Way Off the Fast Track

On a July night in a Nashville club, Lucinda Williams strums a few guitar chords, then stops before reaching the first words of “Lake Charles,” a song from her critically acclaimed new album, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.”

“It’s so hot, my brain isn’t working,” she cracks, flashing a crooked smile. She then counts off the tempo and starts the song again.

For Williams, stopping in mid-performance has become something of a concert trademark. And as with Pete Townshend smashing his guitar, this spontaneous outburst boils down her musical personality into one simple move.

Williams’ work is inseparable from her anxiety and her drive for perfection.

“I don’t like it if something doesn’t feel right,” she says. “If something is a little off, or it’s not working for me, I’ll say so. That used to be embarrassing, but now I make it work for me.”

Williams believes her anxiety and perfectionism work for her in the recording process as well. Slow and methodical in the studio, she habitually second-guesses herself while making a record. She accepts that, she says, but her methods repeatedly have caused rifts with collaborators and record companies.

“I usually have an idea of how I want a song to sound, but I don’t always know how to get there,” she says. “I have to try different things to see what works best. Other people get impatient with that, or they think they know better than I do about how my songs should sound. That’s usually where the problems come from.”

For Williams, the relative success of the new album is helping her move beyond the years of frustrations and battles that it took to complete it and get it out. In a rare 4 1/2-star review, Rolling Stone called the collection “perfect,” adding, “Sometimes it seems Lucinda Williams is too good for this world.”

If anything, Spin was even more enthusiastic, labeling it the year’s best album. Even if not everyone agrees with that sentiment, others have been supportive. (See review, Page 81.)

But Williams (who will play the Greek Theatre on Sept. 20 as part of the Newport Folk Festival touring lineup) has always been a critics’ favorite. “Writers like me,” she says with a smile.

What’s different about “Car Wheels” is that it’s actually selling. Until now, the singer has never had an album break the Billboard Top 200 chart. “Car Wheels” changed that by entering at No. 65 with first-week sales of more than 21,000 copies. After five weeks in the stores, total sales for the album have climbed to 85,000.

For Williams’ manager, Frank Callari, it’s not just the numbers but also the location.

“In the three or four cities where she’s getting radio play, she’s getting tremendous sales,” he says. “To me, that says that it’s not just her fans buying the record, it’s not just those who’ve been waiting five or six years for it to come out. If it’s tied to radio play, that means she’s reaching new fans.”

Emmylou Harris, who has recorded several of Williams’ songs in the past, says the recognition is long overdue.

“I think Lucinda has been one of the great overlooked artists of our time,” she says. “I’m so glad to see that it looks like she’s finally going to get heard.”

All of these good tidings have put Williams, who is notorious for her self-doubting and self-questioning, in an uncharacteristically chipper, even self-congratulatory, mood.

At age 45, she’s suddenly, unexpectedly popular.

“I feel a lot more comfortable being me these days,” Williams says. “I mean, my albums have always gotten good reviews. I’m constantly told that my work is good. A lot of fans and a lot of other artists say my songs and albums mean a lot to them. Isn’t that what’s important?”

Williams currently resides in a spacious, sunlit, two-story home in a tony neighborhood in central Nashville. She rents the home with bassist Richard Price, her boyfriend of three years. She moved in not long ago, after selling a larger, more modern, more expensive brick home.

Though she says she was never comfortable there--”it was too suburban feeling”--she also sold the place for financial reasons. The six-year break between albums didn’t just cause her emotional stress, it also created economic strain.

However, she shows few signs of pressure as she sits on a couch in her cozy, spotless living room. She’s relaxed and amiably chatty as she sits down to talk.

Her home, tastefully decorated in muted Southwestern colors, reflects the newly settled stage of life that she’s entering. Her shelves are packed with CDs and books, her tables and corners dotted with folk art and family mementos.

She seems far from the terse, hard-living, brokenhearted, restless rambler her songs might suggest. At least she’s not that way these days.

“Someone asked me recently why I was attracted to abusive men,” she says. “But that’s not me now. I’m not like that anymore. I’m settled and happy. Sure, I’ve gone through a lot of bad relationships. But so has nearly everyone I know. A lot of people put themselves in those situations, especially women. I don’t think I’m that different than anybody else.”

But not everyone grew up with writers like Flannery O’Connor and Charles Bukowski dropping by to see their folks. Miller Williams, the singer’s father, is a well-regarded poet who teaches at the University of Arkansas and read at President Clinton’s first inaugural.

Because of her father’s teaching work and restless nature, Williams’ family moved throughout the South when she was a child. She was born in Louisiana, a state that often figures in her songs, as do Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and Texas.

She learned her defiance early on: Her grandfather was a conscientious objector during World War I. Her father was active in the civil rights movement and protested against the Vietnam War. In high school in New Orleans, Williams once refused to recite the pledge of allegiance, as a statement against the war. She was expelled. As an adult, she’s always gone her own way.

She continued her father’s vagabond ways: She’s lived on her own in New Orleans, New York, Houston, Austin, Texas; Los Angeles and, since 1993, Nashville.

“I’m in love with the South,” she says. “I grew up around Southern writers, and I’ve always appreciated this region in a romantic sense that I probably got from being around all those literary types.”

Even though she’s enjoyed the financial rewards of country hits--Mary Chapin Carpenter (“Passionate Kisses”) and Patty Loveless (“The Night’s Too Long”) both have had radio success with Williams’ songs--she’s never associated with Music City’s mainstream music industry.

Instead, Williams identifies more with the city’s alternative club scene. She’s a fixture at nightclubs, where she’s championed unknown performers and bought tickets to see favored acts who come through town.

On such nights, she’s consistently cheery and approachable, like any other music fan out for a night of songs and kicks.

“I try to go out and be a normal person,” she says. “I think that’s important. I don’t understand artists who are reclusive. I’d be afraid of becoming alienated. I would really hate for all this to get where I can’t go out.”

Williams grants that she is a perfectionist. She might even be neurotic, she says. But her work vindicates her methods.

“You can’t really praise somebody’s work and then criticize the process,” she says. “That’s what’s so ironic about all the criticism and comments I get about how I make records. I mean, who cares what happens in the middle? I think the music proves I made the right decisions.”

Williams was newly signed to American Recordings when work began on “Car Wheels” in January 1995 in Austin. When Williams and American chief Rick Rubin were unhappy with the results, she says, those sessions were scrapped.

Williams then recorded the same songs in Nashville with the Twang Trust production team of Steve Earle and Ray Kennedy. For the first two weeks, Williams says, “We really cranked them out. We were really on a roll.”

Then, as she started fine-tuning the songs, she butted heads with Earle, she says. That extended the recording schedule, and time problems arose.

“We literally ran out of time,” says Williams. “Obviously, I wanted to get the record done--it had already been a long time by this point. So I decided to book another studio. We ended up going out to L.A.”

In Canoga Park’s Rumbo Studio, she “put a little icing on the cake” with former E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan. She admits her decision created “a little bit of a problem between me and Steve. He was frustrated, and I was frustrated. He had some ideas he didn’t have time to try. But now everything is cool.” (Earle declined to be interviewed about the subject.)

With the album out on Mercury Records, which eventually stepped in and bought the recording rights to “Car Wheels,” and with the praise rolling in, she says the tension and hard work were worth it. She’s learning to accept that the way she works isn’t easy, but it’s what works for her.

Still, she’s taken aback at how many stories in the media focus on her problems rather than her music. She thinks she’s received a bad rap, partly because she’s not the only one to blame for the delays in recording and releasing the album.

Harris thinks her friend has endured unfair characterizations in the press and within the music industry.

“Maybe I’m getting too much into a feminist mode,” she says. “But it seems to me that when a guy takes a long time to make a record, he’s a genius. . . . If a woman does that, it’s a different matter. Whatever road she had to take was the road she needed to take, because the record is a masterpiece.”

Williams smiles when she learns of Harris’ comment. “I would never say that, because if I did, people would say I was whining,” the singer says. “But it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people that that’s what it is. I’m just trying to get past all this stuff and put the focus on the music, where it belongs.”