THE UNCUT GUIDE TO THIS MONTH’S KEY RELEASES
LUCINDA WILLIAMS
World’s Gone Wrong HIGHWAY 20/THIRTY TIGERS
Compelling, compassionate state-of-the-nation address from an Americana icon.
By Fiona Shepherd
“When voices are not heard, what the hell are we learning”
ALBUM OF THE MONTH 8/10
MARK SELIGER
LUCINDA WILLIAMS made her name as a chronicler of ordinary lives and a confessor of romantic travails. Over the years her music has toughened and her vocal tone hardened into the remarkable instrument we hear today. Yet she has always written with such lyrical economy, influenced by her father, the poet Miller Williams, and authors such as Flannery O’Connor, who led the way in capturing the Deep South environment of her childhood.
Her purpose was curtailed, but only briefly, when she suffered a stroke in November 2020. Always a ballsy player, she dug right into rehabilitation and was touring again within a year. Weakened down her left side and unable to play guitar as before, she drafted in former Black Crowes guitarist Marc Ford to her superb band and switched up her composition style. She and husband/manager Tom Overby have developed a co-writing relationship which has flourished across her most recent albums, and she has kept her considerable chops up with Lu’s Jukebox, a pandemic-birthed series of live tribute albums to the music of Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Southern soul and, most recently, The Beatles. World’s Gone Wrong is not to be confused, she says, with World Gone Wrong, Bob Dylan’s 1993 album of acoustic folk and blues covers. There is no mistaking the mean electric charge of Williams’ rocking blues, but there is common ground: both collections are stuffed with songs both timeless and timely, documenting and responding to the travails and conditions of their day.