Write Turns: Veteran singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams keeps fans guessing

Spencer Patterson

Friday, Feb. 20, 2004 | 8:51 a.m.

Who: Lucinda Williams.

When: 7 p.m. Saturday.

Where: House of Blues at Mandalay Bay.

Tickets: $22, $27.

Information: (702) 632-7600.

Critics hailed Lucinda Williams' "World Without Tears" as one of 2003's best discs, but the veteran singer/songwriter didn't really expect it to win a Grammy for best contemporary folk album.

Williams had a sneaking suspicion that honor would go to the late Warren Zevon who succumbed to lung cancer in September and, sure enough, it did at this month's Grammy presentation.

"I felt like I stood a chance, because I'd been making a lot of the year-end lists and we'd been out touring quite a bit, so my profile's been real high," Williams said in a phone interview from her home in Toluca Lake, Calif.

"But I thought it would probably go to Warren Zevon, because of his untimely passing. It ends up being a tribute more than anything else."

Williams plays the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay at 7 p.m. Saturday. She most recently played Las Vegas in July, when she opened for Neil Young at The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel.

Though Williams was proven right on her Zevon prediction, the 51-year-old singer/songwriter learned long ago how difficult forecasting Grammy voters' preferences can be.

The woman Time magazine called "America's Best Songwriter" in 2001 has won three Grammys in her career, one each in a country, rock and contemporary folk category.

Her 2001 trophy for best female rock vocalist was awarded for "Get Right With God," a cut she described as an "old Delta blues, bluesy-gospely song." She won in a field that included Stevie Nicks, among other more traditional "rock" stars.

"It's weird with the Grammys," she said. "Sometimes when you think you've got it all figured out, it completely surprises you. It's really hard to predict."

Likewise, it's hard to predict Williams' musical moves. Her rootsy material has blurred the lines between folk, country, rock and blues since she see arrived on the scene with 1979 debut album "Ramblin'."

"I'm kind of like Neil Young or Bob Dylan in that you never know what they're going to do next," the Louisiana native said with the same tough Southern drawl that has graced her seven records.

"I might want to go back to my roots and do something more acoustic, folky next, but I don't know."

Over the past decade much has been written about Williams' renowned perfectionism. She worked for eight years to follow up 1980's eponymous CD, then took six years to complete her 1998 masterpiece, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road."

But Williams' recording process has sped up in recent years. She released "Essence" three years after "Car Wheels," then came back with "World Without Tears" just two years after that.

Williams said that hasn't been the result of a determined effort to move faster, however.

"Whether it takes a year, two years, three years, I don't care," she said. "That's just my philosophy about it. I don't like to be on a timetable. I'm not trying to crank out records just for the sake of putting records out."

In particular, Williams works at her own pace when writing songs. She said she'll often go weeks without picking up a guitar, then suddenly feel the creative urge to begin crafting melodies and writing lyrics.

"I used to worry about it, because some time would go by and I wouldn't be writing anything," she said. "But now I realize I kind of work on what's called a J-curve: you can go along, go along, go along, and then all of a sudden you have this spurt.

"When that happens I can sit down and finish like seven or eight songs, work on stuff every day for two weeks. I get my notes out and get a little tape recorder and my guitar, usually sit at the kitchen table and just kind of go at it."

"World Without Tears" was completed quickly in large part because it was recorded live in the studio with her three bandmates, guitarist Doug Pettibone, bassist Taras Prodaniuk and drummer Jim Christie.

Keyboards were added to tracks later, but everything else on the 13-song disc sounds as it did when recorded.

"For the kinds of songs we were doing, it seemed to fit," Williams said. "(Recording live) is cool, but at the same time, you don't have as much control over things. Maybe next time I'll do a bit of both -- record the tracks live, but then maybe go back in and do some of the vocals again."

"World Without Tears" also features a more rocking sound than its predecessors, most notably on "Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings" and first single "Righteously," a song nominated for a best female rock vocal performance Grammy. (Pink won the category.)

Williams said approaching the album from a rock perspective was more or less intentional.

"I can't force anything to happen, but I was definitely conscious of the move toward that, because I felt like I needed to move in that direction after the last record," she said. "I didn't want to make another laid-back thing."

"World Without Tears" also includes two tracks -- "Sweet Side" and "American Dream" -- that have been described as having a hip-hop feel by several reviewers. Both songs feature spoken lyrics. A move into yet another musical genre by the stylistically adaptable Williams? Not exactly.

"I was listening to a little bit of (hip-hop). I mean, we all listen to it because it's everywhere," she said. "I was influenced a lot by that Jill Scott record ('Who is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds, Vol. 1') and I liked a lot of the Lauryn Hill record ('The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill').

"So it was a little bit of that beat thing, which is really what hip-hop stems from. But it really goes back to the original talking blues stuff that Bob Dylan used to do in the '60s, songs like 'Subterranean Homesick Blues.' It wasn't meant to be hip-hop. That's ridiculous (laughs)."

The lyrics to "American Dream" read like a John Kerry stump speech, an account of economic woes, poor mining conditions and American Indian displacement.

Surprisingly, the political song is a rarity for Williams, who has spent much of her life protesting injustices. As a sophomore in high school, for example, she drew a long suspension for refusing to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

"I've always found it very difficult to write a good topical song," she said. "There have only been a couple of writers in my mind who have been able to succeed in that, people like Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Steve Earle.

"It's really hard to do without overly romanticizing things, and having the lyrics sound overly maudlin or corny or dated now."

Instead, Williams channels her political energy more directly into her daily life. Last year she and her boyfriend put a homeless woman up in a Los Angeles hotel for a month after discovering her sleeping outside a Carl's Jr. restaurant in their neighborhood.

"A lot of people think politics are just about elections, or an anti-war movement," she said. "But it's also about being active. It's about everyday life and helping everyday people to make ends meet."