Lucinda Williams: A Guide To Her Best Songs

To paraphrase one of her most evocative lyrics, there's something about what happens when you listen to a Lucinda Williams song. The plain but cultivated beauty of her phrase-turning draws you in, but it's another quality that makes a novice listener into an ardent fan. It's the feeling of watching something grow like a flower on a vine: a recollection, a fully fleshed-out image, a person's inner life unfolding. Williams crafts words and melodies that seem to originate in the listener's own head, capturing the way stray observations and building reveries intertwine to become the stories we tell ourselves and each other. Her songs bring to mind the way William Carlos Williams (no relation) described the task of writing poetry: "We're not putting the rose, the single rose, in the little glass vase in the window — we're digging a hole for the tree — and as we dig have disappeared in it."

Williams, who releases today, was born to this process. Her father Miller was, in fact, aa perfect work of observational storytelling that both defined the nascent Americana genre and instantly transcended it, because no one could write both so personally, it seemed, and with such talent for reaching inside fans' own souls. I remember when I first got — an advance copy transferred onto cassette tape by a friend who knew Williams, the song titles written on the cover in my friend's neat, cramped hand. I put the tape into the boombox in my Brooklyn kitchen and it didn't leave for a month. Every evening I'd listen, making dinner, my solitary thoughts filtered through Willliams's voice like the twilight through my row house's back window.