Like the romanticized Depression drifters hopping freight trains, Memphis-based Lucero are itinerants, touring the country ceaselessly but seeing America from cramped vans and tiny clubs instead of empty railcars. It's a free and rootless life, simultaneously unburdened and unblessed by notions of home and stability. Following the adage You have to live the life that you sing about in your song, Lucero have written about the touring life with complexity for years. On 2003's That Much Further West, Ben Nicholls sang about the strong lure of home (a faithful woman, a stable day-to-day) and the stronger call of the road, letting the contradictory emotions speak for themselves as Roy Berry's gremlin drums burst into intimate moments and pulled him even further west.
The tension between stasis and movement, between permanence and transience, saturates the band's follow-up, Nobody's Darlings, produced by Jim Dickinson. That Lucero would work with the man who recorded Sister Lovers and Pleased to Meet Me seems inevitable, at least in retrospect: They've been playing and recording with his sons Cody and Luther (two-thirds of the North Mississippi All-Stars) almost since Lucero's inception. Dickinson streamlines their songs and plays up the gritty bar-band sound, emphasizing the interplay between Nicholls' and Brian Venable's guitars. If the album loses a little spark towards the end (specifically on "California" and "Last Night in Town"), Lucero still sound more like a live, dynamic unit than ever on songs like "Sixteen" (with Berry's snare rolling out the coda) and "Noon As Dark As Midnight" (with its dueling guitars adding to the tense country-noir atmosphere).
In addition to that collaboration, Nobody's Darlings marks the debut of the band's new label, Liberty and Lament, which they formed after Tiger Style went on indefinite hiatus and left That Much Further West with no promotional push. "Nobody's Darlings" is a sober nod to such disappointments: Lucero are neither critics' nor women's darlings, just some guys who play music on a stage, half-ignored by the crowd, pleased whenever someone dances along. Again, Nicholls wails with his bluesy, grainy voice, and when he sings that's he's "happy just watching her dance," Berry taps out a short waltz rhythm as commentary. "Anjalee", the album's catchiest track, is a brave-face postcard from the road, with Nicholls sending his love to his best girl back home-- "tell my Anjalee I love her best." But the kicker comes at the end: "Don't tell 'em about how I'm lonely."
Pushing his songwriting in new directions, Nicholls tries out a few narrative-driven songs, which are unpolished but still among the album's best. "Bikeriders" starts with a scenario that's been used a million times (in Robert Earl Keen's epic "The Road Goes On Forever", for instance)-- good girl meets bad boy, sparks fly-- but Nicholls tweaks it dramatically: instead of happily ever after, it's the start of a rocky relationship: "Kathy's been with Benny Bauer ever since that night/ She's tried to leave him many times she can't quite get away/ She's seen more jails and courts and lawyers than she'd like to say."
"The War" is the story of (presumably) Nicholls's grandfather's tour of duty during World War II. Backed only by his ragged acoustic guitar, Nicholls tells the story slowly and patiently, setting up the details before getting to the point: the narrator would rather get demoted than send his friends to their deaths. Just as it's impossible not to read this song as a commentary on the current war, it's also impossible to miss Nicholls comparing himself to the narrator and finding himself lacking somehow. He's wondering if all the touring and all the travel and loneliness is worth it, but he's not coming up with any easy answers.
