Lucinda Williams - "Changed The Locks" [Live From Austin, TX]
Have I ever told you about my friend Lucinda? Not that I know her personally, even though I saw her play a few years ago unfortunately in a dreadful place (no offense to the locals), a kind of former oratory by Lake Pusiano where there wasn’t even a square or a main street. I was saying that I don’t know her personally, and until about a decade ago, I didn’t know her at all as an artist; but she gave me, from the very first listens—without my knowing anything about her biography—the feeling of someone I’d love to sit with in some remote dive bar in some kind of godforsaken desert to get good and drunk, rambling nonsense about this shity life.
There’s no need for me to recount that said life: we all know—those of us who have been to hell at least—how it goes. Badly, although not always, perhaps (no hashtags this time).
As for the rest, a voice that spits in your heart and guts everything that’s there, including certain dirty, scratched loves, but always sublimated into an immense, unarmed tenderness. All of it played by a god: a kind of very "Dirty" Country-Rock but full of that desperate beauty that only great, intensely human and sensitive artists can convey.