Adrian Bohm Presents is pleased to announce the return of three time Grammy winner LUCINDA WILLIAMS for a New Zealand tour in April 2012.
With a recording career that is now in its fourth decade, her latest album BLESSED released in March 2011 received rave reviews worldwide. It’s not all that hard to find an artist who’s capable of
offering a guided tour of life’s dark clouds – nor is it rare to come into contact with one who can hone in on the
silver lining. But the ability to do both with equal grace, well, that’s an altogether rarer gift – and it’s one that
Lucinda Williams displays with remarkable élan on this album.
“Being married and feeling comfortable in my life, I’ve been able to go outside myself and write about other things,”
she says. “I feel like this album, as a whole, is positive, but it’s not my so-called ‘happy’ album. Yes, I’m in love
and I’m happy in my personal life. But my personal life isn’t the only focus. There aren’t all those unrequited love,
‘I’ve been shot down by a bad boy songs’ … well, there’s one of those … but there are songs about all sorts of things.
It’s just a lot easier to stretch these days.”
“I didn’t have a fully realized picture of what I wanted the album to sound like going in, but I hardly ever do,” says
Williams. “Back when I was playing open mic nights by myself, I’d be sitting up there with my Martin guitar and doing
‘Angel’ by Jimi Hendrix or ‘Politician’ by Cream alongside Robert Johnson and Memphis Minnie songs. It never occurred to me to pick just one style. That’s stayed with me ever since. ”
Williams has never hesitated to wave that flag of iconoclasm, but she’s never used it as a shield. Ever since the
release of her 1978 debut Ramblin’ on My Mind, the Louisiana-bred singer-songwriter has been ready, willing and able to call upon both her natural affinity for roots
music and her familial literary tradition. She learned the importance of professional integrity around the same time
most kids are learning their ABC’s, thanks in large part to her award-winning poet father Miller Williams, where she grew around poets and novalists and they all had families and normal lives. He invested her with a
“culturally rich, but economically poor” upbringing where artistic expression was of primary importance. Later, she’d
hone her vision playing hardscrabble clubs around her adopted home state of Texas, absorbing the influence of sources as
varied as Bob Dylan and Lightnin’ Hopkins.
In recent times, Williams has shown herself to be the kind of artist who’ll never back down from a challenge, whether
collaborating with surprisingly kindred spirits like M. Ward and Flogging Molly or putting her own spin on iconic tunes like Bob Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” and Jimmy Webb’s classic “Galveston”. She’s taken that same approach to her most recent recordings as a solo artist as well: The 2006 release West and
2008’s buoyant Little Honey - an album Paste hailed as “an album that brims with varied, impeccable writing” - made for an ethereal emotional
travelogue that takes in both great loss and the sort of discovery one can only make when emotional barriers are taken
down.
“People buy into this myth that once you’re quote happy unquote, you just die as an artist – that’s inane. It’s
ridiculous,” she says. “People have actually asked me, ‘well, will you still be able to write now that your life is
happy?’ That’s a somewhat pedantic point of view, the myth that happiness can’t be part of the backbone of creativity. Whether you’re a longtime Lucinda Williams fan or just discovering her wonderfully captivating music for the first time,
these shows are not to be missed.
www.lucindawilliams.com