Lucinda Williams Gets Intimate At City Winery
By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 29, 2013 8:25PM
Photo credit: Chicagoist/Chuck Sudo
If Lucinda Williams decided to coast after the breakthrough success of her 1998 album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, few would notice. That’s how strong she is as a singer and songwriter. Instead, Williams followed that album (a Desert Island Disc by any measurement) with what has easily been the busiest and most experimental period of her career. Notoriously known for taking years to record an album prior to Car Wheels, Williams has released five studio albums and a live set in the past 12 years, ranging from the raw Essence to the experimental talking blues of World Without Tears and the almost obsessively upbeat Little Honey.
But Williams knows it’s Car Wheels that affords her the opportunity to play intimate shows like her completed two-night stand at City Winery Chicago and a sold out show Jan. 30 at SPACE in Evanston and she gave the crowd what they wanted: A set liberally peppered with songs from that album.
Lucky for the audience, Williams didn’t phone in her performance Monday night at City Winery. Taking the stage looking meticulously haggard, she was in probably the finest voice she’s been in years as she kicked off her nearly 90-minute set with a languid version of “Lake Charles” that contrasted nicely with the slow rocking motion of her body as she sang and played guitar. Longtime accompanist Doug Pettibone joined Williams for a pleading reading of “People Talkin’” from World Without Tears and provided waves of sonic color for the remainder of the set. By the set’s third song, the wistful “Metal Firecracker,” audience members were shouting their pleas for affection to Williams between songs.
Photo credit: Chicagoist/Chuck Sudo
The stripped down setting afforded the audience a glimpse into Williams’s creative process and the singer didn’t disappoint as she shared two in-progress songs and one that will be featured soon on the ABC nighttime soap Nashville. One of the works in progress, which Williams said was titled (for now) “A Place in My Heart,” mined the familiar longing and hope of her best songs while the second “When I Look at the World,” showed she wasn’t done with the experiments in vocal delivery that informed World Without Tears and West. Williams admitted it was her father, the noted poet Miller Williams, who first made her recognize Car Wheels on a Gravel Road’s title track was autobiographical.
Williams and Pettibone kicked into a higher gear with a five-song section that started with the pleading “Blue” from Essence and reached its apex with a nasty rendition of that album’s title track, Pettibone’s stinging guitar licks reminiscent of Nashville ace Buddy Miller. Williams’s choices for covers—a version of Skip James’s “Hard Time Killing Floor” she said was as relevant now as it was when it was written and a playful take on Howlin’ Wolf’s “Come to Me Baby”—showed her blues roots.
Opening for Williams was the Kenneth Brian Band, a quartet from Decatur, Alabama that showed the Drive-By Truckers don’t have a stranglehold on modern Southern rock. The band’s namesake frontman, his torso and arms dotted in tattoos, managed to warm the crowd into a frothy lather for the headliner with growling vocals and sharp guitar playing, with his band mates sharing the stage for a handful of songs. If they ever make it back up north to play as a full unit, catch them.