards: 14 songs in six weeks, which she pared down to 11 and recorded with producer Charlie Sexton during marathon sessions in Minneapolis. (By comparison, she spent three years in three cities with three producers to make ''Car Wheels.'') In time-honored tradition, inspiration came on the heels of a split with her longtime boyfriend.

''I hadn't written in five years, and it was like a cork being pulled out of a bottle,'' Williams recalls. ''I found myself physically and emotionally and mentally alone. It's the best place for me to write.''

After the tour is over, Williams will go back to Nashville. But probably not for long. ''It's a part of the country I never felt at home in,'' Williams says. ''I think I want to be in the Southwest. I just don't know exactly where.''

This story ran on page 2 of the Boston Globe on 6/5/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

Newsday reviewed the new CD prior to Lucinda's appearance at Roseland in New York City:

Newsday, 05/31/2001
READY TO RUMBLE

Lucinda Williams keeps fighting the good fight with her latest album, 'Essence'

by Glenn Gamboa
Staff Writer

THE FIGURATIVE matchup is nothing new: In the far corner, wearing the red power tie and the navy pin- striped suit stuffed with cash: The Establishment.
In the near corner, wearing the cowboy hat, the black tank top, the faded jeans and the boots that will kick your butt from here to Nashville and back: Grammy winning singer-songwriter Miss Lucinda Williams.

Until Williams began work on her forthcoming CD "Essence" (due out Tuesday),
her only jabs were verbal ones, and the only punches she threw were in songs. With the release of the much-anticipated follow-up to her landmark CD, 1998's "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," Williams has fallen in love with boxing and is ready to continue her musical fights.

"It's [boxing] been a huge awakening for me," Williams said, calling from her Nashville, Tenn., home. "It felt so out of character for me that I started laughing. It was the strangest feeling, but I enjoyed it so much.

There's something really liberating about it-getting a lot of aggression out. My trainer told me, 'Not everybody takes to this like you are; you're a natural.'" The parallels between her words and her actions don't escape Williams.

"I've been doing verbal boxing all my life," Williams said. Boxing, like writing honest songs about life from the point of view of a strong woman, is something women have to work at, something that doesn't come easy to them in American culture.

"[Women] are just not conditioned to do that," she said. "I've done it, but I've always been rebellious. I've always had that kind of edge." On "Essence," Williams continues to create remarkable songs in her own distinctive style, one that musically spans country, rock, folk and blues and lyrically covers literary and personal styles.

However, unlike the other albums in Williams' 22-year career, "Essence" came to her in a short period of time, basically as a package.
"I had just come out of a four-year relationship [with bass player Richard Price] and I went into a writing frenzy," Williams said. "I wrote all the songs close together, and within two months I had an album's worth of songs." For a songwriter used to meticulously picking out images and phrases, Williams began to worry about finishing so many songs so quickly.

"I really started second-guessing myself," she said. "I didn't trust it, but I played the songs for some people and they were really responding to them. They all really loved the songs, so I thought that was a pretty good test."

"Essence" is filled with gripping stories and touching moments-from the laid-back folkie seductiveness of "Steal Your Love" to the fragile beauty of "I Envy the Wind" to the gospel blues-stomp of "Get Right With God" to the epic ache of "Broken Butterflies." The title track, which is also the first single, is pure lust wrapped in muted bluesy guitar and urgent harmonies.

"People always ask me if I feel self-conscious about my lyrics, but I really don't," Williams said. "If I felt self-conscious about it, I wouldn't do it. I don't think about that when I'm writing." Williams was amused when she had to create a radio-friendly version of the song to cover a well-placed expletive with a guitar riff.

"It was so ridiculous," she said, laughing. "Everyone's going to know what I said; by censoring it, it just draws more attention to it. The irony of it is that it's not even the most suggestive part of the song, it's not sexual at all." Though Williams is always willing to take on the music establishment on a variety of issues, she is also very aware that if she keeps throwing punches, some will come flying back at her.

"It's hard to take criticism," she said. "Sometimes you can't win for losing. I try to remember that you can only do the best you can and I look to artists like Neil Young and Bob Dylan and Springsteen who...take [criticism] and still keep making records." But it is hard for her. Her biggest worry about "Essence" is how it will be compared to "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," argued by many as the best album of the 1990s and the collection that gets her mentioned in the canon of singer-songwriters with Bob Dylan and Gram Parsons.

"I am so worried about people comparing it to 'Car Wheels,'" Williams said.

"For me, it's a moot point. They're two completely different things." When Rolling Stone's review compared songs from "Essence" to songs from "Car Wheels," Williams felt winded.

"It was my worst nightmare," she said. "I feel silly worrying about it because there's nothing I can do about it, but I do." Williams said she also gets troubled by the way she has been portrayed since the success of "Car Wheels." "The whole idea about me being a perfectionist and some sort of prima donna is quite distorted," she said. "I don't see myself that way. I see myself as being maybe a little too serious at times, and I tend to be, you know, somewhat too analytical. I take things too seriously. I worry too much about what people think. I'm overly sensitive. I was talking to this friend of mine the other day and they said, 'You're so sensitive.' And I said, 'How do you think I wrote all those songs?' There's a price to pay for that. You can't have it both ways." Williams genuinely seems distressed by the media's opinions about her, especially the talk about becoming some sort of alt-country diva.

"People tell me all the time how generous I am, how giving I am," she said.

"I really bend over backwards for people. I mean, yeah, I'm moody. Sometimes, I guess, I'm kind of cantankerous. I'm kind of a pain in the --sometimes, but I'm a sweet pain." WHERE&WHEN Lucinda Williams plays Roseland Ballroom, 239 W. 52nd St., Manhattan, 212-777-6800, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. Tickets are $25; call TicketMaster, 631-888-9000.

The L.A. Times published both a review & an interview in the Sunday edition:

Los Angeles Times - Sunday, June 3, 2001
Rawer This Time Around
By NATALIE NICHOLS

LUCINDA WILLIAMS "Essence" Lost Highway

It's been almost three years since the critically beloved singer-songwriter put out her Grammy-winning, profile-raising "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road." But that's actually a fast turnaround for an artist who's releasing only her sixth album in 22 years.

Where the mainstream roots-rock sound of "Car Wheels" was exuberant and practically slick, the spare yet elegant "Essence" (in stores Tuesday) is rawer and more subdued. Williams balances her perfectionist's precision with an agreeably ragtag feeling, as if she just happened to be hanging out and playing her folky blues-rock with the likes of fellow producer Charlie Sexton, drummer Jim Keltner, guitarist Bo Ramsey and other fine musicians.

Williams' austere phrasing creates lovely tension against her passionate, visceral lyrics. Occasionally a metaphor goes overboard, such as the love-is-like-heroin (or is that heroin-is-like-love?) title tune. But her songs mostly suggest situations--the aftermath of a breakup, a neglected friendship, returning to a childhood home--that are loaded with complex, contradictory reflections.

Her elastic, slightly raspy soprano buttonholes each mood, from the mournful, Neil Young-like "Out of Touch" to the sassy, blues-rocking brushoff "Are You Down?" But when Williams' utterly naked voice bleeds all over such ballads as "Bus to Baton Rouge," you'd need the hardest of hearts to keep the tears from your eyes.
Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times

L.A.Times - Sunday, June 3, 2001
Trying a Different Road
By RANDY LEWIS

Lucinda Williams' last album, 1998's "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," shifted the acclaimed singer-songwriter from cult darling to widespread commercial success and even a Grammy, for contemporary folk album. But the "Car Wheels" experience wasn't all rosy for the 48-year-old Nashville resident. During work on that album, her longtime drummer, Donald Lindley, died of lung cancer and her band of 10 years broke up. .

Her new album, "Essence," is due Tuesday, and the recording process was a lot less traumatic. (See review, Page 60)

Question: How did the commercial success of "Car Wheels" change things for you?
Answer: It didn't really change anything for me inside, as a person. . . . But definitely my public profile has increased quite a bit. One thing I've noticed that I don't like is people paying too much attention to my private life--gossipy kinds of stuff, and that bothers me a lot. I don't look at the Internet stuff much because I don't have a computer. But one time I glanced at some of it, and it amazes me the [fans'] attention to detail. If I change my hair color, or whatever I do, it just ends up on there--what I'm wearing or who I'm with. I can't imagine what it would be like to be a really big star and not have any privacy. I would hate that.

Q: Most of the songs for "Essence" reportedly came out of a relatively short burst of songwriting last year--that's pretty unusual for you, isn't it?
A: Yes--I always wait until I have enough songs ready before I start to record. The songs have to be good enough, and it's hard for me to come up with that many songs that I feel are all good enough. So it's amazing to me that I came up with this many in such a short period.

Q: Many of them have a different feel too--not so many of the rich narratives you're known for, but more what you've called "internal songs." Was that a conscious shift in your approach to songwriting?
A: It's just something that evolved that way. When I first finished these new ones, I was questioning that myself, because they did seem to come so easily. I wondered whether they stood up to my own standard, because some of them are simpler lyrically. I was kind of concerned about that--I'm used to laboring over the songs. . . . But it's kind of liberating at the same time.... The groove factor is a departure for me. Most of my other stuff has depended more on the lyrics to get songs across. This time I let go a little bit, and freed myself up to play around with groove tempos and the mood of the song and the melodies. But it seems to be working.

"Get Right With God" has a real scratchy, country gospel-blues feel--did that grow out of performances you did last summer with the North Mississippi All Stars?
A: That's definitely the vibe I was going for. Do you know Jesse Mae Hemphill and R.L. Burnside? I was just trying to write something that would sound like a really old song. In fact, while we were recording it, [drummer] Don Heffington asked me where I'd gotten that song--who I'd learned it from. He couldn't believe I'd written it.

Q: That song is part of an interesting stretch that closes the album on a strongly religious note--what's that about?
A: I've been sort of delving into it the same way I do a lot of other stuff. Both my grandfathers were Methodist ministers, so I have that in my background. I've also been influenced a lot by Bob Dylan's writing and his use of Bible imagery, even before his Christian stuff. In "Highway 61" he was singing, "God said to Abraham kill me a son." And Leonard Cohen has done that a lot. It doesn't have as much to do with religion as the lyrical nature. I started reading the Bible as an interesting piece of literature, because I'm always looking for stuff I can use in my writing to make it more interesting.

Q: How is it to be living in Nashville these days?
A: I don't really belong here. You know how that is--you just get situated in a place. I've got some good friends here, and that keeps you in a place.... Ultimately it's not where I want to stay. I feel drawn more to the Southwestern area. I lived out there in L.A. for six years and I enjoyed it. I miss a lot of it. Nashville is pretty suburban still. And there's no good Mexican food here.

Randy Lewis Is a Times Staff Writer
Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times

Here is a very nice piece from the Austin paper:

Lucinda's sweet new world
By Chris Riemenschneider
American-Statesman Staff
Tuesday, June 5, 2001

"So, I didn't take so long this time."

Lucinda Williams is between songs at a sold-out, Monday night Antone's show and appears to be having the time of her oh-so-rambling life. The material she's performing off her slow-throbbing new album "Essence" is going over OK. Just OK. None of it has the barnstorming blues grind of "Joy" or "Changed the Locks," two classics she would later use to bring down the house. Most of the songs also lack the singsong catchiness of 1998's Grammy-winning album "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road." These tunes are far more subtle, far less the kind listeners latch onto immediately. However, it's remarkable just watching Williams' delivery. Even with a new band to break in, the bleach-blond 48-year-old seems certain the "Essence" tracks are ready, right and rock-solid. She flashes several bright, even cocky smiles. She shows no sign of the doubt or anxiety that dotted her preview gigs for "Car Wheels" -- an album whose genesis would go on for four years, through three producers, numerous band members and one lengthy record-label dispute. "Essence" took her less than a year.

"This is the best part," she tells the Antone's crowd during another break, relishing the chance to trot out new songs. "This is what it's all about."

With the new album due to hit stores today, the former Austinite and native Louisianan showed in an interview last week the same confidence that she had at Antone's a month earlier.

"I feel real good about this one, even though it's a completely different record," she said, using one reviewer's comparison to "Goat's Head Soup," a much-debated Rolling Stones album. "Nobody liked `Goat's Head Soup' when it came out. It was so weird and different from the stuff the Stones did before it. But over time, people came to appreciate it. (`Essence') takes time, too, I think."

In contrast to the full, carefully arranged sound on "Car Wheels," the new album is more translucent, loose and low-key. The tracks are stacked with seasoned instrumentalists, including Charlie Sexton, former Stevie Ray Vaughan keyboardist Reese Wynans and Bob Dylan bassist Tony Garnier, but the performances often sound quiet and tepid.

That minimalist style is like a spike into the vein of Williams' solitary, semi-obsessed, feminine songs. From the disc-opening "Lonely Girls" -- really just a collage of lipstick-smudged images -- and the poetically gushing closer "Broken Butterflies," the abstract songs are a change from the more specific narratives on past albums. She just threw whatever was upstairs out into the yard, and made sure it didn't get stepped on.

The short time that went into the album is telling of her increased confidence: It took two and a half months of songwriting; a few weeks to get most of the studio work done; a few months for her new record label -- the songwriters imprint Lost Highway, tailor-made for her -- to get up and running.

That's fast for most artists. It's really quick for Williams, who has released only six albums in 22 years and has always gone at least four years between albums since her first two unrefined efforts for the Smithsonian Folkways label.
"I can't really explain it, except to say I just had a creative burst, I guess," she said. "I didn't write songs for five years because of everything that went on with `Car Wheels,' so I suppose the inspiration built up inside me."
The songs came like "floodwaters," she said, and the recording process was "incredibly smooth-going." She's adamant, however, that the "Car Wheels" sessions were not as harried as the media made out. "A lot of it had to do with label problems and industry stuff that people didn't even hear about," Williams said.

"Essence" co-producer Sexton, who also played guitar on "Car Wheels," said: "As expert a songwriter as Lucinda is, I think there were many things about the recording process that she didn't fully understand, even going into `Car Wheels.' And that probably led to a certain amount of insecurity. But `Car Wheels' proved she really does have great instincts in the studio. Those come out in full force on `Essence.' "

Williams certainly agrees that the success of "Car Wheels" had a direct effect on why "Essence" happened with more speed and ease.

"In many ways, I felt a lot like I did after the (1988) `Lucinda Williams' record, because I had gotten a lot of attention and I trusted myself a lot more," she said. "Plus, I also had a lot more artistic freedom. `Car Wheels' ensured that I'd have nobody looking over my shoulder this time.'

Luke Lewis, president of Mercury Records Nashville, said Williams was the principal artist he had in mind when he started the Lost Highway subsidiary, which also includes Robert Earl Keen, Kim Richey and Whiskeytown's Ryan Adams. However, he said, the label purely got lucky that Williams had a new album ready to lead the charge.
"There was never any pressure for her to hurry and get it done." Lewis said, adding with a laugh, "Like that would've done any good, anyway."

Lyrically, "Essence" is the Lucinda Williams album that comes nearest to a self-portrait. Granted, all of her records have delved into her personal life. They've been filled with real-life characters and scenes, from a late brother and ex-boyfriends to the gravelly back roads and road-mapped life of her youth, as the daughter of poet/professor Miller Williams.

This one simply seems to have more of her. In the "After the Goldrush"-like "Broken Butterflies," for instance, which was originally the title track, she yearns for personal rebirth with some of her most vivid writing ever: "Choking on your unplanned words, coughing up your lies/Tumbling from your mouth, a flurry of broken butterflies."
Meanwhile, both the steamy title track and the adulterous acoustic "Steal Your Love" find her struggling between love and obsessions, ("I've piled up a lot of that over the years," she explained, laughing). And the Delta gospel stomp "Get Right With God" makes good use of her newfound interest in reading the Bible ("There are only Old Testament references in that song," she said, " 'cause I haven't gotten any further than that.").

Another personal tome -- and one of three songs she had snippets of going back 10 years, finally completing them last year -- is "Bus To Baton Rouge," which finds the singer re-pledging her allegiance to her native state. Though she lived in Austin off and on for 10 years, Louisiana remains Williams' most-used canvas for her songs.
Despite this, plenty of Austinites still claim her as one of our own.

"She'd be the first to tell you that her personal development happened in Louisiana, (but) her musical core was formed in Austin," said deejay Jody Denberg, who's already recruited Williams to be on the cover of the KGSR "Broadcasts" CD in November -- an honor previously reserved for locals only. "She still exudes the Austin musical aesthetic, no matter where she hangs her cowboy hat when she comes off the road."

Williams said she doesn't really feel at home anywhere anymore. Of Nashville, where she's lived the past seven years, she said, "I like it, but I've always felt like I've had one foot out the door." A brief move to Los Angeles in the late '80s was good for her career but little else, she said. Besides Louisiana, Austin remains closest to her heart.
"I got my start as a performer in Austin, and can't think of a better place to have done it," she said. "Back then, I was able to play in front of lots of nonjudgmental, uncritical audiences, and that was invaluable to me. The audiences there are still a lot like that. But I guess I needed it more back then than I do now."

The New York dailies also reviewed the CD:

From: Arts and Lifestyle | Music |
Wednesday, June 06, 2001

New Pearls of Williams

Lucinda's new disc a distillation of love

By ISAAC GUZMAN
Daily News Feature Writer

Lucinda Williams is a desperate woman and she doesn't care who knows it.
When she falls in love, the feeling is like a drug, something she wouldn't mind shooting into her veins. That's the way she describes the feeling in "Essence," the title track of her new record, released yesterday.

"The sense of desperation that I was feeling, it's very powerful," says the singer, who plays a sold-out show tonight at Roseland Ballroom. "And so are drugs, hence the connection — sex and drugs. Very forbidden. I get like that sometimes and I just can't stand it."

"Essence" is the sixth album by the Grammy-winner, who has earned acclaim for her aching tales of heartbreak, death, jealousy and hard living. When she sings, it's not so much melody as a cry into the wind.

The Long Road to 'Car'

Williams' last album, 1998's "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," was hailed as a country-inflected, roots-rock masterpiece. The record was made over five years, during which Williams twice scrapped completed tapes to start over. During that half-decade, she did not write a single song. She just obsessed over how she wanted "Car Wheels" to sound.

So when she started writing again last July, she was surprised by the new songs that spilled out. It seemed too easy. Within nine months, she had written and recorded an entire album.
"I worried about it a little bit, like, what's wrong with this picture?" she says. "I came up with 14 new songs in a two-month period and I've never done that before. I kept wondering if maybe I had to go back to the drawing board. I kept comparing all my new songs with all my old songs."

The new songs turned out to be something new for Williams. Instead of relying on evocative stories full of Southern flavor, she focused on rhythms and let herself be carried away by the sounds of words. In the record's opening track, "Lonely Girls," she repeats the title some 20 times.

It's a simple idea, executed with great beauty and Williams' unswerving gift for singing songs worth weeping over. Oddly, Williams says she doesn't write when she's sad.

"When I get bummed out about something I take it in and file it away and write about it later, when I have a sense of well-being," she says. "And all these songs aren't bummed-out songs. If everybody knew what the songs were about, it would make more sense, but I don't want to get into talking about all that. So everybody has to sort of read between the lines."

'Essence' of a Woman

Even if Williams' inspirations are obscured, she believes that "Essence" is the most direct album she has made about her feelings. The title track and "Blue" both express the longings, sexual and romantic, within a woman's search for love.

"It feels like a woman's record, like a woman standing up and saying, 'This is how I feel,' and not being afraid to express her sensuality," she says. "Of course, I've always done that, though."

She laughs and mentions the songs "Hot Blood" and "Right in Time," which make no bones about their erotic themes.

"I guess I'm getting a reputation now. But I think I'm just getting braver in my old age."

New York Post -- June 5, 2001
LUCINDA WILLIAMS
"Essence"
Lost Highway

Once in a while you hear an album where the artist's intention and the result seem to be one.

Lucinda Williams set out to make a serious, beautiful, truthful, soulful record and achieved one with "Essence."
On this brilliant album of narratives and confessionals, she petitions the lord with prayer, wraps herself in nostalgia, laments lost love and revels in new passions.

America fell in love with alt-country's queen in 1998, with the release of "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road." "Essence" rolls down the same path. Williams is naked and unashamed on this heart-and-soul collection of 11 songs. Her guitar work is moody and stark and her dry-throated drawl quivers when she holds a note with weary patience.

These are smart songs that don't try to be clever. On "Blue," Williams conjures contentment, safety and devotion: "Feeds me when I'm hungry, and quenches my thirst, loves me when I'm lonely and thinks of me first." Poignant, simple and beautiful. No one writes about love like Lucinda.

Here is an in-depth review by one of the music industry's top critics:

The Village Voice – April 6, 2001
Rock&Roll&
by Robert Christgau

Lucinda Williams's Essence Comes Quick and Goes Slow
Encore From a Utopia

A year ago, Lucinda Williams was the subject of a grueling, penetrating, National Magazine Award-nominated New Yorker profile by Louisiana-born Granta founder Bill Buford. This isn't merely the best thing ever written about an artist journalists have long adored. It's a classic portrait, adulatory and unillusioned all at once, of a "genius" (even if Buford leaves the G-word itself in the mouth of departed guitarist-collaborator Gurf Morlix, and also in a parenthesis). Cultural before he gets personal, he crafts a steamy evocation of Williams's South, then tells the stories of the dead lovers and other wasted charismatics who inspired her songs and then demonstrates how songs they inspired aren't literally about them. He records a balls-out yet strangely theatrical and philosophical public argument
between Williams and her bassist boyfriend. And in a matter-of-fact concluding paragraph, he reports that Williams and the bassist are through after five years-as is her writer's block of about the same duration.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Essence, which three years past the gold-certified breakthrough Car Wheels on a Gravel Road stands as Lucinda Williams's quickest album since she started trusting her own material in 1980. What will she do for an encore, you wanted to know? Whoomp, here it is. It's well-named-too abstract and ethereal by Williams's standards. Watch out for that backlash, now. Could get wicked.

At the National Magazine Awards, New Yorker editor David Remnick wished out loud that Williams liked Buford's piece as much as everyone else did. Even if she weren't a mad perfectionist, however, that would be a lot to ask.
Geniuses tend to be impossible people, and Buford's Lucinda is no exception and a half. She can be " 'the sweetest, most thoughtful, kindest person you'll ever meet,' " then glower like a stormcloud or strike out fangs bared. She works assiduously at the downhome naturalness she's beloved for-worrying her looks, collecting Southern kitsch, even, Buford suspects, trotting out specimen bubba-buddies for journalistic delectation. Anyone who's had doubts about her taste in men is now sure-roughly speaking, she fluctuates between doom-seeking egoists and bass players she can push around. We're also left with the feeling that the main reason she broke up with this one is that she feared a stable home life was distracting her fromher calling.

Buford reports none of this with relish. He conveys only respect, regret, and unmitigated affection. Nevertheless, Williams has the right to want to be loved not as a tremendously gifted neurotic, but as the passionate paragon (nice gal?) she knows herself to be deep down. And she also has the right to worry that many who read Buford's profile won't cut her as much slack as he does. Because, as will be clear inside of a month, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road cost Williams her underdog status. For a full decade-only two albums, OK, but 10 years-Williams was the great
rankling injustice of the American popular music system. Not only were 1988's Lucinda Williams and 1992's Sweet Old World gorgeous, flawless, brilliant, they weren't even threatening. Musically and morally, they embraced realism, directness, sincerity, emotion, the natural. They rocked often enough, but they were noisy in neither the Jacques Attali nor the turn-that-shit-down sense. There was nothing remotely postmodern about their exploitation of tradition; what small dissonance or irony they allowed reinforced rather than undercut their humanism. They had tunes. They had soul. Yet so gaping were the cracks in the music system that they owed their shamefully cultish measure of success to pointy-headed nerds whose hopes for the future were better embodied by Nirvana and/or Public Enemy-not, please, Mary Chapin Carpenter or Tom Petty, bestowers of the better-late-than-never cover hits that kept Williams afloat during the six years preceding the thrice-produced Car Wheels. Which by dint of raw substance, accrued goodwill, and committed major-label support finally elevated its creator into an NPR cynosure with a sustaining audience of folkies-by-nature, alt-country postpunks, New South culture vultures, and a miscellany of bereft riffraff who never read rock criticism but are perfectly capable of relating to straight-ahead songs that shouldn't have needed it.

Although Essence is Williams's most imperfect album since 1980's Happy Woman Blues, her audience is sure to love it. Now that they've found her, they're not going to let her go, especially since she's the kind of high-performance artist who compels one to substitute "most imperfect" for "least accomplished." But those with no appetite for Mary Chapin Carpenter and Tom Petty are left with a thornier problem that's only slightly complicated by
Essence's artistic shortfall, whatever that might be. Formerly, spreading the word was a no-brainer-Williams was too damn good to be ignored, so that combating her commercial obscurity was a righteous cause. Since she'll never be ignored again, however, one's brain must now reenter the fray. One can't help wondering exactly how much one identifies with what she uses her superb skills to say-her ideas, her themes, her obsessions, her meaning; her dolor,
her desperation, her romanticism, her bullshit.

Essence brings such doubts into relief by cutting off the pleasures of Williams's trademark concreteness. On Sweet Old World, short-story details ("chess pieces," "dresses that zip up the side") packed a textural thrill akin to local color; Car Wheels generated a similar vibe cheap by dropping Southern place names, over a dozen all told, most of them Louisianan. This time both methods are in abeyance, and the glaring exception-"Bus to Baton Rouge," which catalogs an old house-seems weak and wrong. That's because the inspired songs here, only one or two of which reference anything that could be the breakup she gratefully asserts got her writing again, impact lyrically as something like generalized modern pop, or perhaps (with Dylan sideman Tony Garnier now on bass) the fabricated monosyllabic archaicism of Time Out of Mind. The problem with these analogies, over and above the unlikelihood that either ever crossed Williams's mind, is the album's penchant for blood-simple metaphor. "Steal Your Love" and "I Envy the Wind," "Blue" and "Are You Down?" turn over the elementary possibilities the clichéd titles set up like there's gold in there. "Lonely Girls" incants three commonplace two-word images: "heavy blankets," "pretty hairdos," "sparkly rhinestones." And though "Out of Touch" and "Reason to Cry" work differently, shading plain talk into eloquence and home truth, in fact all the nothing-fancy metaphors around them inhabit identical territory: the songwriter's utopia where speech and poetry are the same thing. Forget theme-that's what the album's about.

You could say this linguistic strategy revisits Lucinda Williams, give or take a "Passionate Kisses" and an "I Just Wanted to See You So Bad." But it isn't just the avidity of those lyrics that's absent, it's the avidity of the music. Not only is Essence slow, its sole rocker, the faux Pentecostal "Get Right With God," it's kind of slick. Chorus harmonies whisper Jordanaires. There's viola on three tracks. Where Gurf Morlix was sharp, veteran guitar man Bo Ramsey goes for pretty, veering well toward Mark Knopfler on "Are You Down?" And while Williams still plays her voice for crack and overflow and fissures of feeling, her projection is subdued, settling in on a weary, conversational croon. Avid would be nice. Funny thing, though-call this singing weathered or call it complacent, it highlights the words just right.

Like many others in due time, I don't necessarily approve of all this. I'm certain the new record isn't as surefire as its three predecessors, and I'm obliged to mention a shockingly dire finale featuring Biblical citations as purple as its title, which is "Broken Butterflies." But grant Essence its prerogatives and soon it justifies them-on most of these songs, and generally not the ones you notice first, the synergy of words and music is so uncanny that it would be pure crankdom to pretend it isn't doing what it sets out to do. Within the slowly obsolescing parameters of the
singer-songwriter form, imperfect Lucinda Williams is immensely more effective than peak almost anyone else. I've been listening to plenty of hardworking folkies who prove it, and along the way I've also sampled relevant efforts by such eminences as honorable old Dolly Parton, admirable new Eileen Rose, helpful Emmylou Harris, hapless David Byrne, and, just for fun-much the best of these, but a clear runner-up nonetheless-Bob Dylan on the aforementioned Time Out of Mind. Be glad Kasey Chambers, who'll open for her June 6 at Roseland, belongs in the same room. On the merits, Lucinda Williams is too damn good to deny.

All of which is to say that Essence begins by bringing doubts into relief and ends by burying them in its own druthers. Not entirely, however. One of the songs you notice first is the title track, an avid almost-rocker that puts Williams's bullshit on full display-baldly doom-seeking love-is-the-drug trope right down to "Help me get fucked up" and "Shoot your love into my vein." When artists I like express this kind of impulse, as happens all too frequently, my usual reaction is to pray they'll go back to the bass player. But with Williams this would be flushing empathy down the
toilet-she's too much the egoist, too obsessed with her calling. Instead I figure that what all those wasted charismatics are for her she can be for me-a conduit to values and experiences whose limitations are all too clear.
I don't believe in the natural any more than she has a death wish. But there's no one like an edge dweller to show you how precious and precarious life is. And only a convinced cornball like Lucinda Williams can manipulate
tradition with the emotional skill to save it from an untimely end.

Before Lucinda appeared at Roseland, she was on the Dave Letterman Show on June 4 & sang "Essence."  She looked & sounded great. A new guitarist was there on her left -- evidently some changes have been made in the band.

Here are some fan reviews of Lucinda at Roseland:

From: Jennifer Gibbons
Date: June 8, 2001
Subject: Lucinda Roseland

Dear Marq and Barry:
First and foremost, thank you for the great job keeping the flame burning for Lucinda, Townes and all the other greats in the early days. People don't appreciate that enough once the artist hits the big time, like Lucinda.

I was at the Roseland concert Wednesday night. Kasey Chambers was a good opening choice, with her sweet voice and tight band. Her set was short. Lucinda came on around 9:20, but played only until 10:45. Union rules close
down too many stages at 11 pm. She looked great: cowboy hat, studded leather pants and a tight long-sleeved jersey top. The set opened with Metal Firecracker, a crowd pleaser, followed by Right in Time. She dedicated 2 Cool 2 Be Forgotten to Joey Ramone. She played many of the Essence songs: Lonely Girls, Essence, Blue, Reason to Cry, Get Right with God, Bus to Baton Rouge. The title track was a great jam, with Bo in rare form. She played nothing from Sweet Old World. She played only one song from Lucinda Williams - "Changed the Locks" - but it brought down the house. Lucinda closed with Joy, then returned to the stage for about four more songs.

It was amazing to see the whole audience - Roseland was PACKED - singing along. I saw Lucinda for the first time in 1990 or 1991 in Central Park for free with Roseanne Cash. Until Car Wheels Lucinda was a relative unknown: but the Roseland concert proves those days are over. Congratulations to Lucinda on her great new album.

The following fan reviews are from IDD postings:

Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2001
From: Diane Casey
Subject: LUCINDA, LUCINDA, LUCINDA!!!!!!!!!

OH. MY. GOD.

This woman's voice is simply too amazing for words.

Just got back from Roseland, and I'll try & keep this short & sweet since I'm totally exhausted and have to get up early and somehow manage drag my sorry butt to work tomorrow....

The place was jam-packed when Lucinda came onstage & did a bunch of songs off the new cd - including the very HOT title cut "Essence" -- WHEW! So, Love IS the Drug, after all... Indeed! Roxy Music (appearing BTW, at MSG
7/23) knew it all along!!! :)

Other highlights for me were "I Envy the Wind", "Joy" and when she dedicated "2 Cool to be 4gotten" to Joey Ramone, and btw, was that a New York Dolls T-shirt she was sporting?? She also got a kick outta how everyone's always harping on her "Get Right With God" song; that songs about God seem to push people's buttons in a funny way. True.

RANT ALERT! -------------
One mind-boggling and VERY annoying aspect of tonight's show (for me, anyway) was the people in front of us holding conversations while the artist they "supposedly" came to see is ONSTAGE singing/playing. Not only is this
incredibly rude to the people who paid alot of money to hear the band (i.e. ME!), but I'm assuming that the talkers themselves actually paid for their tickets as well. Why do people do that?
END OF RANT!! ------------

Oh, btw the opener Kasey Chambers was very good too. I really liked her country sound, and her dad played guitar in the band. Nothing like keeping it all in the family, huh? I found this blurb about her that describes her sound quite well:

"Lyrically mature beyond her years, Chambers' twangy voice - sort of a cross between Lucinda Williams and Iris DeMent - is disarming in its ability to sound innocently youthful and worldly wise at the same time."

And her songs had a good sense of humor, too. Ah, back to Lucinda! I could listen to her sweet lilting voice forever. But right now I've gotta catch some zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz's.
G'nite all!!
Diane.

Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001
From: Bob.Cohen

The main additions that I can remember about Lucinda's set were that she did do "Bus To Baton Rouge", "Get Right With God", and "Car Wheels", plus that Howlin' Wolf cover to close. I wondered if her New York Dolls t-shirt referred to the band or the topless bar downtown (I just know it exists, honest). She dedicated 2-Cool 2-Be-4-Gotten to Joey Ramone and mentioned how she saw the Patti Smith show last night.

I was didn't think I'd be able to stand the crowd for the whole show (great 45 minutes by Kasey Chambers, 45 minute intermission, and 1 hour 45 minute set by Lucinda), but somehow I managed. Definitely one of those times I'm
grateful to be a big galoot - I may be closed in like on a rush hour train, but at least I can see. I saw a woman being led out of the crowd who looked like they were having a panic attack during the song "Joy" - I was hoping she got her joy back when she escaped from masses. Some day I'll figure out why they book shows where they do. They could have sold out the Beacon if they decided to book the show there

Enjoyed Kasey Chambers. Except for part of the first song, her voice sounded great. She did a couple of new songs from a record due out in the fall that were excellent. I love her sense of humor - she's very funny live and
she closed with "We're All Going to Die Someday". She'll be a headliner on her own soon.

I enjoyed all the new material but wasn't blown away by it. The songs had a nice groove to them. My favorite part of the new band was the keyboard work - it probably was electronic but it sounded like a B-3 to me. Are there laws against women over 45 looking that good in leather pants?

Yours whatever, Brother Bob

Date: Thu, 07 Jun
From: Steven Lederman
Subject: Lucinda - wow

Lucinda put on a fantastic show this evening. She was in great form and her voice sounds fantastic. Her set was primarily from the new CD and from Car Wheels with a rollicking version of "Changed The Locks" and a couple of
blues covers the only exceptions (one of them may have been on Happy Woman Blues - I need to go check later). Bo Ramsey played guitar and really put on a show. The bassist was from Dwight Yoakam's band, Roseland Ballroom was packed, although too many people spent most of the talking to their friends or on cell phones ("It's the last song
- I'll be outside in a few minutes" - of course she still had 20 minutes left). I am really excited to pick up the new album. From what she played, it sounds wonderful. The big surprise was the opener Kasey Chambers. For a 22 year old, she is incredible confident and really holds herself on stage. She covered Fred Eaglesmith's "Freight Train" and really gave it some energy. She is definitely an artist to watch.

After Roseland in New York, Lucinda played in Red Bank, New Jersey at the Count Basie Theater.  Here is a fan review from IDD:

Date: Sat, 09 Jun 2001
From: adammonago
Subject: Lucinda in Red Bank

Just got back from the Lucinda Williams show at the Count Basie theater in Red Bank tonight. Great show...most of the new album, plus a few older goodies, a Howlin' Wolf cover, and a version of "Too Cool To Be Forgotten" dedicated to Joey Ramone.

As if that were not enough, Mr. Elvis Costello himself was in the audience, and when he shouted out a request for "Drunken Angel", Lucinda called him up on stage to perform it with her.

All in all, this was a classic show. Lucinda's new band is fantastic and the new album sounded great live. She was even better than at NO Jazzfest.

Anyway...that's it for now. Bedtime.

The next stop for the band was Northampton, MA & then Boston.  The Boston Phoenix had this to say prior to her visit:
 
The Boston Phoenix ---THURSDAY, JUN. 07 2001
Lost highways
Lucinda Williams and Whiskeytown
BY MATT ASHARE

THE ESSENCE OF LUCINDA? The new album finds Williams exploiting the sensual, earthy qualities of her voice to convey yearning and desire.

It’s less than a week before the release of Lucinda Williams’s sixth album — her first for the new Nashville-based Mercury imprint Lost Highway — and the 48-year-old Louisiana-born singer/songwriter is still feeling a little anxious. Not that there’s anything unusual about that: even artists who pour just a tiny bit of their heart and soul, not to mention a decent chunk of (usually) someone else’s change, into 40 or so minutes of music regularly worry about how fans and critics will react. And listening to any one of the three albums that preceded Essence — 1988’s defining Lucinda Williams (originally released by Rough Trade before being reissued 10 years later by Koch), 1992’s Sweet Old World (Chameleon/Elektra), and 1998’s Grammy-winning Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (Mercury) — tells you she’s not prone to putting just a little of herself into anything. But Williams isn’t just feeling anxious about Essence — she’s talking candidly about it over the phone from a hotel in Virginia on the third stop of a tour that will bring her to the FleetBoston Pavilion this Sunday.

“I’m my own worst critic,” she admits. “So when I wrote the new songs, I questioned them myself, partly because I wrote them fairly quickly, which is a different thing for me. And I was afraid that I didn’t have enough narrative songs, because that’s what I’m mostly known for. But I started playing the songs for people and getting good responses. It was liberating at a certain point because I just let go of worrying about everything having to be that long, literary, narrative style.”

Take the first gig she played after she recorded the CD. “It was in Fort Worth, and I was making the set list out and debating about whether we should play ‘Are You Down?’ The guys in the band wanted to do it. But I wasn’t sure because it was a sit-down kind of listening audience, and I didn’t think it was going to go over very well.”

As it turned out, this atmospheric blues rumination on falling out of love brought the sitting crowd to its feet, in spite of its having a skeletal two chords and one verse and a lack of narrative and relying more on the soulful tone and texture of her voice than the force of her words and, in short, being the antithesis of the country-seasoned Southern storytelling that brought Williams a measure of success in ’98. “Are You Down?” has been in the set ever since. But even that hasn’t entirely set her mind at ease.

“The guy who just reviewed my record for Rolling Stone obviously didn’t get it,” she points out. “I read that review and I thought, ‘Here we go . . . ’ I mean, I knew people were going to compare it to Car Wheels. But that’s like apples and oranges — it’s like comparing [Dylan’s] Time Out of Mind with Blonde on Blonde.”

The Dylan parallel is apposite, since it was his way with words, the long vivid narratives that characterized his Blonde on Blonde era, that Williams used as a model. “That’s all the stuff that I listened to and I aspired to. That’s how I wanted to write, and for years I was trying to write like that.” So when Dylan embraced a sparer, more impressionistic æsthetic on 1997’s Time Out of Mind (Columbia), it made a deep impression on her. And when some critics panned that album (which nonetheless went on to win a Grammy), she took that to heart as well. “When Time Out of Mind came out, the Tennessean just trashed it. I saved the review because it made such a big impact on me: I thought, ‘Here’s this beautiful album that he’s done and he’s gotten a bad review, so if this is happening to him, then it could happen to me.’ ”

The bulk of Essence is indeed a departure for Williams, who began her recording career with a pair of blues albums — 1979’s Rambling on My Mind and 1980’s Happy Woman Blues — before developing a style she could call her own a full eight years later on an album that would eventually (in 1994) earn her a songwriting Grammy for Mary Chapin Carpenter’s cover of “Passionate Kisses.” For starters, it’s the first collection of her songs that isn’t dense with references to the Louisiana towns she grew up around — Algiers and Opelousas on Car Wheels’ “Concrete and Barbed Wire”; “Pineola” on Sweet Old World; Mandeville on Lucinda Williams’s “Crescent City.” It’s also the first album she’s made in more than a decade that doesn’t feature the core band (guitarist Gurf Morlix, bassist John Ciabotti, and drummer Donald Lindley) from that trio of releases. Instead, she demo’d all of Essence’s tracks with guitarist Bo Ramsey and relied as much on the music to convey emotion as she did on the sparer lyrics. Then she recruited a studio band from among the core group of pro players who have been putting in time of late with Dylan and Neil Young, including Austin-bred guitarist and Dylan sideman Charlie Sexton, who ended up co-producing Essence with her.

“I think it’s just a natural progression,” she comments. “I mean, I like to think I’m always trying different things out, and I’m not always going to do the same thing all the time. I’m at that point in my career now where nobody at the label told me anything about anything. I just got the songs together and we went in and made a record. It’s just a real easygoing kind of thing. I had all the songs together, the label was together — I mean, there was a real security factor there and a lot of support. We just used the demo as a reference point when we were tracking all the songs, because we got the essence, if you will, in the demo we did. That word just keeps coming up.”

There are a couple of places on Essence where the Lucinda of Car Wheels surfaces — in the uncomfortable encounters with a friend from the past that frame “Out of Touch,” and in the evocative details of her grandmother’s house that color “Bus to Baton Rouge.” Both songs predate the burst of creativity that supplied the rest of the material for Essence. “Believe it or not, ‘Out of Touch’ was originally written in 1981. It almost ended up on the Car Wheels record as a slower ballad. And ‘Bus to Baton Rouge’ is probably more familiar in terms of having that narrative kind of thing.”

Fans of Car Wheels may have wanted to hear Williams rock a bit harder. At the same time, it’s great to hear her exploiting the sensual, earthy qualities of her voice to convey yearning and desire in the subtler, more economical cuts that give Essence its character — “I Envy the Wind,” “Broken Butterflies,” and “Are You Down?” And on the title track, she brings it all together in one of the more powerful distillations of pure wanting this side of pure soul music: the sinewy blues guitar; the languid, breathy vocals with a touch of sweet Southern twang; the rich, rootsy sense of melody; the poet’s eye for devastating detail (“Kiss me hard/Make me wonder who’s in charge”).

None of which is going to make it any easier for tastemakers to find a format for Williams. “I hate the whole alternative-country thing. The problem is that because Lost Highway is based in Nashville, people assume it’s country. When people ask me what kind of music I play, I say ‘roots-based music.’ Then I end up saying, you know, ‘folk, rock, blues, a little country thrown in.’ But if I say the word ‘country’ or the word ‘folk,’ it gets confusing, because they mean different things to different people. It’s roots-based or Americana, I guess. I don’t like that, either, but I feel more comfortable with it.”

IF THE FOLKS AT LOST HIGHWAY are as interested in shaking the “alternative country” label as Williams is, the label’s first release, Whiskeytown’s Pneumonia, isn’t going to be much help. Recorded three years ago in an abandoned Woodstock church by the now defunct Ryan Adams–led North Carolina band, the disc got shelved in the wake of the Universal/PolyGram merger. Adams has already moved on to a solo career — he released Heartbreaker last year on Bloodshot and is working on a new one for Lost Highway — but that didn’t keep him from feeding a growing buzz about Pneumonia’s being the great lost Whiskeytown album.

Recorded by a core trio of Adams, fiddler Caitlin Cary, and guitarist Mike Daly, with Ethan Johns (the son of legendary producer Glyn Johns) producing and playing drums, the 14-track disc is as representative an introduction to “alternative country” as you’ll find. And it reflects both the best and the worst tendencies of the genre. The music does have that loose, rough-around-the-edges, down-home feel that’s missing from the “non-alternative” country Nashville feeds the mainstream. And Adams does deliver a pair of his better songs — the playful “Don’t Wanna Know Why” and the more reflective “Don’t Be Sad.” But like many “alternative country” artists, he tends to use country clichés as a crutch, relying on tears-in-my-beer self-pity and mistaking reverent formalism for genuine inspiration. The plaintive reminiscences of scraped knees, neon signs, and a 50-cent picture frame bought at a five-and-dime in “Jacksonville Skyline,” for example, are just a wee bit precious. It’s the kind of pat poetics you never seem to find on a Lucinda Williams album. And it explains a lot about why she’s not into being labeled “alternative country.”

Lucinda Williams headlines the FleetBoston Pavilion this Sunday, June 10, with opener Kasey Chambers. Call (617) 931-2000.
Issue Date: June 7 - 14, 2001

Here is the New York Times review of the Roseland show:

The New York Times - June 9, 2001
Lucinda Williams: The Spirit Meets Sex
By ANN POWERS

Among her acknowledged attributes — a genius for song craft, unassailable integrity, a voice that tears hearts — Lucinda Williams is sexy. She could even be called a sex symbol, at least among her listeners, who are more likely to seek thrills on National Public Radio than in Maxim magazine.

Ms. Williams, who is 47 embraces a defiantly blunt seductiveness. Consider her outfit at her Roseland show on Wednesday night: a shirt emblazoned with the logo for the band the New York Dolls (an image of a woman bending over) and tight lace-up leather pants with suggestive leopard-print trim. With her bleached hair and cowboy hat, Ms. Williams was more biker than poet, a woman proudly on the prowl.

Ms. Williams' new album, "Essence" (Lost Highway/Universal), is as tangibly erotic as her persona has become. Songs like "Lonely Girls" and the title track, both given easy treatments at Roseland, are mantras of desire, slowly building like the longing they describe.

But these songs are also weary, and in that quality lies their insight. Ms. Williams's new work is about the need for love — carnal and spiritual — at the time of life when such needs gain gravity. The songs drag a bit, and instead of her usual tactile writing Ms. Williams colors them with clichés. The words don't thrill. But arranged just so, they do something more unusual, relating what language becomes when words aren't doing the trick.

The sound on "Essence" is contained and subtly tense, communicating both frustration and acceptance. Live, however, Ms. Williams was more confident than ever, supported by a highly respectful group throughout a lengthy set. "It feels like a band," Ms. Williams declared after the ferocious "Joy."

She delighted in the artful flash of the guitarist Bo Ramsey, with whom she performed a duet with a midset country blues. The rest of the five-piece band didn't shine so hard, instead locking together in expertly honed arrangements.

The show became exciting and not just stunningly admirable when that expertise touched on less careful emotion. A honky-tonk arrangement of the new "Reason to Cry" and an intense version of an old favorite, "Changed the Locks," generated the steam that Ms. Williams wants now.

So did "Get Right With God," a raggedy gospel number that Ms. Williams defended, remarking, "The songs about God bother people more than the songs about sex." On "Essence," it's clear that Ms. Williams is exploring the ancient pathway linking the carnal and divine. She's figured out how to be a sex symbol and stay true; she would like to be a God symbol, too. That's harder in the secular world, but Ms. Williams is figuring it out.

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

Newsday also reviewed the Roseland concert:

Newsday - 06/08/2001 - Friday -
Ramshackle Rock
Williams is still looking for love, in all her ragged glory
By Martin Johnson. Martin Johnson is a regular contributor to Newsday.

LUCINDA WILLIAMS. More ragged than meticulous, and better off for it.

Wednesday night at Roseland Ballroom, Manhattan. Kasey Chambers opened.

LUCINDA WILLIAMS' music has so much Southern flavor that Roseland Ballroom wasn't the optimal place to see her play, but since the Louisiana State Fair isn't likely to take place in Manhattan anytime soon, the refurbished, narrow dance hall had to do. And on Wednesday night, Williams made the place her own with a set that was equal parts a run through some old favorites and a road test for material from her new recording, "Essence" (Lost Highway).

Williams has lived throughout the South, and her songs are about breadth of place and the resonance of love. Her metaphors for love and longing rank among rock's finest.

For more than 20 years, Williams has been sporadically releasing recordings, with long absences often due to prolonged wars with her labels over creative control, but sometimes due to her own relentless perfectionism.

However, it all paid off with the 1998 release of "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" (Mercury).

The record was Williams' breakthrough, catapulting her into the national limelight and earning her a Grammy Award. Those songs made you feel the grit and taste the grits of a rural Southern morning, and some conveyed such a powerful sense of loss that they could take the wind right out of you. Her new release is completely different. "Essence" was written quickly in response to a romantic breakup, but it contains little of the stereotypical rancor. Instead, the gentle pacing of many of the songs and the softly crooned lyrics give the sense of someone finding her emotional compass after a brief period of numbness.

She opened the set with relaxed versions of "Metal Firecracker" and "Right in Time," from "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," which eased the shift into four songs from the new recording. Then it was time to party. Ratcheting up the tempo and the dynamics, Williams and her five-piece band tore through "2 Cool 2 Be 4-Gotten," which was dedicated to Joey Ramone; "Change the Locks" and "Joy" from her previous recordings, as well as the title track and "Out of Touch," from the new album.

The band, most notably guitarist Bo Ramsey, added nuances to the tunes, but as a unit, it lacked polish, which enhanced the ramshackle feel of the songs.

Williams left the stage after just over an hour, but her encore turned into a 40-minute set of its own that alternated classic blues with quieter new songs and closed with a gentle cover of Howlin' Wolf's "Come to Me Baby," in which Williams' singing began as a sultry command and ended as a seductive whisper.

The Australian country singer Kasey Chambers opened the show with a 40- minute set. Although barely in her 20s, Chambers is a convincing traditionalist, and she delivers her thoughtful material with enough humor to make you wonder if the Louisiana State Fair travels to the outback.

Before closing, let me remind you to keep a eye out for some upcoming CDs on which Lucinda will appear:

“Avalon Blues: A Tribute to the Music Of Mississippi John Hurt “(Vanguard) – June 12 release
“Clinch Mountain Duets –Ralph Stanley (Rebel) – Aug. release
“Poet: A Tribute to Townes Van Zandt” – Sep. 9 release
“Barricades & Brickwalls” – Kasey Chambers – Sep. release
Tribute to Hank Williams (Lost Highway)
Greg Brown Tribute (Red House)

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