Lucinda Williams
The Ghosts of Highway 20

There is no particular reason, but from the early morning, the hours of this day have been full, rounded, juicy, teeming with inexplicable and sublime positive energy. A run on the home mountain, Cima Marzola, with a soft and harmless rain tapping on my face and now, after a couple of hours, the day has exploded with light and I feel as though I'm in a battery charger. Perhaps later I'll see a girl: I want to fool myself that she isn't as unstable and nasty as the last ones. Stretched out in the sun with a beer in hand, I realize I am living through juicy hours like a ripe and fresh fruit into which it is impossible not to want to sink your teeth, soft and inviting like a breast, on which, after playing around for a while, one would eventually want to fall asleep after a night of passion. It happens to spend hours in total harmony. It happens like this, unexpectedly. We fall into it and forget all the daily filth we have learned to swim through for mere survival. The human mind, however, is nasty, and often if there's no particular event to punctuate those hours, beyond the immense sense of peace and wellness that strikes us, we forget them and the shrill alarm of the first Monday takes them away. Forever.

I believe this is why I felt the need to tear a sheet of paper to quickly write, between sips of an excellent Porter, these skewed lines. The rest, I tell myself, will come on its own.
Lucinda Williams and her latest album are the excuse with which I want to bind this microscopic and precious grain of life to memory; an attempt to ensure it doesn't fall into the flush of lost good memories.

Minimalist blues, southern, and folk songs, like “Louisiana Story”, based on a simple arpeggio and the rough, melancholic, and passionate voice seems to have been written expressly as the soundtrack for this day. It is quality work: this is demonstrated by the fact that a wonderful black and orange butterfly decided to spend a slice of its so brief life to rest here next to me to listen to about thirty minutes of great music. It flaps its wings and reminds me of the audience, yes, I was there too, last Wednesday in the province of Como at Pusiano. A small sea of butterflies flapped their wings in time when Williams and her band finally greeted us with the Neil Young cover “Keep On Rockin in the Free World”. A thousand in a park with a full moon as the backdrop to her first visit to Italy for one of the best concerts I've attended in the last three years: second only to Gov't Mule and The Dream Syndicate. Of “The Ghosts of Highway 20” I preferred the more measured and hypnotic pieces compared to the more upbeat ones like “Bitter Memory”, mentioned only to give a benchmark to those who have already listened to this work. I think of the title track with its simple and enveloping melodic lines well rendered by Mathis's guitar work. Rocked by her voice as “Can't Close the Door On Love” ends, with a warm wind blowing a mild breeze over my hair, the view of the Brenta peaks polishing my eyes, I fell asleep and slept deliciously, letting the beer slide down the slanted slabs of the garden. Slowly, like the rhythm section and the flow of the amber liquid to the grass, my eyelids closed. The album, it's a double, I played it a couple more times and that feeling of well-being spread even more. The very sad “Dust” dedicated by the singer-songwriter to her late father restarts and I also think of mine who was taken from me two years ago. However, that lump that usually tangles in my gut like barbed wire doesn't rise; this time it doesn't feel like I'm swallowing damned razor blades. While she sings and remembers, I keep the beat and relive the many beautiful moments I spent with him with a hint of a smile on my lips and just a few harmless tears, as it should be. It's an enjoyable album right from the start and yet it falls into the category of those that require several listens to fully appreciate. The only flaw I feel I can point out is the perhaps excessive length of the work. Ten tracks on a single album might have been a better choice, but these are trifles and today I'm not quite in the mood for criticism and ratings.

Now, with a few hours passed since the last line, I feel things slowly returning to normal. I'm in the midst of the so-called golden hour. The shadows lengthen: the sun approaches the sunset with small steps and floods everything with enveloping, soft, and charmingly declining light. The perfect light on cloudless summer evenings that makes us, little pretentious brats with a piece of plastic in hand, believe we're photographers when instead all the credit goes to the spectacle that we aren't even able to enjoy in silence, too busy having to share it immediately with hordes of unknown friends. Yes, I'm turning sour again. Better to turn off the stereo, end it here, and say goodbye.