Lucinda Williams: Outside the Gilded Cage

There should be a special preserve for rare birds such as Lucinda Williams, whose lack of showy plumage sinks them in the mating dance of the music marketplace but whose sweet, simple, profound song is tuned to the essence of greatness far more than the Jewelbird, the Tori tanager or the golden Alanis goose.

As it is, this Louisiana-hatched, Nashville-roosted talent keeps losing habitat. Since her artistry reached maturity in 1988, Williams has managed to produce just two independent-label albums, both for companies that folded.

During her show Monday at the Coach House, Williams wryly but tartly alluded to business difficulties with American Recordings that have kept a completed new album from appearing.

She did what she could under the circumstances, playing at least an album’s worth of unreleased songs during a 95-minute set, all immediately striking.

Williams’ hybrid of country, folk, blues and rock is deceivingly simple. There is remarkable texture in her straightforward lyrics, and her nasal, unadorned but attractive Southern twang conjures a complex weave of ardor and stoicism.

Many of Williams’ songs captured grief and loss borne with dignity, never, never allowing listeners the easy balm of sentimentality or taking the easy songwriting out of a bland, woe-is-me outpouring.

This was storytelling, measured and believable.

*

In the funeral song “Pineola,” Williams gave a detailed and evocative account of her shock and grief at a friend’s suicide--the point at which many an above-average songwriter would have quit with a self-congratulatory slap on the back.

Instead, she went on to mull over the deep fissures in our life stories--in this case, the gulf between the Bohemian, freethinking circle in which her friend moved and the severe, Bible Belt upbringing he tried to put behind him. That’s texture.

The corpses piled up steadily during Williams’ set, with suicide and boozing the toll-takers; “Drunken Angel” was a particularly fine song that interwove aching loss with steely reproach.

In a portrait that could have applied to Hank Williams, Johnny Thunders, Kurt Cobain or Townes Van Zandt, Williams rejected the common sentimental indulgence of glamorizing talented people who throw away their art by not valuing their lives.

But Thanatos was balanced in the set by an unpandering Eros, as in the very sexy, but even more hilarious, “Hot Blood.” (Williams said that Wynonna Judd was too chicken to record it; one suspects that was not because of the lust in it, but because of its droll, off-kilter mining of the comedy in obsessed desire.)

Williams’ inward meditations gave way toward the end to some edgy blues. “Joy” was the boiled-down, telegraphic essence of what English rocker PJ Harvey has been driving at in her elaborate myths--a way of using the blues as a womanly declaration of self-hood and roiling passion.

Williams was by no means a detached performer, offering humorous asides and commentaries on her songs and career ups and downs.

*

But she is a storyteller with a fundamental, stiff-shouldered restraint in her bearing rather than a natural performer and self-dramatizer.

She leaves it to the listener’s imagination to conjure colors, make connections and draw conclusions. All that has gotten her, at age 44, is a place on the endangered list.

“Is it too much to demand / I want a full house and a rock ‘n’ roll band,” Williams sang on “Passionate Kisses,” the song that has kept her solvent, thanks to Mary Chapin Carpenter’s 1992 hit cover.

On Monday, she had half a house (albeit a loudly appreciative one) and two-thirds of a rock ‘n’ roll band--a bassist and guitarist who sang supportively but, in guitarist Chris Anderson’s case, played without the nuance and inflection needed to do the job well.

No matter; Williams’ drummer-less rock ‘n’ roll band ensured that we heard every word and note from her, making this a great night for scouting that rare species: the inspired, uncompromising and unpretentious pop-rock singer-songwriter.