Lucinda Williams’ new album, Blessed, has been out for two weeks. So there’s no excuse for you not to buy it and put it instantly into heavy rotation on your playback device of choice.
Martin Chilton, Digital Culture Editor at The Guardian is fully on board (if that means anything to you).
Although she has been performing for 37 years, she is still at the height of the song-writing prowess that prompted Time magazine to call her ‘America’s finest songwriter’.
The sad song “I Don’t Know How You’re Living” is about her brother, whom she admits she “hasn’t heard from in a long time”.
Bleak and haunting too is “Seeing Black” as she tries to make sense of the mind of a suicidal friend (the late songwriter Vic Chesnutt, who was recently the subject of an album of covers by The Cowboy Junkies called Demon).
Williams said: “Yeah, it was inspired by Vic. I should have said that instead of saying it was about him. It was inspired by his suicide, which happened during the time that I was writing. It was so sudden and shocking and stunning and sad . . . He had a wicked, wild sense of humor. And he had this sweetness about him.”
Elvis Costello, who sang a duet with Williams on 2008’s “Little Honey,’’ contributes searing guitar work on a handful of songs. Having admired his previous work in various genres, Williams chose Don Was to co-produce the album, and his touch is often “light and ethereal,” according to Boston.com.
The new Lost Highway album needs very little promotion, but the label produced a series of well-made Web videos anyway. Here’s one: