Lucinda Williams, one of the finest songwriters of her generation, is still touring and making records at 73 years old. To see her, an artist revered by the likes of Neil Young and Katie Crutchfield, is worth paying any ticket price.
She is equal to, and even above, the iconic venues hosting her on the British stretch of her tour. On this night, the Barbican Hall, London. Ben de la Cour opens with a charming set of his eddying, gently drifting songs. His slightly wavering baritone voice works best on his shortest pieces, such as the one-minute ‘Christina’, which impressively packs years of storytelling into a few delicate lines. Charismatic and bleakly funny, de la Cour sets the scene for Williams wonderfully.
This kind of nuance is required for a Lucinda Williams set. Her songs can have piercing and subtle power, even at their simplest. Her opener, ‘World Without Tears’, flows gently as a Louisiana creek, but there are sharp rocks in the lyrics; “If we lived in a world without tears / How would heartbeats know when to stop / How would blood know which body to flow outside of / How would bullets find the guns?”. Her voice now keens more sharply than ever, and the lyrics cut deeper.
Though Williams suffered a stroke six years ago and requires help getting out onto the centre stage, she commands the entire hall once there. Across twenty songs, she unspools the tapestry of lost, broken characters, which have always populated her songs. Often, there are ghosts. Haunting the wonderful ‘Drunken Angel’ is Blaze Foley, a songwriter, a “poet” in her words, never truly known in his lifetime and who shows up “on the other side” here. Despite the brokenness of the song, which details Foley’s senseless death in the heat of an argument, Williams’ lyrics always point towards sensuality, towards an immovable romance of memory, of the South, a dreaminess so vivid that Foley may well not have died at all. He is one point of her roadmap of places and heartbreaks, stretching from song to song.
Williams is also a fantastic melodicist, and ‘Drunken Angel’ is not a lone example. It is thrilling to hear stone-cold classics such as ‘Lake Charles’, ‘Changed the Locks’, ‘Fruits of my Labor’, and ‘Joy’, ringing out across the hall, rendered in subtly different arrangements from the records. ‘Changed the Locks’, from her 1988 self-titled record, is a highlight of the evening, lit up by fiery solos from Ford, and a driving, snarling vocal performance from Williams.
The set meanders and rarely tires. Between songs, Williams is wryly funny, offering vignettes and stories, the real-life influences of songs, whether from her own life or something distant. She collects those pieces and compiles them into a captivating history. Some brand-new pieces, from her just-released World’s Gone Wrong album, are moodier, darker counterparts to her older work; it seems no accident that she follows up opener ‘World Without Tears’ with ‘The World’s Gone Wrong’.
The musical history Williams takes us through is far-ranging and leads through almost as many songs as she wishes she had written, as well as ones she wrote. The Beatles’ ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is rendered soulfully, Memphis Minnie’s ‘You Can’t Rule Me’ is angled sharply towards the current U.S. administration, and the set rides out fiercely on Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’. Most surprisingly, Williams turns her keening voice to Bob Marley’s ‘So Much Trouble in the World’; but is it surprising? She is a lover of music and music history, and righteously angry at the state of the world – to that end, Marley’s song is perfectly in-keeping with the mood of the set.
A tagline from a movie poster, for a 1984 film called Paris, Texas, ran through my head repeatedly during the set: “a place for dreams, a place for heartbreak, a place to pick up the pieces.” This place, not really a place at all, but felt as a kind of sadness, nostalgia, or even emptiness, is where Williams takes us again and again throughout the evening. Now in her final years of touring, she has picked up enough 'pieces' to build a tower, and by the final bars of ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, the audience seems to realise that they have witnessed the culmination of a life's work. A standing ovation is nothing less than what Williams and her band deserve, and it is what they get.
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