Lucinda Williams

West

Lost Highway

LUCINDA WILLIAMS’s music is evocative in a way others can’t touch. It’s not only the fragility and ache in her voice but also her economy of language, with its declarative simplicity that cuts to the heart. A perfect album is a rarity, yet Williams has made two, her 1988 self-titled breakthrough and 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Wheels’ five years of sessions were torturous for this onetime Austinite, as was a 2000 New Yorker profile that portrayed her as a perfectionist frozen by her insecurities; though Williams now moves with greater speed and newfound confidence, the clichéd Nashville cats who have backed her of late seem clueless to her sensibilities. With WEST (Lost Highway), producer Hal Willner and musicians like Bill Frisell and Gary Louris right the wrong, and Williams—alternately longing, wistful, funny, and pissed off—turns in what is easily her most powerful work in years. With the mournful questions (“Are You Alright?” “Where Is My Love?”), the plaintive narrative of “Fancy Funeral,” the quiet despair of “Everything Has Changed,” and the come-on of “Unsuffer Me,” it’s more than easy to get lost in these masterful songs.

Ruthie Foster

The Phenomenal Ruthie Foster

Blue Corn Music

Those lucky enough to have caught RUTHIE FOSTER live, particularly years back when she sat in with the Austin gospel act the Imperial Golden Crown Harmonizers, know something her albums have never fully betrayed: She’s a stone soul singer who’s been masquerading as a folk act. No longer. THE PHENOMENAL RUTHIE FOSTER (Blue Corn Music) is a throwback to an era when gospel-tinged Southern soul ruled the airwaves. Decades ago it was also common to see titles like The Incredible Jimmy Smith and The Genius of Ray Charles; while such immodesty has long been out of vogue, Foster wears it well. Her voice is a typhoon, bold and rich, with a tendency to suck up everything in the room. Though the album’s arrangements are all of a piece and the recording is thin, the playing is solid. And the song selection (originals, plus covers of Son House, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Lucinda Williams) is superb. Credit Harmonizer bandmate Malcolm “Papa Mali” Welbourne, who coaxed Foster back to the music of her youth by taking away her acoustic and sitting her at a Wurlitzer piano. From there, it instantly became all about the groove.

Norah Jones

Not Too Late

Blue Note

Sell 20 million of your debut album and you suddenly bring a little clout to the table. No one has wielded hers more curiously than NORAH JONES, who followed her elegant Arif Mardin-produced 2002 triumph with a reluctant shrug: a homemade-sounding second album and a barely serious side group with her friends called the Little Willies. Now comes her third, NOT TOO LATE (Blue Note), and Jones seems, at least to some degree, to have rallied the troops. The sound is a bit more radiant, and—something new—Jones herself writes most of the songs. With the exception of the embarrassing “Little Room,” they aren’t so bad, either. A few (“Wish I Could,” “Thinking About You,” “The Sun Doesn’t Like You,” “Be My Somebody”) stick with you, and the Dallas-raised singer slurs and purrs with considerable charm. Still, the playing at times seems amateurish, and Jones’s predilection for dirge-slow material—there’s little resembling an actual tempo here—has a narcotic effect. Would it kill her to cut loose occasionally? Jones clearly has talent; strangely, she seems to be doing her best to hide the fact.

Patty Griffin

Austin chanteuse Patty Griffin is known for her deeply introspective music, yet her new album, Children Running Through (ATO), is joyous and fun.

You seem to change moods from album to album. Are you easily bored? Yeah, I can’t stand the songs anymore [laughs]. You get exhausted on the road and you end up repeating the set, so it gets to feel a little slutty. In the years since the war started, I’ve looked out at the faces in the audience and felt like I needed to have more material of my own that the audience could engage in with me. I’m really inspired by Willie Nelson; he picks these plums that everybody feels a part of.

You do seem liberated. When you get older, one of the great things is that you’re not cool anymore; there’s a lot of freedom in that. I’ve been reading Rumi, and I named the record after one of his poems:

I used to be shy, you made me sing
I used to refuse things at table, now I shout for more wine
In somber dignity, I used to sit on my mat and pray
Now children run through and make faces at me.

I think that’s pretty awesome.

Children Running Through: Patty Griffin, published by ATO.