Album Review: Lucinda Williams, ‘World’s Gone Wrong’
As the world plunges steadily into darkness, we witness daily humanity’s depraved indifference in televised acts of heinous brutality and orchestrated cruelty. At the same time, we see daily instances of righteous love in both physical and verbal response to a casual unconcern for individuals and their worlds. In the taut lyrics and raw vocals on her eighteenth studio album, World’s Gone Wrong, Lucinda Williams viscerally evokes a bleak landscape cluttered by political and ethical blindness, overweening self-regard, corruption, broken promises, and hopelessness: a world that’s gone wrong, indeed. Embedded in her songs, though, shine glimmers of hope, reminding us that even in the midst of gloom we can find comfort in community, and in music.
The title track, a swampy rocker that features Rob Burger on swelling B3 and Britney Spencer on soaring harmony vocals, opens the album, drawing a picture of individuals trying to make it through the day in a world turned upside down. Even in such a world, however, we continue to “look for comfort in a song.” On the minor chord blues rock “Something’s Gotta Give,” fueled by Marc Ford’s and Doug Pettibone’s searing guitars, evil romps in every yard: “evil has come to play/you can feel everywhere.” Mickey Raphael adds his soulful harmonica wails to the country shuffle “Low Life,” an ode to a juke joint where “they don’t know my face/and the bartender makes good hurricanes.” A sonic nod to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the soaring Southern rocker “Sing Unburied Sing,” inspired by Jesmyn Ward’s novel of the same name, explores the haunting injustices buried in the past of many Southerners. Mavis Staples joins Williams for a powerful take on Bob Marley’s “So Much Trouble in the World,” while the fierce blues “Black Tears” strips to the bone the ways that truth is masked and justice short-circuited: “the dreams have been deferred/And the churches are burning/Where voices are not heard/What the hell are we learning?” The album closes with gospel-inflected “We Have Come Too Far to Turn Around,” with Norah Jones on piano and harmony vocals. Jones introduces the song with a riff on “Amazing Grace,” leading into a soulful plea that cuts many ways: refugees who have traveled far to turn around because of broken promises; individuals who continue to protest on the front lines of violence to those refugees and injustice; a nation that has come 250 years on the promises of liberty and justice, too far to turn around. It’s a song that should be sung at every protest march.
Lucinda Williams has always found a way to speak truth to power, and on World’s Gone Wrong she speaks more loudly than ever.
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World’s Gone Wrong is available HERE.
