Lucinda Williams Marks Career Firsts With Upcoming Album
Lucinda Williams will release her first-ever double studio album in September. Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone features 20 new tracks and is another first for the 61-year-old singer in that it includes a song crafted from a poem written by her father. Author, college professor and published poet Miller Williams is perhaps best known for his poem read at President Bill Clinton’s second inauguration. “Compassion,” a musical expansion of one of his poems, serves as the upcoming album’s opening track and will be the first collaboration ever released by the father-daughter co-writers.
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“My poetry and her songs — you could say they both have dirt under the fingernails,” the elder Williams once told an audience at the Poetry Center of Chicago. “In my writing, I try to get down to the nuts and bolts of living, and there’s no question that Lucinda does that, too. Her music is not abstract. There’s real sweat in every song.”
The only other songwriter on Bone‘s credits is JJ Cale on the closing track, “Magnolia,” as 18 of the 20 songs were penned by Williams solo. However, the three-time Grammy winner did recruit a who’s-who list of musicians to play on the record, including guitarists Bill Frisell and Tony Joe White, Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan, Pete Thomas (drums) and Davey Faragaher (bass) from Elvis Costello’s band, and Wallflowers guitarist Stuart Mathis. Additionally, Wallflowers lead singer Jakob Dylan lends his voice to “It’s Gonna Rain.”
Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone, the singer’s eleventh studio album, was co-produced by Williams, Tom Overby and Greg Leisz and will be available September 30th via her own Highway 20 Records.