LUCINDA WILLIAMS - LIVE: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
LUCINDA WILLIAMS
Sydney Opera House, August 31
THERE IS NO QUESTION that as a storyteller-in-song there are few to match Lucinda Williams. And the songs on this night, presented mostly chronologically as they related to her life rather than when they were written, repeatedly drove this point home, helped in no small measure by a superb band of drummer Brady Blade, bassist David Sutton, and guitarists Mark Ford and Doug Pettibone, who held back perfectly and then happily powered forward towards the end of the night.
Using her richly-detailed work and some judicious covers, you could map a detailed life on the road, from childhood to career, from Lake Charles to Silver Lake to the ghosts of Highway 20. You could follow a route into and (eventually, though not without scars) out of bad choices in her life and the troubled souls she’s lived alongside, from her brother to her lovers. You could grasp a chronicle of American music and some of its mythology in her sources and inspirations, whether Blind Pearly Brown and Elizabeth Cotton or the poet Frank Stanford and the unrelated folkie Hank Williams. And most of all, you could see worlds come to life.
But Lucinda Williams as a storyteller-between-songs, as this show built on the foundations of her memoir as much as her back catalogue, and juiced up with home movies, family photographs and other footage, promised? Well, there we ran into trouble.
Williams has never been a wholly comfortable performer or easy raconteur, on stage or in interviews, and though she has loosened up in the past decade, this hasn’t really changed. Seated mostly and without her guitar – pretty much the only noticeable effects of her recovery from a stroke – she told rambling, occasionally disjointed stories in a stiff delivery that sought to contextualise each song and in theory flesh out those narratives.
Natural raconteurs such as Billy Bragg can do this with a loose concept and some planning, but even a well-honed storyspinner like Bruce Springsteen worked up a full script for his Broadway show in this vein. It isn’t draining the spontaneity but doing the hard work to make things look easy, and winging it just doesn’t cut it across a whole show.
Williams, who was buoyed by the extremely warm reception from an audience clearly happy to be getting her at all, needed if not a script then at least a solid plan with stories nailed down, a grip on what “extras” of revelation the stories would bring to the songs, endings/segues worked out, and more rehearsal. To support her and the avoid the story sections sucking the energy out of the night.
In the seeming absence of all these a potentially tight and rewarding 90 minute show ran for more than two hours and felt simultaneously padded-out and under-delivering. Something her songs never do.
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A version of this review originally was published in The Sydney Morning Herald