Lucinda Williams didn’t wander far from the tree for the title of her latest album, “Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone.”
It’s a line, written by her father, poet Miller Williams, that always stuck with her.
Last summer, a few months before the album came out, she played a show in her hometown of Fayetteville, Ark., but her father wasn’t able to attend. So she brought the show to him, staging an impromptu concert in his living room in Fayetteville. He read the poem, she sang the song and her husband captured it all on video.
After a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, her father died New Year’s Day at 84. Now the album resonates as a lasting tribute and a glimpse into where Lucinda comes from and where she sits now, at 61, a dozen albums deep and a little more reflective - or at least expansive; there are 20 songs on this, her first-ever double album).
In a nearly 40-year career, she’s taken fans like loving prisoners, plunging them into the servitude of heartache and longing with a voice that calls to witness natural-born sorrow. Her words can fall like drops of rust rolling off an old car in the rain, but it’s nothing she can’t escape for romps and ragged, runaway ballads and rockers. Her latest album walks that line again, from the cautionary solace of “Compassion” to the get-over-it-and-move-on tempo of “Walk On.”
Before Williams plays the Uptown Theatre in Napa next Friday, here are the Top 5 Things you should know about her right now:
1. Of the 20 songs on her new album, only two are not written by Williams: “Magnolia” by J.J. Cale and “Compassion,” a poem by her father with additional words and music by Lucinda. As she writes in the album credits, “Dad, as Flannery O’Connor was to you, you were my greatest teacher.”
2. You can bet Williams will be traveling with her ragged and beloved lyric book in tow. At 61, Williams has no qualms about propping up her songbook on stage - not to sing from, word for word, but for an occasional glance so she doesn’t forget lyrics. It’s more of a safety net than a teleprompter.
3. It was Emmylou Harris who once joked that Lucinda could “sing the chrome off a trailer hitch.” The two have been inseparable since the 1980s. A few weeks ago, at an all-star tribute to Harris in Washington, D.C., Williams dedicated “Hickory Wind” to her old friend.
4. Her husband, who recorded video of the aforementioned house concert, is Tom Overby, former Universal Music Group exec. They were married on stage at a 2009 show in Minneapolis.
“When Tom and I got together, it was definitely a marking point in my life and career as a songwriter, because it felt really liberating to know I was with the right person,” she recently told Rolling Stone magazine.
“It let me explore other avenues of writing. I wasn’t going to just be writing about unrequited love anymore.”
5. Reviews of her latest tour have been mostly favorable. In Cleveland, a critic pointed out “the capacity crowd almost stomped the floor out of the second-story venue during her four rousing encores.”
In Charleston, a reviewer noted a few fans were shocked by “what some may consider questionable language” near the end of the sultry “Essence.” And in Chicago, she told the crowd, “We’ll keep playing all night,” pushing the set well past two hours.
Bay Area freelancer John Beck writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat. You can reach him at 280-8014 or john@beckmediaproductions.com.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: