But anything less tumultuous would be disappointing. The 48-year-old’s embattled persona and tough, weary demeanor is behind some of the most heart-wrenching, raw and beautiful songs in recent memory. Her last album, 1998’s “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” gave hope to those numbed by Nashville’s modern, slick offerings and tired of rock’s current creative sag. It was a breakthrough for a woman who had struggled for 15 years to live off her uncompromised art. Williams ended up topping critics’ lists, selling 500,000 copies and even winning a Grammy.
All that, and the Louisiana native still finds it difficult to promote herself, let alone her new album, “Essence.” “At a photo shoot this morning, they had me in a blouse, unbuttoned, with no bra on. I would never wear my shirt like that,” says Williams, who, left to her own druthers, prefers a Harley-Davidson leather jacket, faded jeans and black motorcycle boots on her sinewy frame. “I was real unhappy. They kept asking, ‘Baby, what do you need? What do you want?’ and I felt like screaming, ‘I just want to be myself!’ "
“Essence” is pure Lucinda, even though she wrote the album in one year, and recorded it in 14 days–a sheer miracle compared with the six years it took to make “Car Wheels,” and the previous 15 years devoted to just two albums of original material. She mixes her narrative style, rich with images of broken beer bottles, shattered hopes and bleeding hearts, with emotionally charged haikus. Williams sings about lonely girls by simply repeating lines like “pretty hairdos, pretty hairdos” or “heavy blankets, heavy blankets” atop subtle washes of ambient pop. She repeats these spare lines like a mantra in a weary, wilting voice that cuts to the core. Though she now largely concentrates on communicating fleeting feelings rather than entire tales, “Essence” still feels like Williams at her best. It gently extracts the listener’s feelings with the grace of a master pickpocket, and lays wide open the deepest of pains. “So you think I rip people’s hearts out in a very Southern, genteel kind of way?” she asks, laughing, then affects a Scarlett O’Hara voice. " ‘Excuse me, ma’am, may I just rip your heart out now?’ " she says in a long, sweet drawl. “I love that. The best of poetry and fiction does that. That’s the best I can hope for, because this album was an experiment in breaking from long narratives and feeling comfortable with simplicity.”
Williams says she doesn’t just listen to “narrative, introspective, singer-songwriter stuff” but was inspired by the more eclectic likes of Sade, Dusty Springfield and Roxy Music. “I loved letting the music do more, letting the groove just breathe. To me, it’s sorta like the transition Bob Dylan made from his early, really heavy narrative stuff to what he did on ‘Time Out of Mind.’ The Nashville paper said: ‘What’s this? He’s not saying anything.’ I think it’s a beautiful album in its simplicity. Sure, it’s not ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ but he’s already made a grand statement in these masterpieces. Jeez, give the guy a break.”
There is an agitation and ire that surrounds Williams in person. It’s as if life’s an itchy wool jacket that she’ll never feel comfortable wearing. The tousle-haired singer is embattled about bad art, societal complacency and what a struggle it is to find a good pair of shoes these days. Yet she dearly embraces life’s small victories–like her suspension from high school for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance (a one-woman Vietnam protest). She ended up returning with the power of the ACLU behind her. “I grew up with that whole thing about follow your heart, do what you want to do,” says Williams in her sleepy, Louisiana drawl. “It was an era of protest songs, where you stood for what you believed in. I was, and still am, idealistic. My dad always instilled in me a sense of wonder–a sense of childlike awe. If you lose that, you’re dead.”
Having poet Miller Williams for a father also helped fuel her wanderlust. The college professor and friend of writer Charles Bukowski constantly resettled with his daughter–Louisiana, Chile, Mexico City and Arkansas. Back in the States, she dropped out of college her freshman year and began playing in a New Orleans club for tips. It was a risky life she embarked on, but for Williams there was really no other option. “I never questioned it,” she says. “It’s just what I had to do.”
Stability is hardly a key element when it comes to Williams and her music. It instead seems an unobtainable goal, something she treats with longing and disdain. “When was the last time you met a stable artist who didn’t have some kind of neurosis?” asks Williams, who is digging in her bag for a tube of red lipstick. “Artists are supposed to be a little eccentric. It’s just everybody’s so conservative now. What happened to the rebellious nature of music and art? Van Gogh and those guys back then were temperamental and moody, but so what? Now, some of these artists might as well be working at Wal-Mart: ‘Hi, I’m a musician. How can I help you?’ What happened to passion? Conviction? My friend says it would have been worse to have been born in van Gogh’s time. People died so young and all. I say yeah, but at least they lived before they died.”
