Lucinda Williams Counts Her Blessings

Williams might’ve linked her songs to traditional murder ballads on Crook & Chase and elsewhere, but there are important differences between the way she writes about death and the way it’s portrayed in those old songs. She makes you care about – not just fear for or pity – the protagonists who meet their untimely ends, and the people they leave behind; she actually dwells more on the good of life than on the grim inevitability of death. On the new album, a pair of slow-burning soul numbers – “Convince Me” and “To Be Loved” – illustrate a remarkable symmetry between desperately doubting and wholeheartedly believing in the worth of it all.

As for the three songs that deal with death directly, “Copenhagen” is an impressionistic, affectionate country meditation on the passing of Callari, her late manager. She wrote the bracing roots rock number “Seeing Black,” she says, after the indie rock singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt took his own life; the lyrics arrive in the form of increasingly urgent questions wrestling with his life-and-death decision. And “Soldier’s Song” surreally juxtaposes battlefield deaths with cozy home life; love is the link between those two distant worlds.

“Seeing Black” is one of the new songs that get to the heart of themes Williams has taken up in the past; here, as in “Sweet Old World,” she can’t take her mind off all that a person gives up with suicide. Then there’s “Don’t Know How You’re Living,” a troubled plea to a long lost loved one which continues a thread begun in “Are You Alright?” from West. As she puts it, “I wrote yet another song for my brother, prodigal brother.” And “Awakening” shares the caustic attack and cravings for transcendence of “Unsuffer Me” before it.

“It’s funny that you mention this,” Williams says when the subject of connections between her songs comes up, “because now that I’m thinking about it, ‘Buttercup,’ for instance, is chapter two of ‘Jailhouse Tears.’ Like, I wrote that about the same guy.

“The last few shows we did I was highlighting some of the new songs and I told the audience – talking about the songs on the new album – I said, ‘I’ve only got one bad boy song on the whole album.’ I still had a little bit left in my system and I had to get it out. So I think that squeezed the last little bit out of there.”

“Buttercup” – which opens Blessed – is the better of the two songs that guy inspired. It’s a sturdy, sarcasm-laced country rocker, while “Jailhouse Tears,” from an album back, is a sorta goofy honky-tonk duet with Costello. That Williams is playfully forecasting the end of her “bad boy” songs is no small thing, since bad boys – tough and troubled artistic types – have been favorite song subjects of hers and she has a striking way of calling out the pain they inflict.

“Soldier’s Song,” on the other hand, represents for Williams a revival of a certain kind of songwriting. “I’m actually really proud of that song,” she offers, “because it is very detailed narrative and I haven’t done anything like that in a long time.” She’d never taken up a storytelling challenge quite like it, moving back and forth between two different vantage points, one a soldier, the other his wife and the mother of his child.

“I was struck by that Jimmy Webb classic, ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’,” she explains. “That one, where there are two different things going on at the same time in two different parts of the world. My dad wrote a poem like that.” (Her father is the poet Miller Williams, who was selected to read at Bill Clinton’s second presidential inauguration.)

Though war is a central feature of “Soldier’s Song,” it couldn’t rightfully be called a protest number; instead of voicing an outright indictment, it makes its impact through tangible, parallel narratives. “For me,” she says, “this is a statement about the whole general insanity of war, but just done in a different way.”

Williams has shifted some of her songwriterly attention from those ne’er-do-well heartbreakers to broader social topics, and she lightly suggests a reason. “Well, probably because I’m in a relationship now with Tom, so I had to find some other things to write about. But actually it’s not been like a forceful thing. It’s actually very liberating to spread out and write about some different things.”

“I’ve been wanting to for years,” she continues. “I’ve struggled trying to write more of what used to be referred to as topical songs, like Bob Dylan.”

The title track of Blessed is an example of what she means. Beginning with purposeful strumming on acoustic guitar, she describes people that upend social norms – like a girl who sells flowers on the street setting an example of how to live – with a mixture of hope and romanticism and a simple, repetitive folk melody.

She’d scribbled that particular image down on a napkin. “There was this young girl who used to come in and sell roses in this Mexican restaurant we go in. She’s not just some girl selling roses. She has a family. She has a life.” Not only is Blessed one of the most balanced collections of songs Williams has released, it may well be her best-sounding album. At a time when just about everybody else’s recording budgets seem to be shrinking, she cut the final album in her contract with Mercury roots imprint Lost Highway with one of the biggest budgets of her career.

Williams’ last album, Little Honey, was produced by Overby and her longtime engineer Eric Liljestrand. This time they brought in Don Was, after Williams hit it off with him back stage at a Neil Young tribute show. Was is as busy a roots music producer as they come these days, but the most telling reference point for what he achieved with Williams on Blessed is the string of terrific blues-pop albums he made with Bonnie Raitt during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s; he helped Raitt take substantial songs and make them widely and immediately accessible.