Today is the day that Lucinda's new CD "World Without Tears" is released. The first single from the album is "Righteously" which is being promoted with the following ad:

The reviews for the new CD are coming out thick & fast.  Here are some of them.  The Boston Globe had this article/review in Sunday's paper:

A bruised flower in bloom
Lucinda Williams changes direction with new 'World'

By Joan Anderman, Globe Staff, 4/6/2003

AUSTIN, Texas -- Lucinda Williams is analyzing her tattoo. There is a complicated story behind the two-headed serpent circling her left arm, involving philosophy, Toltec culture, the devolution of society, and a shaman. She gazes down at the powerful symbol etched into her flesh, which at this particular moment is nesting next to the glittery letters on her tank top: BOY BEATER. Then she lifts a bottle of beer to her mouth, throws her head back, and takes a good long slug.

''I'm spiritual,'' Williams says in a laid-back Louisiana drawl. ''But I'm certainly not leading a pious existence.''

Lucinda Williams is a heat-seeking missile for places where the sacred and the profane rub each other raw. She's all about the bad fit, the crossed stars, the dueling purposes. Brazen and easily bruised, she's a rebel who craves approval. A maverick with paper-thin skin. A gifted musician whose confounding 24-year recording career has endured long dry stretches, bloomed with brilliant art, and produced a mere five albums of original music.

On Tuesday it will be six. ''World Without Tears'' -- Williams's stunning follow-up to 2001's Grammy-winning ''Essence'' -- is, on so many levels, a departure. Of course, the woman's exits -- from the wrong city, the wrong lover, the wrong record company -- are so numerous that she seems, mysteriously, to have left more places than she's arrived. This time around, though, Williams has landed. She moved from Nashville to Los Angeles last year and recorded ''World Without Tears'' at the Paramour Estate, a 1920s mansion in Silver Lake. Notorious for her perfectionism, Williams and her road band laid the 13 tracks to tape live, in a massive converted living room with a fireplace -- forsaking studio musicians and endless takes for the first time in her life.

''Everything just sort of happened organically,'' Williams says. ''I started writing two years ago, on the road, when I was going through this really intense breakup thing. [With Richard Price, her former bassist.] There's about five songs on the album about the same person. Then the 9/11 thing happened, which prompted `American Dream.' So much stuff was going on, and I was writing on the road. We were on a roll and just kept going.''

Breaking out again

Williams's masterful ''Car Wheels on a Gravel Road'' -- the 1998 album that catapulted her to stardom -- was a pristinely crafted model of raw emotion. It's as if she spent the three years it took to make that album painstakingly erasing everything but a hard, sweet ache. ''World Without Tears'' moves in the opposite direction. It feels like a flowering -- fertilized with heartache and grief, but a blossoming nonetheless. Six months of overdubs couldn't have summoned the natural soul that sets these songs in motion. It comes as no surprise that Williams crafts country blues so wretched you can practically taste the salt in her wounds. But she also rocks hard (think ''Exile on Main St.'') and burrows into R&B (she's been listening to Jill Scott). She flirts with hip-hop and has written the most forceful lyrics of her career. The whole collection is delivered with a gorgeous, mournful economy.

''Lucinda's been bagged as alt-country, and she's breaking out of that,'' says Luke Lewis, president of Nashville-based Lost Highway Records. Lewis signed her as one of the young label's cornerstone artists, along with Ryan Adams, two years ago. ''I don't know if it's right to say she's more self-confident, but you can hear something like that on this album. She's comfortable in her skin.''

The night before we met, Williams spent the evening in a local studio with Willie Nelson recording a duet of ''Over Time,'' a desolate ballad from the new disc that Nelson is going to put on his own upcoming album. Two days later, she played a triumphant set of misery-choked country-rock tunes at Lost Highway's South by Southwest music showcase. She is, Lewis notes, a masterful translator of pain. But despite her unflinching attention to ravaged hearts and minds, Williams is glowing. It's not just the candles flickering in the Texas twilight. It's more than the irresistible strains of Al Green drifting out the window of her hotel bungalow. It may have something to do with turning 50.

''It's a big damn deal,'' says Williams, who is tiny, leather-clad, and radiant. ''It felt more important than good or bad. When you say it -- 50! -- it just sounds so serious. But it's liberating. Like, you know, I've got something to say and I know what I'm talking about. Listening to Bob Dylan sing about being sick of love means a lot more to me than hearing a 25-year-old sing about love. I guess I feel like I've arrived.''

A graduation

Williams is clearly intoxicated by a sense of hard-won power. She's deeply moved, however, to have earned the respect of her mentor, most trusted critic, and confidant: her father. Poet and professor Miller Williams, who wrote verse for President Clinton's second inaugural ceremony, has been reading and editing his daughter's words since she was a teenager. This time, for the first time, her pages of lyrics came back in the mail untouched.

''I called him and said `Dad, don't you have any comments or changes?' He said `No.' I said `Nothing?' He said `This is the closest to poetry you've ever done.' I said, `Does that mean I've graduated?' He said `Yeah.' And that was a big, big deal.''

Songwriting is an arduous process for Williams. Sometimes events -- a love affair gone awry, another cross-country move -- are catalysts for bursts of creativity. She also finds profound inspiration in the work of other artists. Although ''Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings'' will evoke the Rolling Stones on first listen, the song -- and the heavier rock feel that cuts across the entire album -- was inspired by former Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg, whose solo music Williams discovered last year.

''I became really taken with his songwriting,'' she says, ''how he used this literary approach to writing and set it against this bed of great rock 'n' roll music. I just inundated myself with his records. I think I was ready to explore the harder edges a little more, too. For years I've been saying I have too many ballads, but the rockers have always been harder for me to write. This time, yeah, they did come out like a train wreck.''

Moving on

Getting over a train wreck of a relationship -- ''an intense, chaotic, crazy, insane affair'' -- was one catalyst for Williams's move back to LA, where she lived for a while in the mid-'80s. She'd also had it with Nashville. She says it was like living in a fishbowl. The song ''Atonement,'' a scorching, blues-rap indictment of organized religion, came from ''nine years of having it crammed down my throat in churches on every corner,'' Williams says. Her version of redemption can be found in ''Ventura,'' where the songwriter forces herself to ''Lean over the toilet/And throw up my confession/Cleanse my soul/Of this hidden obsession.'' Oppression also came in the form of fame. With the release of ''Car Wheels'' five years ago, Williams suddenly turned from a cult hero into an icon.

''In a way she was burned by all the attention,'' says Warren Pash, a bass player and friend who lives in Nashville. ''Lucinda's extremely emotionally generous, and gives the same amount of herself to a stranger in a bar as she does going out onstage. People were coming up to her and wanting her to be there for them. The increasing notoriety was a lot for her to deal with.''

Needless to say, it's all in the songs.

''Tangerines and persimmons/And sugarcane/Grapes and honeydew melon/Enough fit for a queen,'' she sings in ''Fruits of My Labor.'' Dripping chords on tremolo guitar, slow circles on a snare drum, and a soft bed of bass notes cushion Williams's brave, broken drawl. ''I been tryin' to enjoy the fruits of my labor, I been cryin' for you boy but truth is my savior.'' It's pure, unadulterated soul. A four-minute triumph of will over the fickle heart. When she counsels, ''Baby, sweet baby if it's all the same/Take the glory any day over the fame,'' it's hard to know exactly who she's talking to. Maybe that's the point. To the suggestion that she's endowed with a fearless taste for revealing herself, no matter how confounding or unsettling the view, Williams demurs.

''I enjoy pushing people's buttons. But I'm still concerned about what they think. I guess I'm a complex person,'' says Williams, who has yet to walk a straight line, or choose wisely, or cheer up. No wonder her songs sound so true.

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com
This story ran on page N1 of the Boston Globe on 4/6/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

The New York Times had two articles.  One reviewed the new CD and the other discussed other artists who are following in Lucinda's footsteps.

THE NEW YORK TIMES - April 6, 2003
Lucinda Williams: Back So Soon?
By ALAN LIGHT

I'm too rock 'n' roll for this neighborhood," said Lucinda Williams. "I've already had complaints from the neighbors on both sides."

Ms. Williams has returned to the Los Angeles area, where she was living back when her glorious, self-titled 1988 album introduced her finely etched country-rock-blues songs to a national audience. But she's not living in hip Silver Lake or Los Feliz; instead, she has moved to the suburban San Fernando Valley — where, as so often happens in her tumultuous life, it was only a matter of time until she would get into trouble.

"I'm just always moving, I guess," she said on the telephone from her home in Burbank. "I wanted to get out of Nashville, I was getting bored there. I bring so much stuff with me anyway, I sort of set up camp wherever I go, so it doesn't really matter where I am — I could be here, I could be in Alaska or in Iowa. I live in my head, pretty much."

Ms. Williams's itinerant ways and eclectic tastes are the glue that holds together her stunning seventh album, "World Without Tears," which will be released on Tuesday. From the revved-up stomp of "Bleeding Fingers" to the heart-tugging old-school country on "Over Time" and "People Talkin' " to several hip-hop-inflected narratives, it's the first recording that truly illustrates the range of a woman whose conversation is sprinkled with easy references to ZZ Top, Nina Simone, No Doubt and Allen Ginsberg.

"My dad is a big fan of John Coltrane, Chet Baker," she said, referring to her father, the poet and professor Miller Williams. "I remember as a kid that was always playing — that and the country stuff. There was never any question about, `How can you listen to Hank Williams and John Coltrane?' It makes perfect sense to me — that's what I grew up on."

What distinguishes "World Without Tears" from the rest of her extraordinary body of work, though, isn't just the genre-jumping; it's also the raw, loose sound of an album cut almost entirely live in the studio. Most of the songs were written on the road and rehearsed onstage during her last tour, with the idea of then capturing them quickly and purely. It was a leap that the 50-year-old Ms. Williams, notoriously wary of the recording process, was both eager and terrified to make.

"I've always ascertained that this is the best way to make a record," she said in her dry Louisiana drawl. "But recording for me is an arduous process. I'm always hanging on to one or two little sounds on one or two songs I'm obsessing on, and I can't seem to completely let go. That's just my own biological pitfall."

Ms. Williams's studio neuroses are no secret; her signature album, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," which won a Grammy in 1998, took a well-documented five years and three sets of producers to finish. And her control issues aren't limited to her music — she tends to live by her own schedule and turns miserable, even hostile, on those occasions when she needs to be in front of a camera.

Mark Howard, the co-producer of "World Without Tears, who had never worked with Ms. Williams before, determined that his strategy would be to make things as painless as possible. "The band came in the afternoon and worked up a song," he said. "All Lucinda had to do was walk in at 7, drink her coffee to calm her down, and sing. We'd do three takes on each song, one song a day, usually ended up using the second take, and that was it."

Mr. Howard, who has engineered albums by the likes of Bob Dylan and U2, said that with Ms. Williams, "it's all about staying out of her way and trying to make her comfortable."

"It's like an animal," he said. "Show them that you're scared and they get nervous."

Ms. Williams's relative ease and self-confidence while making "World Without Tears" is evident in the intensity and focus of the songs themselves. For a woman dubbed "America's best songwriter" by Time magazine two years ago, she continues to stretch her use of language and song structure. These lyrics add a precise physicality to her already blunt, singular vocabulary — "You're a bad pain in my gut/ I wanna spit you out," she sings in "Minneapolis." On "Righteously," the words are deceptively simple ("Get excited and bite my neck/ Get me all worked up like that"), but what lingers is the way the syllables wind and twist around the song's sultry groove.

In some ways, the writing is an extension of her last project, "Essence" — the 2001 album that frustrated many of Ms. Williams's fans by turning away from the gothic, short story-like detail of her earlier songs toward a sparer, more universal style (Bruce Springsteen took a similar approach last year on "The Rising," to similarly mixed response from his devotees).

The triumph of "World Without Tears" lies in the way she was able to take that clarity and adapt it to a wider palette of sounds and styles. Not that the album is flawless; too many of the songs revisit what is fast becoming an overused stock character for Ms. Williams, the broken, misunderstood man in whom only she can see the beauty. But the missteps are generally the result of ambition — the squalling evangelical rant "Atonement" is simply overwrought — not of the laziness that can strike critics's darlings like herself.

This command of craft, though, doesn't seem to have seeped over into her personal life. The songs on "World Without Tears" are relentlessly bleak, adding up to an hourlong chronicle of romantic disappointment and betrayal. The elegiac title track feels like an argument for the necessity, even the catharsis, of pain ("If we lived in a world without tears/ How would misery know which back door to walk through"). "Yeah, I've been going through some stuff lately," Ms. Williams said. "But I didn't want to bum people out. Believe it or not, I do still see the glass as half full, though I know it may not look that way."

Ms. Williams is most pleased with the reaction she's gotten from the one critic she constantly cites, and who is obviously never far from her thoughts. "I send everything to my dad," she said. "He's always been my writing mentor, and — O.K., I'll say it, I like to have his approval, 'cause I think he's a great writer and he's my dad. I sent him these songs, and he said he didn't have any constructive criticism to make on them. He said, `I love it, it's great — this is the closest thing to poetry you've ever done.' Needless to say, I was overjoyed to hear that. So I said, `Well, does that mean I've graduated?' "

Here is the other article:

THE NEW YORK TIMES - April 6, 2003
Lucinda's Heirs (And Imitators)
By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN

 In the 1980's, the mordant fiction of Raymond Carver had aspiring writers joining masters of fine arts programs in droves. In the 60's, singers strapped on harmonicas, eager to become the next Bob Dylan. A few gifted heirs emerged, but in both cases, the hopefuls rarely matched the originals.

The last few years have seen the emergence of what might be called the "Lucinda Effect": a proliferation of female singer-songwriters in their 20's and 30's whose music owes a pronounced debt to that of Lucinda Williams. She is indeed a worthy archetype. Yet while her acolytes are articulate, and some hint at her narrative command, most merely echo her music, availing themselves of her cascading guitar lines, thwacking backbeats and yearning vocals. Less kin than clones, many of these women seem less interested in finding their own voices than in trying on Ms. Williams's for size.

This year's model is Kathleen Edwards, a 24-year-old singer-songwriter from Ottawa, who is shaping up to be a dark horse "it girl" after the fashion of Norah Jones. "Failer," Ms. Edwards's debut album, begins auspiciously, with "Six O'clock News," a vivid, mid-tempo rocker redolent of Ms. Williams's "Drunken Angel"; that's followed by "One More Song the Radio Won't Play," an acrid tale of betrayal that sounds more lived than imagined. Much of the rest of "Failer," however, strains under the weight of received malaise and tired imagery ("He was the lone wolf, you could see it in his eyes") set to drowsy arrangements.

The entrant in the "New Lu" sweepstakes who generated the most buzz last year was Tift Merritt, a 28-year-old North Carolinian with a willowy soprano and an ear for down-home vernacular. Ms. Merritt's current album, "Bramble Rose," has its moments, notably the Stones-inspired rockers and country-soul ballads, yet it's ultimately more pro forma than felt.

Ms. Williams's followers range from studied to spontaneous, from former grad students like Caroline Herring and Laura Minor to free spirits like Pieta Brown and Mary McBride. Ms. Brown, the daughter of the Iowa singer-songwriter Greg Brown, enlisted the guitarist Bo Ramsey to produce her self-titled CD, a languorous, penumbral record akin to Ms. Williams's "Essence" (on which Mr. Ramsey also worked). Ms. McBride, who was born in Louisiana and now lives in Brooklyn, favors the Cajun and blues accents of Ms. Williams's earlier work; at least two tracks from her empathetic "Everything Seemed Alright" measure up to that standard. The same can be said of portions of "Perfect City," the country-punk debut by Florence Dore, a Nashville native and Faulkner scholar who did her post-doctoral work at New York University.

Not surprisingly, Ms. Williams's most distinctive inheritors, women like Kasey Chambers and Mary Gauthier (pronounced go-SHAY), aren't so much imitating her music as following her lead — by listening to their own voices. Raised in the Australian outback, Ms. Chambers, and her winsome country-rock, have received considerable attention, including accolades from Ms. Williams. Ms. Gauthier, by contrast, remains largely unknown, even though she is perhaps the most gifted of Ms. Williams's "daughters."

Gurf Morlix, a longtime collaborator of Ms. Williams's, produced Ms. Gauthier's latest album, "Filth & Fire." Galvanized by lightly twanging arrangements and sung in a drawl that evokes the Louisiana bayous in which she grew up, Ms. Gauthier's record abounds with plainspoken pearls like "I fell into the space between us/ And that's a long way to fall." In "Good-bye," she reveals, "I was born a bastard child in New Orleans/ To a woman I've never seen." Ms. Gauthier then wonders if her birth mother ever held her, confirming that she not only has stories of her own to tell, but a singular voice with which to tell them.

Time Magazine reviewed "World Without Tears" as follows:

TIME MAGAZINE
Monday, Apr. 07, 2003
Bring in the Noise
Lucinda Williams has always been a poet. With her terrific new album, she's now a poet who rocks
By JOSH TYRANGIEL

For decades, the American record-buying public has made its position clear. People do not want poetry mixing with their popular music any more than they want Fred Durst speaking in full sentences. Avril Lavigne's level of complexity and Alanis Morissette's version of irony will do just fine for the drive to the shore, thank you. The two legendary exceptions are Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Both have a poet's gift for turning common words into indelible images and a rock star's knack for churning out melodies that make their poetry subliminal. They bring the pain and the noise.

It's tempting to say that with her seventh album, World Without Tears, Lucinda Williams is knocking on Bob and Bruce's door. Tempting, but untrue, because for years she has been their equal as a writer of aching lyrics and easy hooks. But owing to the no-poetry rule, and a few other irrational market prejudices, she was branded with that deadliest of commercial adjectives: challenging. Her high-art pedigree — she is the daughter of poet Miller Williams, who wrote Inaugural verse for Bill Clinton in 1997--scared off arena crowds; her blending of country, folk, rock and blues made her Kryptonite to rigidly formatted radio; her weakness for bass players and love of Southern Gothic led some to dismiss her as eccentric. An 11,000-word profile in the New Yorker that concluded Williams wrote best when she was thoroughly miserable didn't help matters.

Williams will cop to being eccentric. Anyone who undertakes interviews in a giant pink furry hat and an ISSUES T shirt doesn't leave herself much choice. ("It's a crazy world right now," Williams explains. "May as well wear a crazy hat.") But challenging? Miserable? "Maybe people see my songs as sad. Whatever," she says dismissively in her Louisiana drawl. "Even if you want to talk about a darker song of mine, I still see the glass as half full. I'm coming from a place of empowerment. I'm not being sucked down into the bowels of misery. I mean, Gawd!"

She's right. Her past work isn't all that dark, but it's easier to change your approach than to change the market, and on World Without Tears Williams tries something that brings her optimism into sharper relief. World is a rock record, and a great one. There are country and blues flourishes, and a few changes of pace, but if you block out the supremely crafted (and yes, dolorous) lyrics on tracks such as Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings and Righteously, you could be listening to vintage Rolling Stones. "I had wanted to do a more up-tempo thing," says Williams, "and a few years ago Greg Sowders, who I used to be married to, said, 'Lucinda, you just need to do a rock record. This could be your Exile on Main Street!'"

From World's first lyric--"Baby see how I been living, velvet curtains on the windows to/Keep the bright and unforgiving light from shining through"--Williams admits that she's a sucker for the wrong man, and no, she'll probably never learn. But the music, recorded live in a California mansion, acts as a counterweight. "Recording live," says Williams, "just makes everything sound a lot warmer and more buoyant. I like that contrast."

The contrast doesn't just make Williams' songs more accessible, it also allows her to communicate a more complete range of emotions. Those Three Days is about an apparently budding long-term romance that turned out to be just a fling. "I was pretty pissed off when I wrote it," says Williams, and her anger comes through in such screeching lines as "You found a hole and in you came" and "Scorpions crawl across my screen." Then the music rises and segues into a chorus--"Did you only love me for those three days?"--that wouldn't be out of place on a Lionel Richie album (or rather, a good Lionel Richie album). "It's like this pop refrain," Williams says. "When I finished, I thought, 'This is just too schizoid; it's two songs in one.'" But unrequited love carries with it a series of conflicting emotions, and a song about unrequited love should too.

The flirtation between happiness and sadness is all over World Without Tears. Sweet Side is about a woman who loves her man, a victim of child abuse, because "I know you don't mean to do the cruel things you do." Minneapolis contrasts the open wound of a relationship with the glistening whiteness of the Minnesota winter, while the perky People Talkin' decodes a fair number of Williams' riddles: "Livin' is full of misery and pain/Somebody calls you a dirty name, keep on walkin'."

This kind of equanimity and focus are not what Williams is famous for in her personal life. As a child she spent time in Chile and Mexico, and as an adult she has a habit of changing locations — and lovers — every few years. (The bass-player thing is real: Richard Price, her former bassist, was the inspiration for much of 2001's Essence and several songs on World.) Happiness hasn't always been easy to come by, and her fans make such a fuss over her in part because they think she's too devoted to her work to have a clear shot at contentment.

Williams isn't interested in talking about her romantic travails, but she recently relocated to Los Angeles, and she feels that her new work reflects a sense of peace with the dualities in her life. "There's this photo of Leonard Cohen that came out during his last record," she says. "And everybody'd been talking about how he'd been in this monastery for a while. And there he was, lounging on this couch, and he had a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. There's a tendency to feel like 'If I say this one thing, then I can't do this other thing.' I finally realized I don't have to pick. There aren't any rules."

Copyright © 2003 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

Here is a review from ShakingThrough.net:

Bring the Pain
Lucinda Williams: World Without Tears

Lost Highway, 2003
Rating: 4.3
April 5, 2003
By Laurence Station

On the title track of World Without Tears, singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams' seventh album, the Louisiana-born artist comes tantalizingly close to summing up her philosophy on life and its lessons: "If we lived in a world without tears / How would bruises find a face to lie upon? / How would scars find the skin to etch themselves into? / How would broken find the bones?" Williams is a glutton for punishment; her art couldn't exist without it. She's been making distinct, idiosyncratic and fiercely independent music since the late '70s, yet it wasn't until 1998's Grammy-winning Car Wheels On A Gravel Road (six arduous years in the making) that she gained widespread acknowledgment for her work. After years spent watching others take her songs to the top of the charts, of being a Nashville outsider who just happened to write A-List Music City tunes, Lucinda, with her weather-cracked, ever-on-the-edge-of-breaking-apart voice and notoriously fickle live performances, was in demand. Finally, she had reached the summit.

The problem is, Williams' work has always been defined by that struggle, by reaching so deeply within herself to prove her naysayers wrong, that her newfound success seemed something of a Pyrrhic victory. Artistic and material success is wonderful, but who wants to hear songs about how great things are going? What deep well of pain would Lucinda explore post-Car Wheels? 2001's Essence, with its minimalist production and Williams paring her usually verbose lyrics (often redolent with geographical imagery) down to the bare bones, readily answered that burning question. ("Lonely Girls." "Steal Your Love." "Reason To Cry." See a pattern emerging?) The album stood as her most emotionally direct, intimately concerned work to date, in spite (or perhaps because) of her newfound success.

World Without Tears is informed by similar tales of heartbreak and failed relationships, but bears the hallmark of being the most musically polished (albeit in an immediate, live manner befitting its recording) and sonically textured record of Williams' career. Listeners familiar with Car Wheels will certainly have every right to be skeptical about such a claim -- after all, that effort featured such seasoned heavyweights as Emmylou Harris, Jim Lauderdale, Steve Earle, Buddy Miller and Charlie Sexton. But unlike Car Wheels, World Without Tears benefits from live performances by Williams' crack backing band. Guitarist Doug Pettibone shines brightest, especially on "Righteously," with its creatively circular guitar loops, and the fire and brimstone crunch of "Atonement." Drummer Jim Christie and bassist Taras Prodaniuk accord themselves handsomely throughout as well. As a result, World Without Tears is the first Lucinda Williams album where the sound rivals (and, at points, surpasses) the lyrics. That's no small feat, and it's the album's true triumph.

About those lyrics: World Without Tears is far from Williams' strongest lyrical effort, but it does feature some of the best songs she's written. The languorous opener "Fruits Of My Labor," wherein Williams addresses her newfound fame and the trials and tribulations of becoming content with success; "Those Three Days," about a romantic fling that means more to one partner than to the other; and the bleak, morose "Minneapolis," where "black clouds have covered up the sun again:" All of these songs resonate with an equal balance of measured craft and Williams' heartbreakingly poignant delivery. All three confidently stack up to anything else in her formidable canon, and to even imagine anyone else covering them is near impossible.

But World Without Tears drags in the spots where Williams detaches herself from the subject matter and deals in generalities. "Over Time" is a tremulous, overly languid, post-Romance blues number too generic to leave more than a marginal impression, while "American Dream," with its sing-speak rap on everything from drug addicted Vietnam vets to disappointed Navajo mothers, is one of the worst songs Williams has ever recorded. Thankfully, it sounds great, with bassist Prodaniuk masterfully holding things together. But trying to spew a litany of American ills and failing to place them within a larger context (save for the pointless, too-obvious tagline "Everything is wrong"), is uncharacteristic laziness, a misguided fast grab at thematic profundity.

Despite these misfires, however, World Without Tears bears the undeniable stamp of one of our truest and all-too-rare artists. Here's selfishly hoping the wound in Lucinda's heart never heals completely, if only so we can continue listening as she struggles to assuage the burning pain inside.

Amazon.com reviewed it too:

Editorial Review by Don McLeese
"Most artists who appeal to adult listeners tend to settle into a comfortable niche, but Lucinda Williams refuses to play it safe. Instead, her music stings like an open wound, as she continues to strip away the protective layers from her art's emotional core. Though Williams has long been prized for the naked honesty of her music, this collection is even rawer than its predecessors. From the down-and-dirty bar-band blues of 'Atonement' to the Rolling Stones-style swagger of 'Bleeding Fingers' to the tricky balance of debasement and transcendence in 'Ventura,' Williams leaves the nerve endings of her music exposed. With the band opting for first-take immediacy rather than polish, some of the most powerful material is also the neediest, as the singer addresses lovers who have disrespected her ('Righteously') or abandoned her ('Those Three Days,' 'Minneapolis'). Though her attempts at rap on 'Sweet Side' and 'American Dream' might cause diehard fans to wince, her willingness to take creative chances reaffirms her position at the vanguard of a rootsy progressivism that transcends musical category. Simply put, there's more Patti Smith in her than there is Patsy Cline."

Rolling Stone gave it only three stars.  Here is their review, followed by some readers' comments:

Lucinda Williams - World Without Tears
THE ROLLING STONE REVIEW
 
Lucinda Williams' World Without Tears opens with a note of tremolo guitar. For a fraction of a second it hangs there, like water waiting to drip from a faucet, unfinished but perfect. "Fruits of My Labor," the song that follows, is languorous, unadulterated soul. Brushes circle a snare head, and the bass takes its sweet time; Williams' drawl, scraping the high notes, summons the spirit of Otis Redding. "Tangerines and persimmons and sugar cane/Grapes and honeydew melon, enough fit for a queen," she sings, rolling the words on her tongue.
World Without Tears follows up not just Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Williams' 1998 masterpiece about American roadways and the search for impossible love, but also the relatively underrated Essence, from 2001, on which her gaze turned quietly but devastatingly inward. Musically, it's as superb as anything she's ever done. Williams recorded this one live in a 1920s L.A. mansion, and the arrangements are wonderfully spare: Pedal steel, harmonica and Wurlitzer flesh out her songs' gorgeous amalgams of country, blues and Southern rock. Doug Pettibone's electric-guitar solo on "Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Strings" evokes the poetic economy of Keith Richards at his Exile on Main Street finest.

But underneath the sublime sounds, something crucial is missing. Williams has never been one to flinch from dark subjects -- she's described funerals, peered over bridges into rivers where lovers disappeared -- but here the bleakness is relentless. She gives us a bevy of references to heroin addiction, including two graphic images of characters throwing up; "Sweet Side" deals with child abuse; "Minneapolis" may allude to rape. The album's most ambitious songs are also its weakest. The loud, macho blues workout "Atonement" makes me want to head to the bar. "American Dream," with its semi-rapped lyrics and gnarled patriotism, is an overwrought mess.

By the time you get to the end of World Without Tears, you're in a grouchy mood. Where's the sweetness that she always gave us to offset the suffering? Where's the wounded innocence, the child within always believing in something better? It's not her pain we love, it's the redemption she's always delivered with it. Williams can't always be brilliant. But the tantalizing promise of that first tremolo note makes the eventual disappointment of Tears a little more bitter to the taste.

KAREN SCHOEMER
(From RS 920, April 17, 2003)

cheinrich writes: Somewhat Disagreed with the RS Review

 While the album isn't exactly uplifting, it's still beautiful in its pain. It's not like some macho (c)rap album where it's so cool to be angry and ugly without any redemption. She and her band successfully weave country and rock through the grand tradition of the blues. They pull it off without a hitch or without any pretense whatsoever. It's gut-wrenching and it's real. She's not some fake "tough" singer trying to make a point. She's the real deal. Tough but tender. She's easily one of the best out there, and this album will easily prove it. Her fans will not be disappointed. I think many will think this stands aside "Car Wheels On A Gravel Road", if not even a little above it. DON'T MISS IT!
 
EdP1 writes: Somewhat Disagreed with the RS Review

I have listened to the album, and while a few songs weren't up to the level of Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, it is still excellent on the whole. "Those Three Days" is chilling; "American Dream" is affecting and honest, not overwrought; and "Righteously" is vintage Lucinda. You can feel her passion and intensity, like she's singing directly to you, and that ACHE in her voice gets you in the gut. When she expresses her pain, you feel her pain. There's no singer in Nashville that dares to venture as far into naked emotion as Lucinda, and no one does it so convincingly.
 
This coming fall PBS will air a seven part film series called "The Blues", which will include various films. "The Soul Of A Man" is the 4th film in the series, and Lucinda will be in the film.  Here is a brief preview.

The Soul of a Man - Director Wim Wenders (Buena Vista Social Club; Wings of Desire; Paris, Texas) explores the lives of his favorite blues artists - Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson and J. B. Lenoir - in a film that is part history and part personal pilgrimage. The film tells the story of these lives in music through a fictional film-within-a-film, rare archival footage, and covers of their songs by contemporary musicians, including Bonnie Raitt, Lucinda Williams, Lou Reed, Eagle Eye Cherry, Nick Cave, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Cassandra Wilson, Los Lobos and others.

The television series "Crossing Jordan" has aired two shows which had Lucinda on the soundtrack.  The first show was broadcast April 8, 2002 and we heard "Essence" at the beginning and "Steal Your Love" at the end.  The second show aired on October 14, 2002 and a previously unheard and unrecorded song was used at various points in the story.  The song is called "Hang Down Your Head " and it is now available on a newly released soundtrack CD titled "Crossing Jordan."  Other artists on the CD include Richard Thompson, Joe Henry, Alison Krauss, Rosemary Clooney, Sam Phillips & Jill Hennessy.

Lucinda will appear in New Orleans at the end of this month and then she will tour Europe for the month of May.  She will appear in Scotland, England, Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Norway. When she returns to the United States after this tour, she will be opening for  Neil Young & Crazy Horse during June, July and August.  Her tour dates are posted on Pollstar.com as well as the official Lucinda website.