Lucinda Williams

After years of fans asking for a live album, Lucinda Williams delivers a true delicacy with this double-disc recorded over three nights at San Francisco's Fillmore auditorium. When artists do a long stand at a club, their sound often gets tighter and more honed, and you can hear that in the succession of songs here.

Lucinda Williams writes and performs heart-searing roots rock on the rarefied level of AOR
demigods like Tom Petty and Neil Young; she's also opened for Petty and Young. So the
least she deserves is her own Seventies-rock-style double live album, recorded at San
Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium, no less. She and her impeccable three-piece band give
her songs' meticulously recorded original versions a run for their money; led by... More >

There's no point questioning Lucinda Williams's talent, or her perfectionism. Of course her first live album sounds dandy. There isn't a bad song or performance on it. Unfortunately, there isn't a new song or performance on it either. Every one of its 22 tracks appears in pretty much the same form on one of her painstaking studio albums--including, in an apparent world record, all 13 of the titles on 2003's mildly underrated World Without End. We don't appreciate her new songs, huh? Well, she'll show us--she'll release them again two years later. Sure they have a little more oomph this time. But why the devotees who adore everything she does need more proof that she's an effective bandleader is something her label would surely like to know. (Grade - ***)