It took thirty years in the ranks of small concerts in clubs, moving, moving house, records and ignored a tumultuous existence before Lucinda Williams took revenge against indifference and corruption the world record and earned the giusto riconoscimento di un duro lavoro. Era l’estate del 1998 quando uscì Car Wheels On Gravel Road e nessuno si sarebbe aspettato che un disco così travagliato e tirato per le lunghe sarebbe diventato il suo primo disco d’oro.
Un storia rocambolesca quella di Car Wheels : la Williams, con in mano un contratto con la American Recordings, aveva cominciato a lavorare al disco in Texas col chitarrista Gurf Morlix, produttore dei suoi due precedenti album ma insoddisfatta dei risultati raggiunti aveva ritoccato le parti vocali provocando la reazione di Morlix che, sul più bello, aveva abbandonato il progetto mettendo in crisi il rapporto professionale e l’amicizia che li legava.
Lucinda Williams he then chose to move to Nashville to get in touch with Steve Earle and his production partner Ray Kennedy. With them, in 1995, had tried hard but did not finish the deal with his fussiness. It all seemed easy, it was so in love with the twangtrust Earle and Kennedy had re-recorded everything again but then the disc at the end, work almost completed, we found a new aera dissatisfied with a product sound too. Steve Earle's record after two weeks had gone on tour suddenly without warning the Williams of the time constraints of its commitments and all these upheavals had attracted the curiosity of the media, never before had so interested in Williams.
again in mid-stream Lu had not lost heart and with ribbons in hand had moved to Los Angeles in a new study where with the help of E-Streeter Roy Bittan had overdubbed the vocals in a series of sessions on the edge of paranoid and obsessive. The album had become a nightmare, producer Rick Rubin do I mix the final tracks but the album suffered a further delay due to negotiations to sell the American label. The Mercury saved the situation by buying the rights of the album, fine-tuned to Nashville and finally published, after many vicissitudes, 30 June 1998 under the title of Car Wheels On A Gravel Road . Today, that record is the calling card of Lucinda Williams.
Lucinda Williams belongs to the ranks of folk heroes can get with a simple song in the deepest intimacy of the human soul, a traveling troubadour with a visceral attachment to what is normally understood as southern culture. Born in 1955 in Lake Charles in Louisiana by pianist mother and father a professor of literature, the life of Lu undergoes a change when her father, Miller Williams, poet and professor at the University of Arkansas today (read the official speech at the inauguration of President Clinton in 1996), in the mid-sixties divorce and take custody of three children. By Lucinda and the other two brats to work before he moved to Mexico and then in South America. Lucinda finds himself living in Mexico City and Santiago de Chile and then in a few years went from Utah to Baton Rouge from Mississippi to New Orleans from Atlanta to Macon. A geographical instability that could leave visible signs of displacement, as sometimes happens to those children bouncing around the world for work of his father but instead to Lucinda Williams gave a kind of joy and elation for the hotel rooms and houses sublet. In addition to accepting them as natural as nomadic spirit that then will be reflected in his songs, turning it into a sharp storyteller "street" attentive to details, locations e alle sfumature psicologiche.
“Quell’infanzia di continui spostamenti non fu traumatica come la gente crede, a me piace l’avventura e penso che ciò derivi da quel continuo movimento che caratterizzò prima gli anni di gioventù e poi la mia esistenza. Il problema più grosso non era cambiare città o stato ma era portarsi appresso ad ogni trasloco la mia collezione di dischi di Donovan, Hendrix, Pentangle, Allman Bros., Byrds, Buffalo Springfield e Cream.”
Precoce nello scrivere, Lu assorbe le influenze del padre scrittore e dello stimolante clima casalingo, naturale che alla fine tutto questo mondo confluisse in uno stile che la artista ha definito “journalistic songwriting”.
literary influences alone would not have been able to produce a rockeuse as if Williams is indeed the next to these there were some real musical passions. The win three Grammys in the categories of country, folk and rock music by the Williams is a reflection of different musical loves of youth: the old bluesmen, Robert Johnson and then Dylan, Jim Morrison, Cream, the Rolling Stones and the Byrds. Lu
early career she used to interpret other people's songs spanning various musical circles but then when he began writing in their various kinds amalgamated in a style that did not pose any differences between different languages. Ballad in a style that has its strength and can rely on a mournful voice, sensual and stoned, suitable to convey that sense of abandonment a bit 'fatalistic in the deep south of Williams' stories are full.
"The more than any other album that changed my life was Highway 61 Revisited by Dylan. A student of my father, a young poet, brought him into my house one day in 1965. Although I was still very young was a real revelation for me, suddenly there was someone who put together the two worlds I came from: the traditional folk music discs from my father, Lightin'Hopkins and Mississippi John Hurt and the creative world the writing of the poets and literature. I started to write to ten years but when I was 12 and bought my first guitar, a cheap Silvertone, I learned to play it just to write songs like those that were contained in that record. "
Someone once said that if it was revolutionary in twenty years when he was at least forty-conformists. So it was with Lucinda Williams. "In my youth I was very restless and rebellious. Some time ago my father gave back all the letters that I wrote when I was twenty, well .... are very striking and eloquent. There are matters that are still proud as when I helped a group of friends in the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) to distribute flyers on campus and then we were expelled from school because we refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in front of the Dean who wanted to punish us. I was restored only because my father appealed a court decision that found unconstitutional the school. In the sixties I was very involved in the antiwar movement. My family has always been a pacifist, my grandfather was a conscientious objector of World War I, could not be otherwise. I remember in 1969 at the age of sixteen I went to the peace march in Washington with a group of students from the University of New Orleans Layola where he taught my father. I remember like yesterday's massive demonstration that even the cold and patios for not having brought a jacket suitable for winter in Washington. My political views have not changed over the years, I have the same ideals of the past, I hate war and I find that still Masters of War is one of the most beautiful songs written on the subject. "
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