Anne Mccue

Artist's Choice: Lucinda Williams Review by William Tilland
Lucinda Williams is really an ideal candidate for Hear Music's Artist's Choice, and this collection has to be one of the strongest in the entire series. In her own work, Williams offers a winning and sometimes complex combination of passion, perfectionist tendencies, and poetic intelligence. Similarly, her 16 eclectic choices on this disc provide the same overall balance of wit, charm, craft, and passion, with different qualities predominating from song to song and artist to artist. While many of the participants in the Artist's Choice series choose to reintroduce us to old standards which were a part of their early creative development, Williams brings a connoisseur's ear to her assignment, and while she pays homage to a few artist from earlier decades, she selects nothing prior to the '60s (with the exception of Chet Baker's version of "My Funny Valentine," which she heard in her parents' home when she was growing up).

It features 12 songs co-written with some of Nashville’s most prolific songwriters; Cathryn Craig and Brian Willoughby (We’re Walking Each Other Home), Anne McCue (Dig Two Graves), Joe Collins (Why Fight It, On Captiva), Reckless Johnny Wales (Music Tells The Truth, Boston To Austin, Dig Two Graves, Kay, Que Pasa), Aaron Raitiere (So Much), Lucas P. Gravel (Easy Side) and John Hadley (Never Too Late, What’s Going On With You, Can’t Get There From Here). Some highlights feature a beautiful duet with Cathryn Craig and the tasty guitar work of Brian Willoughby on We’re Walking Each Other Home. They also recorded it on their latest CD, In America, and has been getting a lot of airplay in the UK.

During the years leading up to her solo debut, The Days When Peonies Prayed for the Ants, songwriter Ellen Starski explored both her homeland and herself, traveling from the coal country of rural Pennsylvania to the roots-music hotbed of Nashville, Tennessee.

Four Decades of Folk Rock is an expansive box set, allowing one disc and over an hour of music for each decade. For those who would argue that folk-rock was primarily a 1960s phenomenon in the United States and a '60s and '70s phenomenon in Britain, the box counters that the musical strains of folk-rock have informed everyone from R.E.M. to the Bangles to David Gray. It's unlikely, though, that anyone but record shop nerds and music historians will be very interested in the debate. For everyone else, the set will be measured by the quality of the music itself, and on that account, Four Decades delivers a remarkable set list.