The long waits for Lucinda Williams' third and fifth albums-- eight years for Lucinda Williams and six for Car Wheels on a Gravel Road-- have become the defining story of her career. During those lengthy intervals she established herself as a perfectionist who took her own sweet time making records and tweaked every aspect until it met with her highly strict requirements, which of course she never explained to anyone else. She worked intuitively rather than scientifically-- the songs had to feel right. But those albums fully justified both the waits and her peculiar particularity: Williams' self-titled album expressed her inner desires and uncertainties so comfortably that country and blues felt like second skins, and Car Wheels is a tough and tender travelogue. Neither sounds overworked; she toiled for nearly a decade on each to sound completely off the cuff.
In the decade since Car Wheels, Lucinda has increased her output considerably, releasing three studio albums and a double live with only two or three years between them. If once she was difficult to work with, she has becoming increasingly difficult to listen to, penning uninspired songs that rest uneasily on lyrical clichés, unpalatable vocal scrawls, and a talking-blues delivery that obsessed her but confounded all others. Her gradual downfall sounded like a concerted retreat from roots-rock respectability (no crime there) and an unhealthy, unhappy self-sabotage, and 2007's West was the one thing that no one ever expected from Lucinda: an utterly irredeemable album, short on melodies and insights but long on self-absorption. It would have been a fascinating failure were it not so unfathomably dull.
Perhaps it's fitting that her new album, Little Honey, begins with "Real Love", an unironic, unsentimental statement of newfound happiness that sounds like 1992's Sweet Old World-- or at least Essence. It's not a Mary J. Blige cover: Instead of searching for a real love, she's found one, and it involves a guitar and an audience. Williams reasserts her talent for taking a vague sentiment and unraveling it into something real and immediate. Her vocals sound perfectly slurred, the guitars nicely abrasive, the lyrics suitably modest but incisive. It's enough to raise expectations that Little Honey will be a significant uptick in her output.
It is. And it isn't. While Williams generally sticks to her strengths and suppresses most of her more unsavory musical habits, she maintains her curious reliance on tacky AABB rhyme schemes and lyrical clichés like "It's raining cats and dogs" (on the otherwise excellent "Circles and X's"). From anyone else, that line might not warrant scrutiny, but Williams-- the daughter of former poet laureate Miller Williams-- has shown a poet's eye for detail, phrasing, and juxtaposition, laying out her sentiments in a conversational style and downhome cadence, and her earlier work inspired highest standards in her listeners. Lines like that pepper the album, but every bad habit of hers appears in the embarrassing "Honey Bee", an anonymous rocker on which she literally shouts her lines: "Oh my little honeybee/ I'm so glad you found me/ Buzz around you hive now/ You're in overdrive now." John Belushi's "King Bee" sketch was more dignified.
After that side-one lull, Little Honey picks up considerably with a string of tracks that recall the old, exacting Williams. She sounds like she might even be having fun on the gospel-blues "Well Well Well" and "Jailhouse Tears", a duet with Elvis Costello that's a fitting sequel to "There's a Story in Your Voice", their previous pairing on his 2004 album The Delivery Man. "If Wishes Were Horses" creates an animal metaphor that actually something meaningful: "If wishes were horses, I'd have a ranch," she sings on the lovely chorus. Her vocals are wounded yet measured, as heartbreaking as you know she can be, even on "Heaven Blues", which recalls the acoustic blues of her first two albums.
After such a build-up, it's all the more discouraging that Little Honey falters at the end. "Plan to Marry" poses a gorgeously mopey lament: "Why do we marry? Why do we fall in love? Why do we keep believin'?" She sounds like she's going to wash her hands of the whole romantic mess, but sadly, those questions don't remain rhetorical: She actually answers them, turning the song into a saccharine lover's anthem. It's a poor lead-in to "Long Way to the Top", an aimless AC/DC cover with showy gospel backing vocals and a jaded, defensive tone that leaves a bitter aftertaste. For Lucinda, it's a long way from the top, although it's nothing a good eight years wouldn't fix.
