Vintage Album Review – Lucinda Williams’ “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”
The timeline of country music is not delineated by months, years, or decades. It’s pinned and articulated by albums and songs that went on to revolutionize the music in some way that was historically and culturally significant, whether the commercial registers were in consensus with them or not. We’re talking about albums such as Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger, and Sturgill Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music. Whatever country music was before, it was something significantly different afterwards. And often over time, reflection bolsters opinions about the significance of these works instead of eroding them, until the making of the albums and the legacy they leave take on an almost mythical status.
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams is one of these such works. Though it’s impact would be better to categorize within the Americana sphere instead of country music proper, it was its release and reception that arguably created Americana as a robust and viable creative outlet to counteract country music’s more commercial focus. In the reverberations of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, the rowdy and rag tag elements of “alt-country” coagulated around a common purpose, or at least a common consensus in a scene known for rabid independence. Nobody could agree on what “Americana” even meant. But everyone could agree that Car Wheels on a Gravel Road released on June 30th, 1998 was absolutely badass, and so was Lucinda Williams for making it.
By all accounts, the making of the record was nauseatingly tedious at best, but probably more fair to characterize as downright tortuous for all involved. This was not a project where like-minded musician buddies hunkered down in a studio for a few weeks while Lucinda sat behind a legal pad, chewing on a pencil and making final revisions to lyrics awaiting her turn at the microphone. Lucinda Williams started making the album in Austin, TX with noted musician and producer Gurf Morlix in 1995. After getting the record to a 90% completed mark, Lucinda basically scrapped everything she had and started over, working with fellow alt-country/Americana founder Steve Earle who said later, “[It was] the least amount of fun I’ve had working on a record.”
A third producer was eventually brought on board in the person of Roy Bittan, famous as the keyboardist of the E Street Band. By most accounts, he was the one that saw most of the final recordings through to the end. One footnote to the record often under-reported was that Rick Rubin was also involved. Recording of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road first came about when Lucinda signed to Rubin’s American Recordings label, and he apparently offered executive guidance throughout the process. But the record was eventually released through Mercury, not Rubin’s American. Lucinda’s temperament, and her insistence on getting everything absolutely perfect is cited as the reason that an album that sounds like it was recorded in a week took the better part of three years to finalize.
But perfection is certainly not at the heart of the appeal or staying power for Car Wheel on a Gravel Road. Instead it’s the sloppy, sticky, loose feel of it all, carried upon the words of Lucinda’s candid and real character recitations that make the record feel like the ultimate insight into the disheveled mind of the broken hearted. Agro Los Angeles music curmudgeon Jonny Whiteside once semi-famously labeled Lucinda Williams the #1 Most Lame Americana act, calling her voice “whiny.” Though Jonny was right in his assessment stylistically, what he failed to grasp is that the nearly 900,000 people who would eventually buy a copy of Car Wheels loved Lucinda’s unhinged and emotional delivery. It’s exactly what made her so appealing.
Lucinda Williams is a beautiful mess, and the accounts of the creation of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road work to confirm this. She is a woman who you envision losing her car keys every day for 40 years straight, until someone resolves she probably shouldn’t be driving anyway. And within that mess, a sizable amount of people see a part of themselves, and can relate so intimately that it’s almost impossible not to be compelled. Lucinda Williams is the true poet archetype housed in a wild, rock and roll world. That’s not to say Car Wheels is poorly crafted. A who’s who of Americana such as Buddy Miller, Greg Leisz, Jim Lauderdale, Charlie Sexton, Emmylou Harris, and even excommunicated producers Gurf Morlix and Steve Earle all lent their talents to a record that most now 20 years later consider as a masterpiece.
The music, and Lucinda’s voice deserve all the credit in the world for this nearly universal assessment, but ultimately Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is an album of words, songs, and most importantly, places. Where so many records start with emotions, characters, or events to build a story around, Lucinda Williams utilizes location. Just like the broken-hearted and downtrodden characters she evokes with stupid amounts of ease throughout the record, she chooses backwater and often beaten-down Southern locales such as her hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana, and West Memphis, Arkansas to tell her stories. Just like the humans in the songs, Lucinda is able to impart a level of dignity to these places through her songs to the point where they’re almost magical. You don’t just sense the characters as you listen, you visualize them in their native environs, or coming and going from them—Greenville, Jackson, back to Lake Charles, and parts in between.
It’s the dirtiness of it all that makes the songs of Car Wheels stick to the bones. Nobody ever made concrete and barbed wire sound so poetic, or conveyed the pining of a heart as well as Lucinda does on the album’s opening number, “Right In Time.” It’s her “whiny” capacity employed as an asset that makes the mundane sound eloquent and erudite. And these are songs with impact. Arguably the greatest of the set—“Drunken Angel”—set an entirely new generation in search of Blaze Foley records, of whom the song is about. The sole cover song of the album—“Cant Let Go” by Randy Weeks—arguably made Randy’s career, and Lucinda’s too. The song would go on to be nominated for a Grammy. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road would go on to win the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album.
But winning awards and selling nearly a million records wasn’t the reason Car Wheels was made. This was a non commercial Americana record that exploded simply from the power of the expressions, and just as much in rock circles as folk and country. The album became so reverberating and long lasting, it doesn’t feel like 20 years has passed because you just listened to it last week. The album’s impact and influence is as strong as ever. It is the bedrock from which the strength of Americana has emerged. And from underground songwriters hacking away in local bars, to major recording artists playing to arenas, you can trace many tentacles back to Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.
And it’s impact on country music can’t be denied. The power of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was so significant, it created and important fissure in the genre—and alternative gravel road for artist to navigate down if they so chose. It was one where commercial interests weren’t the primary factor in the music, creative persistence was. But it was also one that if you did something as groundbreaking and significant as Car Wheel on a Gravel Road, you could still find overwhelming support, acceptance, success, and acclaim.
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is the dirty American experience set to music.
Two Guns Up!
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Janet
June 28, 2018 @ 9:39 am
Thank you for this review, I remember very clearly buying this album and totally wearing it out. The sound was so different from anything I had been use to at the time. And I love the cover photo – lonely yet feeling like home.
Case
June 28, 2018 @ 9:45 am
It’s hard to categorize this album. All I know is we went to a show when Lucinda was touring off it and we felt damn good. Was listening to it the other day in fact, which is kind of weird. Lucinda just kind of feels like home. I find it near impossible to put on a few tracks then not jumping into about everything she has. Her voice and storytelling is just, what? Pure? But that can’t be right. I don’t know what it is but I love her. Heard all those recording stories way back and makes me wonder how I can love this album so much. But I do. We do. Nice article, Trig.
kross
June 28, 2018 @ 9:59 am
man what a good record. This Album and Strangers Almanac by Whiskeytown set me on a musical path that I haven’t deviated far from in over 20 years. man I miss the 90’s. I like the classic record reviews. Keep em’ coming.
Corncaster
June 28, 2018 @ 1:54 pm
Yeah, that Whiskeytown record was a breath of beer-basement air. I say that as a good thing. “Sixteen Days” is still a song for the back road with the windows down. More comprehensible than Jay Farrar and the Michael Stipe mumble rap school of rock.
Whiskeytown
June 29, 2018 @ 5:28 am
Same here. I was introduced to SA in high school and it was my holy shit moment in music. That one album open the doors to so many other great artist and showed me their was good country music outside the Red Dirt/TX scene. Granted, I was a little late to the alt. Country scene, but it was still fun digging into it and SA is still in my rotation.
Kingpete
June 28, 2018 @ 10:14 am
“You took my joy, I want it back”
Music row is full of writers right now trying to craft songs the get to the heart of what she did in those eight words.
glendel
June 28, 2018 @ 10:16 am
saw Waylon in concert 3 x before he died. As great as he was, he came very close, but never recorded a song as great as Lucinda’s version of Can’t Let Go.
Save Austin Country
June 28, 2018 @ 10:56 am
I remember Steve Earle saying it was the least amount of fun working on a record. He said during 2015 SXSW that the sessions were painful at times. I believe most of the record was almost completely cut in Austin, and Lucinda scraped it and move the sessions to Nashville. Part of what makes Lucinda Williams a legend are the rawness and imperfections. I will always be partially biased to Lucinda considering she is from my native town of Lake Chalres, LA. A national treasure. Thanks Trigger for pulling this out of the vault for vintage review.
ScottG
June 28, 2018 @ 12:45 pm
I hear that’s a good place to stop…..
Save Austin Country
June 29, 2018 @ 8:36 pm
It’s is.
Save Austin Country
June 28, 2018 @ 11:00 am
When Lucinda Williams was asked a few years back, “Do you listen to country radio.” Lucinda’s response, “Are you kidding me.”
TheBarroomPoet
June 28, 2018 @ 11:04 am
Amazing album, and funny enough, the only Lucinda Williams album I enjoy listening to. I find most of her stuff (especially after this album) really tedious, but Car Wheels is one of those albums that works best played from the beginning and all the way through.
NonProphet
June 28, 2018 @ 1:01 pm
Totally agree, this album is a gem in a pile of gravel compared to her other output. I’m really not a fan of her stuff (especially her live show), but Car Wheels has “it” in spades. And she’s Tom Petty’s doppelganger.
Jack Williams
June 28, 2018 @ 1:43 pm
I’d say “Lucinda Williams” from 1988 is another monster album. I think Sweet Old World from 1992 is chocke full of great songs but the production too polished.
ScottG
June 28, 2018 @ 2:50 pm
Maybe check out the remake she did of that record just last year. The production is 10X better. It’s called “This” Sweet Old World.
Jack Williams
June 29, 2018 @ 3:19 am
I have it and I agree.
Clyde
June 29, 2018 @ 9:20 am
Put me in this camp.
Doug
July 2, 2018 @ 4:01 pm
Agree about her post-Car Wheels output…nothing she’s done since — what I’ve heard of it — comes close to that magnificent record. A big part of the problem for me has to do with the looseness Trigger talks about in this review: The looseness, in her songwriting and her vocals, has become her trademark, her persona. But like a lot of people who take on that persona, at some point it crosses the line from loose and cool to sloppy and boring. She seems to be playing her version of Drunken Angel. Trigger, I respect your writing immensely, but you could have saved a lot of words here by just saying: The songs. The fucking songs. The songs of Car Wheels are fucking great. June Bug versus Hurricane.
ScottG
June 28, 2018 @ 11:07 am
Love this record and pretty much anything she does. Her last few albums are great too. The Ghost of Highway 20 and Down Where the Spirit Meets the bone are awesome. She’s doing some new thing with Charles Lloyd and the Marvels now that looks interesting as well.
I guess her approach to making albums might have changed over the years. The behind the scenes studio clips of her newer stuff makes it seem like she’s having fun with a less arduous process. Cool that she does so much with Greg Leisz still as well. Nice review.
Jack Williams
June 28, 2018 @ 12:10 pm
This album. Love it to death. From a gritty roots music perspective, it delivers like almost nothing else.
Corncaster
June 28, 2018 @ 2:02 pm
Miller Williams’s daughter.
eckiezZ!
June 28, 2018 @ 2:46 pm
Still in my Top 5 favorite records of All Time in any genre.
Car Wheels is a North Star I use to compare other albums to, to decide whether they’re actually good or not because I know that Car Wheels is Exquisite music-making of the highest caliber. And like the greatest albums ever made it still sounds as fresh today as the first day I remember hearing it all those decades (!) ago. Good music will never age. Good songs are like diamonds with multiple facets. Listen to them one day and you’ll hear one thing but the next time you’ll hear something entirely different depending on what kind of mood you’re in or who you might happen to be mad at that day. They become living breathing things that shift and change as you grow old with them you can always revisit them like a long lost friend and lose all track of the time reminiscing away the light. I can still remember laying in bed staring at the cover art when I had nothing going on, no friends, no life, wondering whether it would all really “come out in the wash” as her father once wrote in the liner notes to the Koch records re-issue of her self titled lp. Car Wheels is a prime example of why there are no Lu
Anthology’s or Greatest Hits lps. You can’t just listen to one song. Not with her. The woman makes albums. ALBUM albums. Long players. You have to start at the beginning and immerse yourself in her music like a novel, one fucked up song about fucking up leading to the next broken songs all about resiliance and tenacity and strength of will and persistence to the final song about looping all the way back around and repeating the same damn mistakes all over again. Like a broken record. Like a fractured 20 year old masterpiece.
Love her. Love her art. Love this record. It’s all love.
Gena R.
June 28, 2018 @ 5:30 pm
Lovely write-up, Trig! 🙂
I checked this album out in 1999 sometime after seeing Lu’s performance on SNL, and I’ve been a fan ever since. “All I ask — don’t tell anybody the secrets, don’t tell anybody the secrets I told you…”
Jack Williams
June 29, 2018 @ 3:31 am
We’d put on ZZ Top
And turn em up real loud
I used to think you were strong
I used to think you were proud
I used to think nothing could go wrong
Jim L.
June 28, 2018 @ 9:27 pm
The guitar playing on this album is incredibly good.
Bill
June 29, 2018 @ 4:54 am
My introduction to Lucinda….I now have everything she ever recorded. Looking forward to her show with Dwight and Steve.
Jack Williams
June 29, 2018 @ 5:43 am
Mine was Sweet Old World, but Car Wheels is the one where I became all in on Lucinda. Not long after that one was released, her great 1988 album Lucinda Williams was reissued. I picked that one up and the two earlier albums she released on Smithsonian Folkways (Ramblin and Happy Woman Blues). And yes, I always buy the new Lucinda album. I don’t think she’s been able to match Car Wheels since, but I think World Without Tears, Blessed and Where The Spirit Meets The Bone come close to being great albums. And all of her albums are worth having, I think.
Bro Country Satan
June 29, 2018 @ 5:05 am
Trig,
In medicine, we call clinical trials that change the way we practice “benchmark” trials. So it could be said that Car Wheels is a benchmark album. You also mentioned Red Headed Stranger and Metamodern Sounds in the same way. Was curious if you felt the same way about Purgatory? Is it going to be a benchmark album or is it riding the coattails of Metamodern Sounds?
Jack Williams
June 29, 2018 @ 5:46 am
I personally think Purgatory stands on its own. To me, it’s a beautiful work of art straight from the heart of Appalachia.
Bro Country Satan
June 29, 2018 @ 5:55 am
I agree. I listened to it through this morning after reading this. I’ve never heard anything quite like Purgatory and for sure have never heard a voice like Tyler Childers.
Corncaster
June 29, 2018 @ 7:18 am
For writing, Purgatory is a major benchmark. To me, Metamodern was more about giving Gram’s cosmic cowboy music a sharper edge.
ScottG
June 29, 2018 @ 7:07 am
Maybe, and likely, we haven’t seen the full impact of that album because it is comparatively too new to judge its impact.
I think who it influences will be interesting to see.
Trigger
June 29, 2018 @ 8:26 am
As a Saving Country Music Album of the Year winner, I obviously think highly of “Purgatory,” but as others have said, I think it will take a little more time for that album to reveal its influence and impact. And also let’s not conflate impact with appeal. There have been some amazing records that had little impact beyond their sphere, like the early Hellbound Glory records. However I will say that the impact of “Purgatory” seems to be getting greater, instead of lessening. Tyler is really blowing up, and we may look back at “Purgatory” as what started a raging fire. Tyler’s next album will be CRITICAL on many fronts, more so than many sophomore albums. And I know that won’t be Tyler’s 2nd album officially, but you know what I’m saying.
Bro Country Satan
June 29, 2018 @ 8:37 am
Obviously the total influence of Purgatory is yet to be determined. I just wanted to see your forecast, as one with a keen ear for music, for what you see to come. I think that Childers has the potential to push his style of music to the next level.
Case
June 29, 2018 @ 11:50 am
Well, call me a heathen. Purgatory did not stand out to me. Tyler Childers live, however, has moved me beyond compare. (As does Sturgill.) I don’t know, I’m just one guy, but the Dead said for years the studio sucked for them, as they filled colosseums. Tyler will fill up those same seats. And, really, he went to the studio without a touring band like, say, Sarah Shook’a latest. And like Lucinda, he’s just a powerful force. Singular. Taking no prisoners.
Corncaster
June 29, 2018 @ 7:16 am
Sometimes her voice perfectly suits, and sometimes it sounds mannered. I find it hard to like. I’d very much like to hear her sing a lullaby.
JF
June 29, 2018 @ 8:28 am
“She is a woman who you envision losing her car keys every day for 40 years straight, until someone resolves she probably shouldn’t be driving anyway.”
Top 10 Trigger line right there.
Benny Lee
June 29, 2018 @ 1:16 pm
Wow, kind of bittersweet to finally spend a little time on such an amazing artist, wondering why it took me so long to get here. Great songwriter.
Doug T
June 29, 2018 @ 6:35 pm
Had my stick (1,835 songs) on random and a song from Lu’s Essence album came on. I bought the album 15 years ago, listened a few times and shuffled it behind newer stuff. Wow I didn’t remember how good it was. I listen through the complete album when I can.
But….Carwheels is great. I never get tired of Yellow Firecracker.
Jim L.
June 30, 2018 @ 6:29 pm
Autocorrect? You mean Metal Firecracker. My favorite song on the album.
Willie Potter
July 3, 2018 @ 7:27 am
Greatest Country Album of the last 20 years.
Period.
Ron
July 13, 2018 @ 6:02 pm
Been away for awhile and just catching up. Great review. I agree with everything you said. This album is definitely in the top 5 of Essential Americana albums.