Lucinda Williams

SWEET RE-RELEASE

Lucinda Williams brings back her 1988 Americana classic, with a little help from her fans

by Matt Ashare |  
Published January 15, 2014 http://www.newsadvance.com/the_burg/music/pop_rocks/

The 1988 "Rough Trade Album"

In early 1989, I was convinced by a couple of friends to come along with them to a now long-gone small club in Cambridge, MA to see an artist I’d never heard of, not that it’s all that likely I had much else to do that evening, or that it would have been particularly unusual for me to check out an obscure performer. I don’t recall whether there was much buzz about Lucinda Williams. She was 36 years old at the time, and in the midst of relaunching a career that had gotten off to rocky start a full decade earlier, when the Louisiana native failed to get much traction with a gritty collection of trad acoustic blues reworkings — Robert Johnson covers; Hank Williams’ “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)”; the new Orleans flavored “Me and My Chauffer,” credited to Clifton Chennier and Memphis Minnie — on the Smithsonian Folkways label. In that respect, her timing had been less than optimal: the blues-steeped folk revival of the ’60s was just a distant memory, and it would be a good decade before widespread interest in Americana would be reawakened by, among other things, the reappearance of the Smithsonian Folkways’ Anthology of American Folk Music (a/k/a, “The Harry Smith Box”).

      Without access to now readily searchable online discographies, I would have had no way of knowing about Williams’ past, save for word-of-mouth. And, all I remember being aware of is that Williams had just released, in 1988, a self-titled album on Rough Trade, a London-based, punk-oriented indie label. That, along with the urging of friends, was good enough for me.

     At this point, whatever details of that show I do remember — the alluringly waifish, bleached blond Williams fronting a foursome of laidback Nashville looking dudes with bolo ties; the darkly churning blues rocker “Changed the Locks” (later covered by Tom Petty); the melodic chime of “Passionate Kisses” — have likely been distorted by the tendency of memory to romanticize such things. But Williams, who emerged on 1988’s Lucinda Williams as a gifted songwriter in the country-rock vein, definitely left an impression that resonated well beyond the walls of the club.

     Over the next few years, it wasn’t uncommon to see punk/alternative bands like the Lemonheads tear into one of Williams’ songs during an impromptu encore. And, both Patty Loveless and Mary Chapin Carpenter would go on to have country hits with their own version of tunes from Lucinda Williams — Loveless reached #20 on the charts with the aching “The Night’s Too Long” in 1990, and Carpenter’s recording of “Passionate Kisses” earned Williams a Grammy for “Best Country Song” in 1994. Indeed, just ten years after its initial release, when Williams scored the closest thing she’s had to a mainstream breakthrough with her 1998, Grammy-winning, big-label debut Car Wheels On a Gravel Road (on Mercury), Lucinda Williams was well on its way to being embraced as a modern Americana classic, part of a canon that includes seminal albums by Steve Earle, Uncle Tupelo, and Ryan Adams’ Whiskeytown, not to mention legacy artists like Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, and Bob Dylan.      An expanded version of the “Rough Trade Album,” as some now refer to it, was reissued by another international indie, KOCH, in the wake of Car Wheels in 1998.  But, apparently, nobody actually bothered to keep the disc in print after that. I found that out the hard way back in November when I went online intending to buy a copy for one of my nieces: the cheapest of the few copies of the KOCH reissue I did find was going for $60, and several were priced well above that. The original Rough Trade vinyl — I’ve still got mine, though it’s suffered through repeated spins and a couple of cross-country moves — is now a bona fide collector’s item.

Perhaps it’s just a sign of our digital times, of the increasingly diffuse and fleeting nature of music in the virtual cloud, but the Lucinda Williams CD, a fairly easily reproducible product that there clearly was some demand for, had been sitting in a kind of commercial purgatory for some period of time. As Williams reflects, somewhat hyperbolically, on her PledgeMusic.com homepage, “For decades, people have wondered why they couldn’t buy this album in stores. . .”

Okay, so maybe it’s only really been a decade and change. But, just in time for its 25^th anniversary, and for Williams’ 61^st birthday, is that the “Rough Trade Album” is back in print. And, as yet another sign of our digital times, it’s largely thanks to Williams herself, who procured the rights to the recordings, and to all of the fans who chipped in through PledgeMusic, a crowd-funding site that’s currently hosting projects by modern-rockers Sevendust, singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones, and Brit-punk stalwarts the Buzzcocks (who, coincidentally, also got their start on Rough Trade). There are several packages available: a pledge of $18 get you a digital download; a newly reconfigured, expanded format two-CD digipack, featuring a live set from the Netherlands in ’89, is $25; and, for true audiophiles, there’s the 180-gram, translucent red vinyl LP, for $35. If you happen to be looking for an heirloom, there are also autographed copies of the CD and LP for sale, along with posters and t-shirts.

I’m all for crowd-funding, particularly to the extent that it cuts out the record label as middle man and allows for a more unencumbered kind of artist freedom. And, yet, it’s worth at least pausing for a moment to consider how Williams might have faired in 1988 if, as a largely unknown entity, she been left to her own devices — if, for example, she’d had to raise money from a then mostly non-existent fan base in order to record and release Lucinda Williams. In some ways it’s fitting that the disc is now referred to as the “Rough Trade Album,” and even more so that former Rough Trade A&R scout Robin Hurley, who was instrumental in signing Williams to the label, penned liner notes to the new edition. If it weren’t for Rough Trade taking a chance on Williams and, in a commercial sense, coming up short, then we very well might not have Lucinda Williams.

Hypothetical scenarios aside, Hurley and Rough Trade were smart, prescient, and/or canny enough to see and hear something special in Williams. The album that resulted, with its mix of New Orleans-flavored country comforts, blues attitude, and pop smarts, may not have sold very well, but it got the proverbial ball rolling for Williams, who’s now regarded as one of the best songwriters of her generation. It’s certainly something Williams appreciates. “I can’t even begin to explain what this album means to me,” she admits in her post on PledgeMusic. “It was the first record where I truly found myself. . . Or, at least, figured out what it is I do. And it has shaped me as an artist from that year forward.”

KASEY CHAMBERS

COVER GIRL

Kasey Chambers kicks back with some alt-country comforts on Storybook

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: August 8, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/

On Storybook, Chambers  has fun with some of her favorite songs.

The Hank Williams standard "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," Suzanne Vega's folk-pop classic "Luka," and the Cyndi Lauper mega-hit "True Colors" are three of the more instantly recognizable tracks on Storybook (Sugar Hill), the new album by Australian songstress Kasey Chambers. Americana enthusiasts will more than likely find plenty of other familiar titles here, from the Bakersfield swing of Gram Parsons' "Return of the Grievous Angel" and the spare ruminations of Steve Earle's "Nothing But a Child," to the two-stepping swagger of Lucinda Williams’ "Happy Woman Blues" and the playful roadhouse strut of John Prine's "Leave the Lights On." While there are a couple of relative obscurities – "Everything's Turning To White," a tragic elegy written by fellow Aussie Paul Kelly, is the first that comes to mind — it doesn't take long to figure out that Chambers has taken the liberty on Storybook to set her pen aside for a spell and take a stab at some of her favorite songs written by other artists.

       As Chambers charmingly puts it, by way of introducing the disc's final cut, a lovely live recording of Patti Griffin's poetic "Top of the World," "Bear with me. I really don't know this song very well. But I've been dying to play it. . ." No worries there: Chambers' rendition may not be as pitch-perfect smooth as the Griffin original, but she more than makes up for that with her soulful delivery, bringing just enough grit to bear to an open-ended lyric like "I wished I'd had known you/I wished I'd had shown you/All the things that I was on the inside" to make it feel devastatingly personal.

       It's not particularly easy to get the green light to make an album of all covers. And it's certainly not always advisable. For most serious artists, it's a privilege that's earned, in large part by testing your own talents and proving you can stand on your own as a songwriter. That's something Chambers unquestionably achieved over the past dozen years on her home turf, where she's widely regarded as Australia's reigning country music star. She's never quite broken through here in the States, although she came close in 2000, after her solo debut The Captain, which featured the living-legend husband-and-wife team of Buddy and June Miller in supporting roles, went double platinum in Australia, and Lucinda Williams was kind enough to bring her along on a U.S tour.  Prior to that, Chambers had spent over a decade cutting her teeth as a frontwoman with the Dead Ringer Band, a family affair that also featured her parents and older brother. So it's fairly safe to say that Chambers, who headlines the Birchmere in Alexandria, VA, on August 10th, has paid her dues­ – that she's well within her rights to cadge from the canon and indulge in what might otherwise be considered a mere vanity project.

       That said, Storybook doesn’t come across as anything even remotely resembling a grand statement of artistic purpose. And the only element that appears to tie the album together thematically is Chambers’ personal fondness for the material. To paraphrase her intro to “Top of the World,” these are simply 15 tunes she’s been dying to record – songs that are part of her own storybook in the sense that they’re each uniquely woven into the fabric of her own identity as a singer and a songwriter.

       And that’s a big part of what makes Storybook such a pleasure. Chambers doesn’t go out of her way to radically reinvent or reinterpret the 15 songs she chooses to take on. She’s more or less just having a good old time, even on a track as softly somber as Gillian Welch’s “Orphan Girl.” She’s bold enough to take certain liberties with “True Colors,” nudging it onto folksier roots terrain that suits her style. But her “Luka” — a storyteller’s song that’s right up Chambers’ alley — gets a fairly straight reading.  (It should be noted that five of the disc’s tracks, including the live Griffin cover, Lauper’s “True Colors,” and Paul Kelly’s "Everything's Turning To White," were previously released on various EPs dating all the way back to 2000.)

       It’s probably worth asking whether or not there’s much point in covering a signature song like “Luka” if you’re not reworking it. But, again, one of the strengths of Storybook is that Chambers doesn’t strain to make each and every track here her own. Instead, she achieves something quite a bit more sublime by conveying the solace and thrill she’s taken from these songs, and returning the favor by imparting subtle emotional shadings of her own. Besides, while “Luka” isn’t what you’d call a deep cut, it hasn’t exactly been in heavy rotation for the past two decades. And I, for one, was happy to rediscover “Guilty,” a dark tale of turbulent romance from Matthew Ryan’s mostly forgotten 1997 debut, dusted off by Chambers and rocked up with churning guitars and a muscular backbeat.

       That’s the sort of unexpected gift an album like Storybook can deliver. And, if the name Kasey Chambers is still new to you, Storybook provides a seductive slice of mostly familiar countrified comforts that may just draw you deeper into her back catalogue. It may not be particularly profound, but it’s a good time. And, ultimately, there’s really nothing wrong with that.