Lucinda Williams

Lucinda Williams is incapable of sounding anything less than 100-percent engaged and sincere. Whatever she has to say, she clearly means it, and that more than anything else is the thread that runs through 2020's Good Souls Better Angels, her fourth album since she launched her own record label and took full control of her process of recording and releasing music. Cut mostly live in the studio with her road band – Stuart Mathis on guitar, David Sutton on bass, and Butch Norton on drums – these 12 songs play like a long stream-of consciousness journey, with Williams writing in blues structures that repeat certain lines like a mantra while her band either sneak up on the music like a ghost or howl with elemental, bluesy skronk (the raw, gritty tone of Mathis' guitar matches Williams' vocals for sheer ferocity on numbers like "Down Past the Bottom," "Bone of Contention," and "Wakin' Up" like he's roots rock's answer to Ron Asheton).

Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road features 12 Beatles songs that include classic hits such as 'Can’t Buy Me Love,' 'With A Little Help From My Friends' and 'Something.' Williams and her band also take on beloved deeper tracks such as 'I’m So Tired,' 'I’ve Got A Feeling,' and 'Yer Blues.' Being raised on the blues in the South, the latter is a song Williams was clearly meant to sing. Recorded at The Beatles' legendary studio in London, the new collection serves as Vol. 7 of her celebrated Lu’s Jukebox series and is the first new volume in almost four years.

Lucinda Williams is a daughter of the American South, born in Louisiana, who is proud of her heritage while also understanding the contradictions and the baggage that come with that. Tom Petty was a native Floridian who also loved the South without harboring illusions about it, and so it makes sense that Williams would be a Petty fan, and not simply as one gifted songwriter respecting another. As part of her Lu’s Jukebox series, designed to help independent music venues shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, Williams has cut a set of her favorite Tom Petty tunes, and Runnin’ Down a Dream: A Tribute to Tom Petty is long on songs about Southern life, including “Gainesville,” “Down South,” “Rebels,” “Southern Accents,” and “Louisiana Rain.”

Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road features 12 Beatles songs that include classic hits such as 'Can’t Buy Me Love,' 'With A Little Help From My Friends' and 'Something.' Williams and her band also take on beloved deeper tracks such as 'I’m So Tired,' 'I’ve Got A Feeling,' and 'Yer Blues.' Being raised on the blues in the South, the latter is a song Williams was clearly meant to sing. Recorded at The Beatles' legendary studio in London, the new collection serves as Vol. 7 of her celebrated Lu’s Jukebox series and is the first new volume in almost four years.

Lucinda Williams - The Ghosts Of Highway 20 (2016) {2CD Highway 20 Records H2003}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 479 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 204 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 152 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2016 Highway 20 Records / Thirty Tigers | H2003
Americana / Folk / Country / Alternative Country Rock / Alternative Folk / Singer/Songwriter

Calling her own shots seems to agree with Lucinda Williams. While the singer/songwriter has long had a reputation for taking her time between albums, she's back with another double-disc set, The Ghosts of Highway 20, just a year-and-a-half later. She launched her own label with Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone in the fall of 2014. In many ways, The Ghosts of Highway 20 feels like a companion piece to Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone in its emotionally direct approach and willingness to let the songs play themselves out at their own pace. – they drift with the current, but they don't meander, and they get where they're going in their own sweet time.

Dreams still beckon in a damaged world, and Rosanne Cash renders them with fierce grace on She Remembers Everything, a studio recording arriving November 2 from Blue Note Records. The follow-up to Cash’s 2014 release The River & the Thread, recipient of 3 Grammys including Best Americana Album, the album offers shimmering pop—with hints of twang and jazz—that could find a home in almost any year of postwar American music. But the luminescence and bright production are shot through with a darker vision, trenchant vocals, minor chords, and bent notes that destabilize the landscape. Familiar yet alien, Cash's take on being a woman in the world reveals just how much has gone awry.