Lucinda Williams, “Blessed,” (Lost Highway) Lucinda Williams shows a familiar side — misused, bruised and surly — to start off “Blessed,” her 10th studio album and one of her best.
In “Buttercup,” she turns away an addict ex-boyfriend who has come back for more. “You roughed me up and made me cry/now you wanna borrow money,” she rasps. “Good luck finding your buttercup.” In “Copenhagen,” news of a death arrives while she’s abroad, hitting her like a snowball that’s “covering me in a fine powdery mist and mixing in with my tears.” And in “Seeing Black,” she reacts with fury and questions — “Did you run out of places to go and hide?/Did you know everybody would be surprised?” — to a suicide. (She has said it’s about Vic Chesnutt, the songwriter who died in 2009 and who titled one of his songs “Lucinda Williams.”) The song stomps like Crazy Horse, with a tangle of barbed-wire lead guitars played by Elvis Costello.
But a different, guardedly optimistic Williams emerges for much of “Blessed,” her first album since her 2009 marriage to her manager, Thomas Overby. Many of the songs climb, painstakingly, away from negativity. Her voice has all its old scrapes and hollows; she’ll never come across as too cozy. But her music is newly confident. “Blessed” was produced by Don Was with Eric Liljestrand and Overby. Was specializes in grown-up bands and songwriters (among them Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Bonnie Raitt), and he backs up Williams, 58, with unabashed echoes of rootsy 1960s rock.
Williams makes a lot of lists in her new songs. The bluesy, minor-key crawl of “Born To Be Loved” itemizes things her listener wasn’t born to be — forsaken, misguided, abused — and concludes, “You were born to be loved.” And “Awakening” is a wish list for a better self: “In the awakening/I will honor the forsaken, I will not mourn my youth.”
From its tone, the song could be as bleak as Williams’ past catalog. But on this album, she sounds as if she’s ready to seize her chance for better times.
Jon Pareles, The New York Times
