2023-06-30 18:46:02
‘Stories from a rock’n’roll heart’
Lucinda Williams
Highway 20 / Everlasting / Popstock!
Rock people
★★★★
The starkest encounter of music with life and its incidents produces works such as ‘Stories from a rock’n’roll heart’an album in which Lucinda Williams he sings to his motivating sources and the mystery that continues to surround songmaking. Life-giving work, wrapped in a halo of victory given the delicate path, of a clinical order, that preceded it.
We talked about the tornado that devastated his house, the covid-19 and, worst of all, the stroke he suffered in November 2020, which left him with motor limitations on the left side that he is trying to overcome little by little. Nothing that has stopped her: a few weeks after the stroke she was already performing again, and a few days ago she was able to see and enjoy herself at the Azkena Rock Festival.
Lucinda Williams, wounded, but not defeated at allunable (for now) to play the guitar, but transmitting truth with her voice as a survivor, with character, and showing off as an author in the beautiful and challenging ‘stories’ that she tells us when she is already 70. Beginning with that classic rock, she opens the album, a la Stones or The Faces, called ‘Let’s get the band back together’, in which he sighs for the old spirit of the ‘gang’ andn the company of colleagues like Margo Price and Buddy Miller.
art within reach
There’s a lot on this record Tribute to the music that captivated her at the tender age of 12, and it’s hard to remain unmoved by songs like ‘Rock’n’roll heart’, an allusion to the “working-class boy in a defeated city” who was able to give meaning to his life thanks to a guitar. And when he says that, if you have “a rock’n’roll heart”, then “you don’t have to be so crafty anymore / you don’t have to be a work of art”, because conveying emotions can be within anyone’s reach. The voices of Bruce Springsteen y Patti Scialfaas in another remarkable number, ‘New York comeback’.
Williams sings wistfully to the (alien) tunes of his life on ‘Jukebox’ (with the sweet echo of Angel Olsen as second voice) and turns the song into a poetic character in ‘Where the song will find me’. He invokes two long lost friends, Tom Petty in ‘Stolen moments’ and Bob Stinson (of The Replacements) in ‘Hum’s liquor’. Searching for the melee of rock, letting the half times rest, attentive at times to the acoustic fiber and the touch of ‘pedal steel’, and all this with learned accompanists: the drummer ‘heartbreaker’ Steve Ferrone; the keyboard player Reese Wynans (who was a member of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Double Trouble) or the ill-fated Steve Mackeybassist for Pulp (and Dolly Parton).
And as a climax, that ‘Never gonna fade away’ in which she is seen dear to dear with the depression and he paraphrases Neil Young: “I will never fade away”, he repeats to us, merging with his craft and with the song itself, and slipping us a life lesson. Jordi Bianciotto
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‘The Omnichord Real Book’
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