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until near dawn. By the time the now-seething

singer/songwriter, who has a repu-tation for being difficult, launched into the first chords of the new album’s opening track, “Just Wanted to See You So Bad,” anger was radiating from the stage. Fronting

The ceiling of the Ritz Theatre, on Sixth Street in Austin, Texas, was literally caving in. Great tufts of insulation mixed with plaster hung ominously over the fidgeting crowd. It was 3am, long after beer sales had ceased, and still Lucinda Williams had not come on.

This was supposed to be her big night. Her third album, Lucinda Williams, had just been released on UK label Rough Trade. Unfor-tunately, in a tale all too common in the record business, Rough

Trade had gone bankrupt just as the record was released, and the label’s showcase at South by Southwest had rapidly devolved into disaster. The PA system was funky. And the show-case had gone off at least two hours late, which meant that Williams, the headliner, probably wouldn’t appear

BY ROBERT BAIRD

A Fine PairLUCINDA WILLIAMS NEWFOUND HAPPINESS HAS HER SEEING DOUBLE

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a band led by the great guitarist Gurf Morlix, she raced through the album, originals like “Passionate Kisses,” and “Crescent City” and the Howlin’ Wolf cover, “I Asked for Water (He Gave Me Gasoline)” in record time. While the angry tempo actually made the tunes rock harder, it was clear that, despite the title of her preceding album, Happy Woman Blues, on this March night in 1988, Ms.Williams was something less than pleased.

Flash forward to 2014 and the release of another new Lucinda Williams album, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, a two-disc set of new material recorded in the studio. Williams mar-ried music executive Tom Overby in 2009, and the emotions surrounding this project are much happier, much healthier—almost scarily so.

“There is a myth that you’ve got to continuously live in chaos in order to create. I decided I was gonna prove that wrong,” Williams says in a recent inter-view from her home in Los Angeles. “I can’t live the rest of my life in chaos. My biggest fear was, am I going to be able to get into a solid, committed, loving rela-tionship and still be able to write? What I found out was that if you find the right person, it does work. But it has to be the right partner. In the past I was in rela-tionships where I just kind of shut down creatively, and that would just scare the hell out of me, and I’d go running.

“I knew it could work, because I grew up around writers, poets and novelists, who were married, in the academic world, with kids running around all over the house. Like my dad—he was con-stantly writing about everything, from a wreck on the highway to a cat sleeping on the windowsill.

“Once I found my soul mate, I found it really liberating. In a strange kind of way, I became more prolific, because it just opened up a whole new world of writing and things to write about.”

And write Williams has. Once a staple of the physical-media biz, multidisc stu-dio albums—two- or, in extreme cases, three-LP sets—occupy a proud place in the history of popular music, represented by such masterpieces as The Beatles (“The White Album”) and the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. The great doubles succeeded in being career-defining state-ments, significant landmarks in an artist’s catalog, narratives or small symphonies that would often be sequenced to tell a story and whose success would show the vibrancy of an artist’s vision and the mus-cularity of his, her or their songwriting

chops. Blame time spent on video games or social media, but few artists today could produce enough material in one go to even make a double, let alone a successful one. Add in today’s dominance of tracks over albums, and streaming, which favors tracks over actually owning an entire record, be it in download or physical form, and Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone looks crazy, brave, or a little of both.

“I hope it’s not too long for people,” Williams says. “We actually recorded enough for three albums. It was gonna be next to impossible, out of all those songs, to hone it down to one album. The other option was to put out two separate albums at the same time, like Tom Waits did, but to me that would really be scary—what if one cancels out the other one? I still think in terms of al-bums, when you could just turn it over.”

Williams says she wanted to record and release a double album in 2007, but that Luke Lewis, president of Lost Highways Records, her then label, was skeptical that it would be a financial or artistic success. So the double album became West (2007) and its follow-up, Little Honey (2008). Does it worry her that this new 20-track collection is the first release on her own label, the newly formed Highway 20 Records?

“Not until I was doing an interview with Uncut magazine and the guy—he loved the album and all, but he said, ‘Well, it’s a lot to take in,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, great.’ Tom [Overby] gently warned me that some of the critics probably aren’t going to like the fact that it’s a double album, and they’re going to make comments about it, and you just have to be ready. I keep thinking about Bob Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde. Not only was it a double album, but one song took up one whole side of the vinyl. And yet it doesn’t feel too long to me. It doesn’t even seem like a double album. I’m hoping mine doesn’t either.”

Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone is a very typical collection of Williams’s established songwriting modes, albeit in

lighter, more optimistic tones. The songs range from ballads like “One More Day,” a confessional plea for another chance, to more rockin’ and, in one case, politically charged material: “West Memphis,” her take on the West Mem-phis Three case. Her voice, always the dividing line between fans and detrac-tors, is strong and sure throughout.

Its doubleness aside, Williams’s latest is also distinguished by being an all-star guitar record that contains the work of no fewer than seven players: Val McCal-lum, Stuart Mathis, Jonathan Wilson, Doug Pettibone, Tony Joe White, Bill Frisell, and Greg Leisz. Of the tracks recorded with Frisell, only two, “It’s Gonna Rain” and a J.J. Cale cover, “Magnolia,” appear on the new record. The balance will form the bulk of the next, yet-to-be-titled Williams release, which should come out next year. A cover of Lou Reed’s “Pale Blue Eyes” (which he recorded with the Velvets) and an old Williams tune, “Jazz Side of Life,” rescued by Overby from a demo cassette, are highlights from that record to look forward to.

“Bill can play anything,” she marvels. “He’s so spiritual and incandescent or something. He just looks like this . . . he’s so sweet. He’s like a big kid. He’s so shy and so soft-spoken and humble, it’s unbelievable. And he stands there and smiles, and I look down at his feet—he always has cool shoes on, red Converse sneakers or something—and then he starts playing, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God.’ The stuff that I like most that he does is the more beautiful, wistful, psychedelic folk kind of thing. He just adds all this color that you wouldn’t get otherwise. And he’s so perceptive.”

A special treat on this album is the presence of Tony Joe White, who happened to be playing a show in Los Angeles while Williams was recording, and was lured into the studio to add his guitar and harmonica to two numbers. “When you hang with him in person, he’s the same person offstage as he is onstage,” Williams says. “He’s the same person that you hear on the records. He walks and talks it, you know? His daughter lives here, and we’ve gotten to be friends, and she let me know he was playing, and of course we were gonna be there.

“At one point, when we were listen-ing back to what he’d just done, I said, ‘God, it sounds like the Jimi Hendrix of country soul. It’s psychedelia blended with Delta blues.’ I never realized how great a guitar player he is. It’s mind-

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blowing. My jaw dropped when I first heard him play guitar. And then he put some of that trademark Tony Joe harp on. It just made those tracks.

“I went up and hugged him when he was leaving, and I said, ‘Can’t you stay around for more?,’ and he said, ‘Gotta get back to my fish.’ Fishing is like his Zen thing.”

Another highlight is the album’s opener, “Compassion,” whose lyrics are a poem written by Williams’s fa-ther, the well-known poet Miller Wil-liams. A line from the poem became the album’s title. “I did it at the 11th hour,” she says. “We already had all the tracks cut and we were getting ready to leave to go do some shows, and I man-aged to get this done. I’ve been want-ing to take one of his poems and turn it into a song for years, and it’s not easy, because you don’t have the cadence and everything. At first I wanted to add guitars, acoustic bass, and maybe some strings—kind of a Nick Drake kind of a vibe almost—but then we decided, nah, let’s just leave it. We might recut another version for the next album so it’s kind of like bookends.” [In another track here, “Temporary Nature (Of Any Precious Thing)” Williams uses a

fabulous line her father used in a casual conversation with her: “And it’s always the deepest saddest joys/That prove to be the richest.”]

Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone was recorded in North Hollywood, at Dave’s Place, a studio owned by engi-neer Dave Bianco, who’s recorded and mixed albums by everyone from Rage Against the Machine to Trombone Shorty. The studio, once known as Mama Jo’s, was built in the late 1960s. Bianco took it over in 2006, after it had

All live, no overdubs, no punch-ins—it’s pretty extraordinary. You need an extraordinary bunch of musicians to be able to pull that off.’’

been abandoned for several years. A rehab followed. Now filled with a mix of digital and analog gear, Dave’s Place has an EMT plate reverb that was once in A&M Studios and was purchased from Herb Alpert.

“Alan Parsons liked the place a lot. George Duke. Ambrosia. Pat Benatar’s husband, guitar player Neil Giraldo, really liked it a lot. Rick Rubin had done some stuff there,” Bianco says, recounting his room’s history. “It was kind of a tweaker place. Anybody who cared about sound would work there. It has more isolation than a lot of other studios in town. I don’t have to put amps in little boxes—I actually have little rooms for everything.”

Bianco met Williams when she came in to record for the Songs for Slim project, which raised funds to pay the medical bills of Replacements guitar-ist Slim Dunlap. She liked the studio’s sightlines and sound and decided to track there, a process that took almost a year of intermittent work.

“We didn’t use any tape at all on this record,” Bianco says. “I have an HDX system and I don’t over-cowboy it up with a lot of EQ. I just use a really good vocal microphone [a Mojave MA 300]

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and vintage preamps, and I go right in and, with the natural acoustics of the room and the subject, make it happen, make it sound like tape. It really does too. It’s very warm. I get that a lot. That’s the adjective used most of the time.

“It wasn’t a big deal getting her sound. In fact, she was very complimen-tary right off the bat. She said she heard her sound over the speakers on the first track that we did. And then it was really a matter of the right amount of effects. My EMT she really liked, and a little bit of slap [delay], an analog-sounding slap, was all she really required.

“The entire record is whole-band takes, just like ‘Boom! There it is’ kind of thing. There was very little overdub-bing. We had some additional key-boards added after the fact, but most of the time it was complete takes. When she was happy with her vocal, that was pretty much the take, really. When she nailed the immersion of the thing, it was right. We had Ian McLagan [ex-Faces] playing live on a lot of it, and some of those tracks didn’t need extra keyboards, but then there were others where we added them. And there was one song where we added a couple of horns to it. All live, no overdubs, no

punch-ins—it’s pretty extraordinary. You need an extraordinary bunch of musi-cians to be able to pull that off.

“I did two Bob Dylan records [Together Through Life and Christmas in the Heart], and he wanted to it that way. He had it in his mind that the Chess records were all done without any isolation and live, and pretty much they were, except there was some baffling between instruments—you didn’t have, like, an organ blasting into an upright bass, which I did have with his project. It puts everybody on their game. It’s a whole different attitude of playing when you know you’re not fixing anything, it all has to be done as a unit. It was a marvel, to put it mildly.”

Greg Leisz (pronounced Lease) ended up being the majordomo of the ses-sions, with a co-producer’s credit on the final album. He played on every single cut, and was consulted by Williams and Overby on some musical matters. “We didn’t start out having him as co-producer,” says Williams, “but he proved to be so helpful, and, as Tom put it, Greg is the glue that was bringing it all together. He helped me communi-cate with some of the other musicians, and he just proved to be an invaluable

asset to the whole thing, so we got him in officially as producer. He’s a humble, quiet guy; so sweet.”

“At some point, it became important for Lu and Tom to have a person there that could sort of take over and sort of guide the thing home,” Leisz says from Washington D.C. where he was on tour with Jackson Browne. “I was somehow a thread, the one thing that is on everything. I think that’s how they looked at it. Whether you want to put the P-word on it or not, everybody is collaborating and has a role, and every-body’s free to offer up ideas.

“Lu led the tracking sessions because all the vocals were done live with the band,” Leisz continued. “When we were working out the songs and the arrangements, we were really doing it all together, the way a band would do it. (For more about Leisz, see “Aural Robert,” on p.178.)

“I didn’t tell anybody anything, other than talking to Pete Thomas about the tempo or something like that,” Wil-liams says. “The tempo was the biggest challenge on some of these tracks: fig-uring out the groove, getting the right groove. Once we got in the groove of it, everybody just did their thing.” n