Monday, March 26, 2007

Lucinda Williams, Boston, 3.24.07

Not sure if I was at the same concert Saturday night as the Globe reviewer. That was a nasty dig, wasn't it? I actually agreed with a lot of what she wrote, but it didn't bother me that Lucinda read the lyrics and I didn't mind too much that she didn't really crank on Righteously. And I don't agree at all that her songs are dark and banal. Well, maybe dark, but certainly not banal. You live a certain way on this planet and you start feeling like Lucinda does.

Lucinda (yeah, fans call her by her first name; there is no other) was open and talkative and almost downright bubbly that night, unlike the flat, straight-ahead way she used to perform. Yeah, she read the lyrics or the chords or whatever. I noticed that too, and it actually made me smile a bit, thinking that it was funny that she didn’t know the words, or maybe the chords, to songs that she wrote and has been really steeped in. But so what?

She looked good, even a little chunky. Life looks like it’s treating Lucinda pretty well lately.

Doug Pettibone is awesome to watch…and listen to. You could see Lucinda leaning hard on him to keep things cranking. Well, I guess that’s why you got a guy like that in the band.

Not sure what the reviewer was talking about when she wrote that they “inflicted their tasty , soulless arrangements on sun-dappled Ventura and the country gem Fruits of My Labors…” How do tasty and soulless go together in the same sentence? Ventura just happens to be one of my favorites, though. I love the lyrics, the story they tell, and the dreamlike melody that carries the character to Ventura.

I wanna watch the ocean bend,
The edges of the sun, then
I wanna get swallowed up
In an ocean of love.


When I act I come up with a soundtrack for the character. I used Ventura once for a real lost soul when he was just trying to pull himself up. As with so much music, Ventura really hits me on a personal level, so it’s hard to criticize the way she sang it, like parents sometimes can’t see fault in their kids. Sometimes you go to a concert just to hear a song live from the performer.

Righteously was flat, though, which is a shame because it has so darn much potential to really rock. But she made up for it with so many other songs.

She cooked on Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings.

Joy just ripped. That one single chord that she just hammers on is like that one single point she (and so many of us) have tried to hammer home to some s**ts in our life.

You stole my joy, I want it back.

Her encore consisted of West and one of the songs from her roots in the Delta. She talked a bit about the Delta blues, and how they're still very much alive. Weird that she just threw that in, but it also was kind of like a dessert, just something sort of sweet and different.

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