Lucinda Williams – World’s Gone Wrong
★★★★
HIGHWAY 20/THIRTY TIGERS
Lucinda Williams’s built a body of work that thrives on autobiography and the confessional, fearless vignettes of broken love affairs and men going off the rails. But as she explained in her 2023 memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You, she comes from a family who “understood and taught me the power of language and music to create a more just world”. Williams may be bloodied but she’s unbowed: if anything, she’s as mad as hell and she aint’ going to take it anymore.
There’s an air of apocalypse, of last things about World Gone Wrong, the same cocktail of impending doom, rock ‘n roll swagger and gospel intensity that infuses the Stones’ Gimme Shelter. We are in the hour of darkness from the opening title track, a companion piece to Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car where narrator Williams portrays a struggling couple trying to get by in a contemporary America that grows bleaker by the hour. He’s a car salesman and she’s a nurse, homelessness and foreclosure are everywhere, people are falling through the cracks – all they can do is hold on to each other and “play some Miles”. It’s kind of blue, kind of black, but while Doug Pettibone’s guitars snarl, Rob Burger’s B-3 soothes and Brady Blade’s drums pound, it’s a song of consolation, with a soaring chorus where Williams is supported by emerging African-American country star Brittney Spencer.
Liars and disinformation abound, the head is pounding, the levee’s about to break in Something’s Gotta Give. Williams is here to tell us what we’re feeling, to put an arm around our shoulders, most explicitly in two superb duets. The first, Bob Marley’s So Much Trouble In The World, pairs her with the resolute Mavis Staples, two unbowed spirits facing down the ego mad rulers in their spaceships. The second’s the gospel tinged closer, We’ve Come Too Far To Turn Around, where Williams and Norah Jones gather around the piano to bear witness to a nation still besmirched by the legacy of racism spelt out in the earlier blues, Black Tears, and yet somehow manage to offer solidarity and even hope.
Williams has never been one to flinch from the truth but while she’s happy to upbraid the greedy and dishonest, she’s also happy to admit she too has supped with the devil. She’s still recovering from the 2020 stroke that’s stopped her guitar playing and left an unmistakable wobble that’s only added to the slippage and sway in that magical voice. She’s frail, wounded, and angry but she’s ready to tell it like it is; even as she turns 73, Williams sounds present, ready to mix it, and therefore as good a hope as we have.
World’s Gone Wrong is out January 23 via Highway 20/Thirty Tigers.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade I HMV
Tracklisting:
1. The World’s Gone Wrong (feat. Brittney Spencer)
2. Something’s Gotta Give (feat. Brittney Spencer)
3. Low Life
4. How Much Did You Get For Your Soul
5. So Much Trouble In The World (feat. Mavis Staples)
6. Sing Unburied Sing
7. Black Tears
8. Punchline
9. Freedom Speaks
10. We’ve Come Too Far To Turn Around (feat. Norah Jones)
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