LUCINDA WILLIAMS – WORLD’S GONE WRONG: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
LUCINDA WILLIAMS
World’s Gone Wrong (Highway 20)
TO BORROW FROM The Greg Kihn Band (kids, don’t bother asking your grandparents, ask yourself why you’re even reading this!) when it comes to protest songs “they don’t write ‘em like that any more”. Why, in my day …
… which is, actually, bullshit. But very popular and oft-repeated bullshit.
Ask any music, arts or culture writer anywhere and they’ll tell you for a couple of decades now they’ve been asked to write a story or go on air to discuss how no one writes protest songs (or plays/movies/you name it) anymore. Hard hitting, topical songs like back in the day – by which they mean sometime in the ‘60s they know from old music documentaries, or if they think they’re really plugged into popular culture, when Midnight Oil were at their peak – a time when music could rouse the people. Now, they’ll say and want you to confirm, it’s just bling and tits and drugs and that hippity hoppity music the kids like.
Rather than list the many, many artists who have been writing songs of protest and defiance and provocation for a long time but little penetration into the circles of people of a certain age/disposition/calcified listening, let’s just take a look at one that’s arrived coincidentally in the same week that we lost one of the writers from our own great band of protest and resistance, Rob Hirst of the aforementioned Midnight Oil.
There’s no truer statement, no louder protest, than this from Lucinda Williams’ new song, Something’s Gotta Give: “Evil has come to play/You can feel it everywhere”. And we know it. Can probably rattle off a list of examples. Can say without prompting that the title of this new album, World’s Gone Wrong, is spot on.
Was it the latest dementia-familiar ramblings of the idiot in chief or the bigoted bile of our own orange menace? A sermon from some preacher of hate or a police state decree from a state leader all too happy to repress on behalf of well-funded interests? (As Williams asks in another song, “How much did you get for your soul?”) Or maybe just the latest smears from one of Rupert’s minions? Take your pick, take them all, but while listening to Williams you can’t take a backseat.
While her work generally has dealt with personal politics and implied the social context for them – poverty, racism, narrow thinking, the destruction of a working class – since 2014’s Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone, and certainly 2020’s Trump-era state of the (degraded) nation, Good Souls Better Angels, Williams has grown increasingly concerned and increasingly direct about the worst of us. The evil. This album is an extension of that, a howl of protest shaped into a more elliptical form.
Not an inchoate howl though, even if certain protagonists are not named and the opening/title song’s two characters, a car salesman and nurse, have enough to deal with just to get through, want to hope things are going to get better, and “try hard to ignore the news/Nothing makes sense and she gets confused between what is false and what is true”.
Williams has not been ignoring the news, whether it’s the empty houses in towns, the simmering anger everywhere at empty frauds, or churches burning, not to mention the chipping away of rights, not least for women, particularly women, of colour. Which is why she says in Something Gotta Give – one of two songs, including the title track, she shares with the Black country singer Brittney Spencer – that “there’s a heaviness to these days”. A heaviness matched across the album by Southern-sourced guitars from the multifaceted Doug Pettibone, striding assertively in Something’s Gotta Give, snaking through the bollards in Punchline, or coating the greasy blues of Black Tears where a swamp feel is offered with choir robes, to leaven maybe, except that this church is decidedly street-level, not elevated.
In the southern amalgam Sing Unburied Sing (a chugging base that invites beers, a chorus that turns its eyes sidewards, and a guitar solo that expands), the slouching country gospel of Low Life (harmonica introducing us, church organ carrying us and choral voices accompanying us) and the casually funky Freedom Speaks (biblical language meeting blunt talk and physical grooves) Williams looks to balance things. But the real contrast is found in another pair of collaborations where a higher power is hinted at but faith rests in better women and men.
So Much Trouble In The World, a lightly toasted Bob Marley cover, finds Williams and Mavis Staples sounding weighed down but not yet succumbed. There is a strain of unlikely optimism through it that oddly but suitably climaxes in wah-wah guitar and splashed drums, and eases away with a renewed emphasis on the Marley drag rhythm that can’t help but offer positivity.
Less Marley and more classic Williams ballad, the album’s final track, We’ve Come Too Far To Turn Around, initially is carried more by piano and organ than its fluid guitar, and then decisively in the way the earthiness of Williams’ lead is decorated by the curlicues of Norah Jones’ higher and lighter echo. The message is pretty straightforward: no, we won’t.
In a similar way to how We’ve Come Too Far To Turn Around begins in measured concern and ends in a quiet righteousness, the album that had begun in something like glumness finishes in a steely refusal to give in that feels like hopefulness. Maybe because this is a protest that says things will only regress if we let them, and we don’t have to let them.
For that among a number of reasons, I reckon Rob Hirst might have loved this record, and maybe those editors needing to update their protest singer files will be listening.
READ MORE