Lucinda Williams 'Car Wheels On A Gravel Road (deluxe edition)' album

With a new Lucinda Williams album expected this fall, her most rapturously acclaimed and best-selling album to date receives the expanded Deluxe Edition treatment. The two-CD Car Wheels On A Gravel Road – Deluxe Edition (Mercury/Lost Highway/UMe), released October 24, 2006, adds a pair of previously unreleased studio tracks plus an alternate version of “Still I Long For Your Kiss” heard in The Horse Whisperer and an entire previously unreleased 1998 live performance to a newly remastered edition of the singer-songwriter’s most celebrated and beloved album. Six years since her previous album, 1998’s long-anticipated Car Wheels On A Gravel Road was worth the wait. The 13-song collection’s passionate, sharply detailed accounts of love, loss and longing were matched by the deceptively laid-back intensity of Williams’ performances and those of guest artists that included Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Charlie Sexton, Jim Lauderdale, Buddy Miller and the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan. Topping many year-end critics polls and landing Williams her first gold record, the album also won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album, despite being her least folkish work. A masterwork of roots rock woven through with folk, honky-tonk country and blues, the album (her fifth) marked her artistic and commercial breakthrough after a near 20-year recording career.

Augmenting the original album on Disc One are two outtakes from the album’s initial 1995 Austin sessions--the Williams original “Out Of Touch” (which she would re-record for 2001’s Essence) and a stripped-down reading of the 1920s blues classic “Down The Big Road Blues”--and the alternate “Still I Long For Your Kiss.”

Disc Two captures a spirited live performance, recorded July 11, 1998 at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia for WXPN’s “Live At The World Café” radio show. Featuring Williams’ then-current touring band, the set encompasses nine numbers from Car Wheels On A Gravel Road (the title track, “Metal Firecracker,” “Right In Time,” “Drunken Angel,” “Greenville” “Still I Long For Your Kiss,” “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten,” “Can’t Let Go” and “Changed The Locks”) and four earlier favorites (“Pineola,” “Something About What Happens When We Talk,” “Joy” and “Hot Blood”). The concert as well as the Disc One bonus tracks have also been newly digitally remastered.

What was said of Car Wheels On A Gravel Road in 1998 is still true today: “In a world inundated with cookie-cutter, Lilith-ready wimps,” wrote Entertainment Weekly, “there’s enough gravel on Williams’ wheels to fill a West Texas dump truck.”

Biography

Lucinda Williams' fifth album, 1998's Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, marked the singer/songwriter's emergence as both a major artist and a popular favorite. Merging roots-steeped songcraft and emotionally naked lyrical insight, the 13-song collection's passionate, sharply detailed accounts of love, loss and longing were populated by the ghosts of departed lovers, friends and family members, peppered with vivid images of places from the artist's past, and suffused with echoes of blues, folk and honky-tonk tradition. The intimacy and resonance of Williams' songwriting was matched by the deceptively laid-back intensity of her performances, with her lived-in drawl lending immediacy to the songs' raw, exposed emotions.

Williams was nearly 20 years into her recording career when she achieved her artistic and commercial breakthrough with Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. The daughter of noted poet and college literature professor Miller Williams, she led an itinerant youth, during which her family lived in eight different Southern towns as well as Mexico City and Santiago, Chile. She picked up the guitar at the age of 12, and by her late teens was playing solo coffeehouse gigs in her then-hometown of New Orleans. She continued to hone her craft during stints in Houston, Austin and New York, and was a seasoned performer by the time she recorded a pair of low-budget albums—1979's Ramblin', a set of blues and country covers, and 1980's mostly self-penned Happy Woman Blues—for the Folkways label.

Williams spent the next eight years playing live and experiencing a series of career near-misses and false starts. A deal with Rough Trade spawned 1988's Lucinda Williams, which won her considerable critical attention as well as a new indie-rock/alt-country cult following. The eponymous disc also became a popular source of material for other performers, including Mary Chapin-Carpenter, whose hit version of Williams' "Passionate Kisses" won a 1994 Grammy as Best Country Song, as well as Patty Loveless (who scored a country hit with "The Night's Too Long") and Tom Petty (who covered "Changed the Locks"). Williams' next album, Sweet Old World, released in 1992 by the soon-to-be-defunct Chameleon label, won a similar level of acclaim.

While Car Wheels On A Gravel Road is now widely acknowledged as a classic, it initially won notoriety not for its musical contents but for the struggles that surrounded its long, convoluted recording process.

After signing with Rick Rubin's label American Recordings, Williams began recording her new songs at Arlyn Studios in Austin, Texas in January 1995 with her longtime guitarist/co-producer Gurf Morlix, bassist Dr. John Ciambotti and drummer Donald Lindley—the same team that had made Lucinda Williams and Sweet Old World.

"We were working the way we'd always done before," Williams explains. "But then Gurf and I started butting heads over some tracks that I wasn't totally comfortable about. We just weren't getting along, and I was feeling frustrated. Something was pushing me to grow. I don't know what it was exactly, but I just had this feeling that something needed to happen differently to make that record stand out from the one before.

"When we finished in Austin," she continues, "we'd done all the tracking and had the roughs for all the songs. But I wasn't happy with the way my voice sounded, so I wanted to re-cut some of the vocals. Gurf was fine with them, but I wasn't. By then, I was living in Nashville, so I convinced Gurf to come to Nashville, and we went to Woodland Studios to re-cut some vocals and work on the record some more."

At around the same time that Williams was attempting to rework the Austin recordings, Steve Earle invited her to sing a duet vocal on "You're Still Standing There" for his album I Feel Alright, which Earle was recording with production partner Ray Kennedy at Kennedy's Nashville studio Room and Board.

"When I went in to record with Steve, the sound that I was hearing in the studio was what I wanted to hear for my stuff," Williams recalls. "When I listened back to the track, I loved the way my voice sounded. I listened to Steve's rough mixes and my rough mixes, and I liked the way his record sounded a lot better than I liked mine. He was using more compression on the vocals, and it just had a lot more presence and more warmth and a bigger sound. It was the sound that I had been trying to get on my record."

Williams convinced Earle and Kennedy to sign on as co-producers, and they began working at Room and Board, with Morlix, Ciambotti and Lindley in tow. Eventually, the Austin recordings were shelved and all of the songs were completely rerecorded.

"When we went in, we weren't intending to re-cut the whole record," Williams explains. " But we cut a couple of songs, and all the sudden it was just like the sky just opened up. It became obvious that we really had something. Steve had this way of pushing the tracks that gave them this energy that they didn't have before, and we had Ray engineering so we were getting better sounds. Everybody went 'Wow, this really sounds good, so we might as well re-cut this other song and this other song...' We were on a roll, so we just kept going.

"It just organically grew from what it had been into this whole other thing. But it wasn't that much different. We didn't play the songs different and the arrangements were all the same, it was just the actual recorded sounds that were different. It was exciting to see it grow to that other place."

But if the sessions with Earle yielded results that were closer to the sound that Williams heard in her head, they also hastened the breakdown of her working relationship with longtime collaborator Morlix, who bowed out after a few weeks.

"Gurf was still supposed to be co-producing too, but that didn't work politically," Williams states. "Steve was fine with having Gurf there. But Steve's a very assertive kind of guy, and I think Gurf resented it and felt sort of usurped. He kept insisting that what we had from the original Austin sessions was better, but he was the only one who thought that. It got to the point where it seemed like Gurf didn't really want to be a part of it, and he had pulled away to the point where there was just so much tension between him and me.

"About halfway through the record, we took a break, and Gurf had this cabin in Canada that he and his wife go to every summer. They were going to go there for a couple weeks, and he just chose not to come back. So we went back in with Steve and Ray, and we brought in Buddy Miller and Bo Ramsey to play guitars, and finished tracking the rest of the songs."

Once the basic tracks had been recorded, the album's progress bogged down as the artist wrestled with her insecurities while recording her vocal tracks.

"I tend to be kind of deliberate when I'm in the studio, and I like to take my time working on things sometimes," she admits. "But I also had this fear factor going, where I was afraid to let go of something cause I'd never feel like it was good enough. I still didn't have that much studio experience at the time, and I was still very insecure. I'd hear a little sound and it would be magnified in my head. Also, when you're in the studio with the same people day after day after day, whatever insecurities or issues or demons you're dealing with all come to the surface."

The situation placed considerable strain on her relationship with Earle. "Steve was just so frustrated with me. At one point he said, 'Lu, it's just a record.' Like, come on, get a grip, y'know? But for me it was just such an intense, heavy process. I was feeling like, 'God it's so permanent, and once it goes on there I can't ever change it...'"

As the Nashville sessions dragged on, the recording schedule ran up against Earle's touring commitments. In late 1996, with the bulk of the recording done, the production moved to L.A.'s Rumbo Recorders, where E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan was enlisted to oversee additional vocal, guitar and keyboard overdubs.

American Recordings head Rick Rubin—who'd been serving as Executive Producer, keeping tabs on the project's progress from afar but not attending the recording sessions—then stepped in to mix the album, in collaboration with engineer Jim Scott.

"Rick would send the tapes to me in Nashville and we'd go back and forth on them. He wanted to mix some things a little bit differently than I wanted to. I remember he had mixed 'Still I Long For Your Kiss' so there were more dynamics and the track kind of builds; I think he added some keyboards and filled it out a little bit. I got the mix back and I said 'No, no, no, it's too produced-sounding, go back to how it was,' which he did.

"I'm sure that I would've been fine with Rick's changes now," she continues. "But at the time, I felt like I was kind of hanging on for dear life, and I just wasn't ready at that point for Rick Rubin to do his thing on the record. Had I allowed him to do it, maybe I would be a big, huge star by now, but I just had this innate fear of being overproduced. I was still kind of a purist. I came from the whole folk-singer thing, and it hadn't been that long since I'd been playing in bars, and all the sudden I've got Rick Rubin wanting to put strings on my record, and it kind of freaked me out.

"Underneath it all, I think Rick understood me. We never really got to know each other that well, but looking back on it now, I really appreciate what he was trying to do, although I didn't at the time. I really have a lot of respect for him, because he didn't try to cram anything down my throat when I objected to the changes he wanted to make. He was running the label and was the executive producer, but he never said 'This has to be this way.'

"I think that maybe Rick saw more potential in me than I realized," she adds. "When I had just gotten signed to American, Gurf and the band and I went over to Rick's house and had a meeting with him and hung out and talked about the record. At that point, Rick wanted to be more involved in the actual production. But Gurf just refused, so Rick kind of stayed in the background as executive producer.

"At one point during that visit, Rick took me aside and said 'Would you ever consider working with different musicians?' He played me this PJ Harvey record that Flood had produced and said, 'You could make a record more like this.' He wanted to have me come into the studio, bring some different musicians in and try some different things, which is what I do now. But at the time I didn't allow it to happen because of my loyalty to the band and because I still really looked up to Gurf and followed his lead. I was still such a novice and still so naive about the whole process, that I was just kind of afraid of losing myself. Maybe I let a great opportunity pass me by, but I just wasn't ready yet."

Once the album was mixed, another glitch was narrowly averted when mastering engineer Hank Williams, toiling in his studio during the freak tornado that hit Nashville in January 1997, realized that he'd been given the wrong set of tapes to work from.

But a bigger obstacle lay ahead. The now-finished album ran into a major hurdle when American Recordings ended its distribution deal with Warner Bros. and the label went into temporary limbo.

"That completely locked the record up for a year," says Williams. "Rick wasn't ready to put it out, and it looked like things were gonna be held up for a while, so the decision was made to try and find another label to release it. I don't think Rick wanted to let it go, but it needed to come out."

By the time Mercury Records president Danny Goldberg agreed to purchase it from American and release it on his label, the long-in-the-works album had become the source of widespread media speculation and industry rumor. A lengthy September 1997 profile in The New York Times Magazine (headlined "Lucinda Williams Is In Pain") portrayed the artist as a tortured perfectionist, further fueling the various rumors surrounding the project.

The pre-release chatter was largely forgotten when Mercury released Car Wheels On A Gravel Road in June 1998. The album was greeted by universally rapturous reviews, becoming Williams' best-selling release to date and her first Gold album. The disc topped many year-end critics polls and, despite being her least folkish work, won a Grammy award as that year's Best Contemporary Folk Album. In the years since, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road has remained Lucinda Williams' most celebrated and beloved release.

This Deluxe Edition presents a newly remastered edition of the original album, augmented with a pair of outtakes from the initial Austin sessions. Both of those songs—the Williams original "Out of Touch" (which she would rerecord for Car Wheels' 2001 follow-up Essence) and a stripped-down reading of Mattie Delaney's 1920s blues classic "Down the Big Road Blues"—had been dropped by the time the album was rerecorded in Nashville. Also included is an alternate version of the Car Wheels number "Still I Long for Your Kiss," recorded in 1997 with producer Tony Brown for the soundtrack of the film The Horse Whisperer.

The second CD captures a punchy live performance, recorded on July 11, 1998 at Penn's Landing in Philadelphia for WXPN's World Cafe radio show. The live set captures the artist and her then-current touring band tackling nine Car Wheels numbers and four old favorites.

"I know that people have this special affinity for Car Wheels, but I've never really understood why that was exactly," Williams notes. "Is it because those songs are better than the ones on my other records, or is it because they discovered me with that record? I guess I can understand it, because I have certain records that remind me of a certain time and bring back a certain set of emotions."

It's worth noting that the studio albums that Williams has released in the years since have been made with little of the behind-the-scenes melodrama that accompanied Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.

"There were a lot of things that I had to get past," she concludes. "I had to get used to working in the studio, and I had to get used to not blowing things out of proportion and feeling like every little thing is a big thing. I used to think 'God, if I hear that, everybody's gonna hear it every time they hear the record.' But of course, once it comes out and you hear it a few times, you don't even hear it anymore, you know? I used to torture myself, but I don't really do that anymore."

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Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels On A Gravel Road (deluxe edition)