Lucinda Williams

Listening to Lucinda Williams's Sweet Old World, her first album in four years, you have to
wonder how many voices she abandoned – country, rock, blues, gospel – on the way to
achieving this one, which embodies and transcends them all. Sweet Old World begins with
the near-pop single "Six Blocks Away," the tale of a poet whose love is just out of reach.
Duane Jarvis's and Gurf Morlix's guitars jangle through the mix, though Williams's... More >

On two songs as lived in as their titles, "Lines Around Your Eyes" and "Something About What Happens When We Talk," a star-crossed poet of the everyday grows into middle-aged love. The fetishized tire iron and casserole of "Hot Blood" romanticize attraction and commitment with a lit major's passion. And then there's death. The most powerful track on this Springsteen-meticulous work of songcraft is the raw, bare, strophic threnody "Pineola," where the truest poetic stroke is the bereftly banal "And they went to call someone." So, do the boys who inspired "He Never Got Enough Love" and "Little Angel, Little Brother" actually die, by which I mean fictionally die? Maybe not, but it sounds like they do. Death is how she knows the world is sweet. Music is how she tries to convince the rest of us. (Grade: A)