It must be terrible to be an album as good as Lucinda Williams’ Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone. The 20-song set, issued in late September through Williams’ own Highway 20 Records, is a career highlight for the 61-year-old singer and songwriter. She moves from fiery taunts sung over rippling blues-rock to heartsick requests plead over country-soul, and from quiet introspection eased out above slow Byrds jangle to brooding demands mumbled beyond a lonesome six-string. Williams takes two discs and more than 100 minutes to convey her cumulative message of perseverance through despair and to at least suggest every style she’s touched throughout her 35-year discography. As she should: Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone is perhaps her best album since 2001’s Essence and possibly even her breakthrough, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. It’s as daunting as it is rewarding.
But Spirit’s fanfare, especially in America and especially outside of publications aiming squarely for middle-aged readers, has been almost inaudible. Pitchfork didn’t review it. Rolling Stoneinterviewed Williams and included Spirit in their list of the year’s 40 best "country" records, but they too failed to rate it initially. PopMatters and Wondering Sound both offered lengthy takes, but The Quietus, Consequence of Sound, Drowned in Sound and The A.V. Club never got around to the task. As best I can tell, Spin—the magazine that named Williams’ Little Honey the 30th best LP of 2008 and Car Wheelsthe fourth best of 1998—never even mentioned it. No, Williams’ new record isn’t perfect; some of the arrangements start to blur into a mid-tempo torpor during the second disc. But it deserves better than that.
It’s tempting to blame the oversight on insider mechanics, perhaps a faulty publicist, especially since this is Williams’ first LP without a large label. (She spent more than a decade on Universal imprint Lost Highway.) But she shares a publicity firm with Doug Paisley, Tanya Tagaq, Old Crow Medicine Show and Jason Isbell, who lacked neither ink nor pixels in 2014.
I received my first email about Spirit on July 14, and a copy of the two-disc set arrived by mail at most a few weeks later. I’ve seen Williams half a dozen times, consider her red-earth voice of country-blues melancholy something of a national treasure and have owned, at one point or another, every Williams record, including the reissues and the live takes. Why, then, did I wait until Thanksgiving morning to pluck it from a slagheap of promos and finally listen, only to find out that it’s one of my favorite records of the year and from Williams at large?
Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone’s material wasn’t an outlier in 2014, some wonderful and overlooked alt-country record in a year where no one gave a damn about that kind of stuff. Several exceptional Americana records emerged during the last 12 months, many crossing over into wider audiences and earning their makers spots on late-night television and in major magazines. Only by example, see Sturgill Simpson and Hiss Golden Messenger, Jason Isbell and the married pair of Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn.
And it’s easy to trace Williams’ connections to current mainstream country, too, especially through the emergence of strong leading women like Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves. Williams’ music has always been hardscrabble and tough, the stuff of a survivor looking for the light. Remember, her reputation didn’t find firm footing until she was several albums and almost two decades into her career. What she does is something of a gold standard for the likes of Musgraves and Lambert, a paragon that’s less concerned with commercial status than conveying similarly rambunctious feelings through gritted teeth or a subtle, sometimes-grim grin. When Williams sings "Walk on, girl/ Come on, girl, walk on/ I know you’re fighting an uphill battle" above Ian McLagan’s spiraling organ, it’s like she’s offering those new stars been-there, beat-that encouragement.
But Williams seems to face another hurdle now, and I don’t sense that she’s alone in her predicament: During the last 17 years, she’s released seven fine-to-incredible albums, with gaps of one-to-four years separating each of them. At last, her combination of age and consistency has caught up with her, enabled by our obsessive ability to track what’s new and seemingly important at the expense of what’s familiar though no less powerful. When we’re all trying to keep up with the best new Ableton users on Soundcloud or hunt for the best lo-fi uploads to Bandcamp, who has the time and attention to sit down with a 20-song set from a 61-year-old songwriter and parse just how thoughtful and articulate it is? I didn’t. She’ll likely release another record not long after we have a new president, anyway.
This isn’t mere information overload, where folks are flooded with so many sources of online sound that they never give anything a proper spin. That’s been documented and, I think, overblown elsewhere; if you’re not paying attention to what you’re hearing, it’s not the fault of your personalized online A&R service. Instead, Spirit and many records like it seem to go unnoticed because, in that new church of overwhelming data and choices, we’re looking to latch onto a narrative hook or the simple feeling of newness that we can share. The appeal of something you’ve never heard (and especially something you suspect very few others have heard) dovetails perfectly with our new sharing infrastructure: This is mine, and by showing it to you, I’ve upped the level of my imprimatur.
Much the same applies for finding and sharing a good story, as most any reporter will tell you. If you ever needed any confirmation for Joan Didion’s assertion that "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," simply compare Doug Seegers’ year in the news to Williams’. After struggling with a nowhere career for decades and battling homelessness, Seegers, born only a few months ahead of Williams, saw his career explode after someone heard him sing at a Nashville food pantry. He signed a Swedish record deal, got famous overseas and finally rose to prominence stateside this year with the release of Going Down to the River. That record landed features in The Wall Street Journal and Rolling Stone and a six-minute segment on NPR. Those same outlets covered Spirit, but not with the same mouth-open fervor. Spirit is, by every measure, a much better record, but it’s much more enticing to share the tale of a homeless country singer-turned-international sensation than it is the story of yet another new album from a predictably great songwriter, no matter if it might be her new apogee.
It’s click-bait, really: "A talent scout stumbles across a homeless sexagenarian singer in a food pantry. What happens next will shock you." The only real story hooks for Spirit, aside from how good it is, might be that Williams sings some of her dad’s poetry on the opener or closes with a smoldering cover of J.J. Cale’s "Magnolia", only a year after his death. Jakob Dylan adds some backing vocals. Williams has her own label now, too, but who doesn’t if that’s what they want?
It used to take Williams a very long time to make a record, with eight or six year spans separating some of her best work. But she’s become a seasoned and efficient professional, better at picking up the pace. And she’s recruited top-notch players like the late McLagan or Greg Leisz, musicians able to animate these tunes with speed and skill.
But what if Williams disappeared for a while, taking enough years off to slip from the wider collective memory? Upon her return, she’d be nearing 70, but maybe she’d be better noticed during the next album cycle, scooped up with a zeal that suggests some have mistaken her for a totally new artist whose story and songs "deserve" to be shared. Spirit deserved to be shared, too, but there was very little romance in the act.
"You’ll never find another Lucinda," Spin wrote back in 1998, when they called Car Wheels a feat. Why, then, does it feel like we’re looking for one, especially when she’s just offered us 20 songs that we kind of ignored?