Lucinda Williams Counts Her Blessings

Was, Williams and company recorded at Capitol Studio B in Hollywood, “the former recording home of Frank Sinatra,” she points out. Unlike West, with its electronic and orchestral flourishes, there’s nothing experimental about the playing on the album. Nor does it have the rough, live feel of Little Honey.

It’s crisp, dynamic and, yes, accessible. You can hear every last jabbing guitar lick, every melancholic arc of steel guitar, every seductive groan of her one-of-a-kind wind-chapped drawl clearer than ever before, and for good reason; Was passed the album along to two of his buddies, Bob Clearmountain and Ted Jensen, two of the world’s premiere mixing and mastering engineers, respectively.

“That’s the great thing about bringing Don in – he brought in this whole new circle of people we hadn’t worked with before, we weren’t able to work with,” Williams says, clearly excited about the results. “I wouldn’t have been able to afford Bob Clearmountain. [Laughs.] But he cut us a good deal. And plus, I’ve never had someone just mix the record. Like, that’s all he does is mix. That adds a whole other nice, shiny element to it.”

It just so happens that the most polished album in Williams’ oeuvre also comes in a deluxe edition that pulls back the veil on her songwriting process in a way no release of hers has before. (Acoustic demos of Essence exist, she says, but they’ve yet to make it out there in any official form). A bonus disc – dubbed The Kitchen Tapes after her writing spot of choice – contains no-frills guitar-vocal demos of all the songs on Blessed.

If Williams has grown more comfortable with sharing her work in its barest form, technology – her new Zoom recorder, specifically – was also a real motivator. “Oh my god, it’s amazing!” she says. “I just set it on the kitchen table, get my guitar, sit here and record a song on it, and this is something I never had before that changed the process by which – well, just the entire writing process. Because I was able to get instant gratification. I would put it down, take the Zoom up to Tom’s office, he would hook it up to his computer, burn a disc, and we’d play it back and it would sound amazing. So we ended up with all these songs that we could listen back to like that.”

The fact that Williams had all those songs to capture at the kitchen table is hardly insignificant. In her younger years, the songs didn’t always come that easily.

So what’s changed? “I think I just give myself more permission,” she muses. “I’m just better at what I do now. It’s as simple as that. It’s just the more you do it the better you get, or at least that’s how I feel in my case. I think it’s a combination of confidence and just having done it this long and just learning. I’m always learning. I’m still honing my craft.”

It may, indeed, seem as simple as that. But it’s not every thirty-two-year veteran who can pull off what Williams is doing – finding new ways to loosen up, even about the business stuff, without losing her edge.