Lucinda Williams

With Car Wheels on a Gravel Road in 1998, Lucinda Williams finally got the attention she so richly deserved. The Texan singer and songwriter had been toiling away to the beat of her own strummer for years, more content to drop out of the music biz than to compromise her own deceptively simple wheat-field lullabies and sultry midtempo come-ons. We weren’t entirely sold on her polished folkie approach to hillbilly country until we saw her give a speech down in Austin, Texas, a couple years ago. That speech consisted of a three-minute screed on the music industry, followed by 45 minutes of unaccompanied crooning and strumming that had us literally wiping the tears away. Last year’s follow-up to Wheels, Essence, really twisted the knife. Williams seemed to realize that her best material—the essential dope, it seems to us—is the slowest, sweetest, most melancholy, and this is a double dose of it. Catch her live and let the scales fall from your eyes, too. And don’t be surprised if you hear a couple cover tunes penned by her secret soul-brother, local hero Greg Brown. First Avenue, (612) 338-8388