Lucinda Williams’ voice will break your heart.  It doesn’t really matter what she is singing about — that breathy gravelly voice will take you down every time.  While you’re with Williams, you’ll spend a lot of time in cars and broken down homes, moving from city to city in the deep South.  It may crush you, but it’s well worth the trip.

Although most of her songs are about heartbreak and regret, even the tracks that seem on the surface to be a bit more optimistic embody a deep sadness.  Take the song, Right In Time, which states bluntly “the way you move is right in time with me.”  That’s positive, right?  Yet in the same song, she repeats, “Oh, baby,” throughout the song, stretching the syllables out to such a mournful degree that you can’t quite tell if she is suffocating or having an orgasm or possibly both.

Still, most of Williams’ songs are less opaque.  These are confessional tunes with blunt pronouncements such as “you took my joy, I want it back.”  (That song, by the way, is misleadingly titled, Joy.)  Love was meant to be lost and happiness is fleeting.  Did I mention I really like Lucinda Williams?

Both Joy and Right In Time are from the album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, which is an outstanding place to start listening to Lucinda Williams.  I also own Essence, which is a damn good album as well, and World Without Tears, which I need to spend more time with.

I don’t really know how to classify Ms. Williams.  Country certainly feels appropriate, given the settings and emotions and delivery of most of her work.  But I don’t like country, so I’m reluctant to label it that way.  Some tunes spin out into raucous honkytonk free-for-alls while others spiral down deep into the rhythms of the blues.  But whatever you want to call it, there is always a rock vibe somewhere in there, often lodged in Williams’ voice, which I’ll just say again is hypnotic.

There are two more songs off of Car Wheels that drive home Williams’ ability to capture the regret and pain of relationships.  In Metal Firecracker, everything you need to know about the agony of breaking up is contained in the single line, “All I ask is don’t tell anybody the secrets I told you.”  But possibly my favorite song is Jackson (and that’s a tough choice out of the many tracks I really love).

In Jackson, we go on a road trip with Williams.  She is driving away from someone she loved and has now left.  We never hear a thing about the relationship itself.  We aren’t privvy to the circumstances of how it started or ended.  We don’t find out whose fault it was.  Instead, with doleful accompaniment from a steel guitar, Williams sings the following:

All the way to Jackson
I don’t think I’ll miss you much

Once I get to Lafayette
I’m not gonna mind one bit

Once I get to Baton Rouge
I won’t cry a tear for you

All the way to Jackson
I don’t think I’ll miss you much

It is deceptively simple, economical in its storytelling, and yet we know everything we need to know.  It’s tough out there.  But by wearing her heart on her sleeve and singing her pain on her records, Williams makes it a little bit easier for the rest of us.