Jenn Pelly
This Woman’s Work
White Rabbit/Hachette
2022
Lucinda Williams spent the 1970s and 80s in the small clubs and street corners at the fringes of American music, fitting nowhere — too country for rock, too rock for country, a woman on a self-determined mission insisting that the world catch up with her. A poet’s daughter who grew up between Louisiana and Mexico and Chile and a dozen Southern towns, who was thrown out of high school for refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag, Williams was — to quote one of her early tunes — “born to roam.” She spent decades empty-handed in music and unlucky in love. Across the board, she was “nobody’s girl.”
She traveled on, writing sweet odes to fellow misfits — people broke and broken-hearted with no money, no gigs, at the edge of the bar, on the wrong track. She never grew too hardened to admit, “I just wanted to see you so bad.” She was never too coy to stare an uncaring lover dead in the eye and seethe an outlaw’s threat: “It’s my heart and there’s a price you’ve got to pay.” The cracked incandescence of her voice — warbling, like Hank Williams, into the red of its very limits; reaching through the depths of its poetry — cast its bittersweet ache into reality and relief.
Her first collection of original material was the 1980 feminist string-band album Happy Woman Blues, for the Folkways label. Eight years later, when she was 35, she followed it with the ripping and eloquent barroom rock of her critical breakthrough, Lucinda Williams, for Rough Trade Records — the London countercultural outpost that thought of itself as a Marxist label, saw the marketplace as a false creation, and were besotted by Lucinda’s rejected Sony demo. “It took a European punk label to get me, which tells you a lot,” Lucinda once said. In a dry Louisiana drawl, hers are songs of yearning, betrayal, and death; odes to lost friends and abandoned love; about self-annihilating poets and restless women saving tips, changing the locks, pawning possessions to split town. They form mini-manifestos for female life.
At the center of Happy Woman Blues, Williams addressed a woman, not unlike herself, the rambling would-be cowgirl ‘Maria’. Sometimes I imagine Lucinda is singing to the Maria of Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It As It Lays — another vagabond for whom the highway “has always been your lover,” she sings — misunderstood, rootless, ever in motion. In the opening sentences of her book, Didion wonders about a sinister Shakespearean villain and his demons: “What makes Iago evil?” Didion writes. “Some people ask. I never ask.” Lucinda always seems to ask. Staring into the void, her lyrics do not spare questions. “My dad used to talk about a big dark well and we’re all standing on the edge looking in,” Williams recalled in the 2011 book Right by her Roots. “And he said some of us fall in and the rest of us don’t. But we’re all kind of standing on the edge, you know, and at any given moment…”
“I guess I’m always questioning,” Lucinda said, “what makes someone lose that strength.”
Lucinda’s father was the poet Miller Williams, who secured his first job teaching English at the University of Arkansas thanks to his friend and Lucinda’s hero, Flannery O’Connor. (As a child, Williams chased peacocks in O’Connor’s front yard, and she would never let go of her dream of setting a Great Southern Novel to record.) The elder Williams once defined poetry as “the use of language to communicate more than the words seem to say” in passages where “the reader or listener feels like a co-creator,” and his daughter’s writing proves it. Like all the greats, her songs create a mirror, into which we look and feel seen. What artist has not related, at some point, to Lucinda’s deadpan declaration, on 1980’s shimmering “Sharp Cutting Wings (Song to a Poet),” “I wish I had a ship to sail the waters/I wish I had about a hundred dollars”? The grain of her bruised twang and lucidity of her articulation extends a hand to anyone who’s been there. And I have always had a particular fondness for an unassuming Happy Woman Blues cut called “Hard Road,” in which Lucinda empathizes with her down-and-out buddy, Bill, whose “heart’s on fire” while his “head is reelin’”. “Let me buy you a beer or something,” Lucinda offers to her pal, who she cares for so much that she tells him, “I got your picture up on my wall,” before sweetly proclaiming, “I love you, Bill, as I would my brother.” It’s like Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” during last call at an emptied Texas bar. Platonic friendships of any kind, but especially those between men and women, are rarely articulated so tenderly, or plainly, in song or anywhere.
We can enter into her lines of inquiry. Lucinda was always wondering how things could really be as they are, why someone had to die, how life possibly went so astray. In her blue-skied tribute to the late Blaze Foley, dead in a shoot-out, 1998: “Why’d you ever let it go that far?” In the most devastating elegy to a weekend-long fling I’ve ever heard, 2003: “Did you only want me for those three days?” In 1980, to a bohemian woman wanderer: “Maria, is loneliness a virtue? Are the songs we sing worth a broken heart?”
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Twenty-three years on from Happy Woman Blues, Williams was still looking for answers. By age 50, she had finally achieved conventional success. She was five years removed from her prize-winning 1998 Southern travelogue Car Wheels on a Gravel Road — the album where the world at large had, at last, caught up. In the wake of its zeitgeist-crashing commercial triumph — topping the Village Voice’s critics poll and winning a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album — Lucinda kept searching.
She opened her seventh album, 2003’s World Without Tears, with the wearied country-blues ballad ‘Fruits of My Labor’. Car Wheels and Lucinda Williams are her definitive albums, but ‘Fruits of My Labor’ seems to absorb the weight of them, becoming her definitive song: a postscript of sorts to her Car Wheels era and all of the decades that built to it. Even as Lucinda’s scratched languor evokes her hero, Neil Young, she subverts one of his best known songs. Forces other than love can break your heart: work can.
Lucinda situates herself in a room of her own, a personal desolation row, addressing a distant lover with six charged words: Baby see how I been living — every delicately cracking note of her voice says it’s been hard, even before Lucinda presents the skewed elegant image of “velvet curtains on the windows” and sings out their purpose: “Keep the bright and unforgiving/Light from shining through.” Is she hiding? Does she keep out the light to avoid how messy things have become? Is it simply easier to write in a room with no view, when the sun and world aren’t beckoning you out? She remembers, in a subtle rush, everything — “when we slept together,” “the blue behind your eyelids” — remembrance being the ultimate currency and chaos source in a brutal breakup song. What makes our dreams so complicated? she seems to ask. After decades in pursuit of one — what about eyes?
She sings ‘Fruits of My Labor’ from the crossroads of love lost and knowledge gained. But the theme at those coordinates is the work itself. Like her early inspiration, Joni Mitchell — who once sang of her “struggle for higher achievements” and never-ending quest for “love that sticks around,” and who Lucinda told me definitely influenced this song — she was singing from the precise moment at which heartbreak gives way to revelation. She wants a relationship to work out, but life has become too complicated. And so she takes what she can, uses the mess, the “dirt,” to respond in kind, with a gesture that is uncomplicated: flowers. She luxuriates in naming them — lavender, lotus blossoms, and literal fruits, like tangerines, persimmons, “and sugar cane, grapes and honeydew melon, enough fit for a queen.” Maybe she wants to focus on living things in the wake of this connection that died. Maybe she wants to focus on things that grow because she is trying to. Maybe she wants to acknowledge small beautiful things, for fear she was all too busy to notice before. ‘Fruits of My Labor’ is Lucinda at her most sensory and alive.
The pedal steel and harmonica and brushed drums of ‘Fruits of My Labor’ all play through a squint; every line brushes dust off the moment as it is touched by the glare of light coming in. “I’ve been trying to enjoy all the fruits of my labor,” Lucinda sings. “I’ve been crying for you boy, but truth is my savior.”
Suspended between “try” and “enjoy” is a lifetime. There is the weight, sacrifice, demands, and promise of an existence guided by the artist’s eye. There is the joy and frustration, success and failure, lust and solitude of being a woman with a calling. There is romantic disarray and the self-contained satisfaction of the devoted writer’s life. All of the independent-minded genius and desire Lucinda sang in the ‘80s and ‘90s is tangled up here — “give me what I deserve ‘cause it’s my right,” she insisted on “Passionate Kisses”; “I want to know you’re there, but I want to be alone,” on “Side of the Road”; “you took my joy, I want it back,” on “Joy” — in these carefully calibrated notes. Artmaking, ambition, heartbreak, freedom, and becoming are inextricable in ‘Fruits of My Labor’. A life flashes through it. Behind these velvet curtains. In the dark. Searching for another song.
“I was writing about a guy I had been with, and still wanted to be with and everything — I was thinking about him when I wrote it,” Lucinda told me, when I called her up one spring afternoon to talk about ‘Fruits of My Labor’. “You were with someone at a certain point in your life, and then maybe that person went away for a while, and then all of these things happened, and now you’re in a different place, emotionally and mentally… the idea of ‘Fruits of My Labor’ popped into my head. Sometimes we forget to enjoy the things we worked for. Everybody talks about having a dream of doing a certain thing, a career or whatever, but then people get so busy that they can’t stop long enough to enjoy it.”
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The first time I heard ‘Fruits of My Labor’ it was not Lucinda singing. In a dark Brooklyn rock club on a November night, I was watching the singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield, aka Waxahatchee — one of at least two dozen times I’ve seen her perform this decade. With a voice more sweet than bitter and utterly its own, Crutchfield was on the brink of recording her career-best album, Saint Cloud, during which a photo of Lucinda would hang in the studio. That night, Crutchfield’s voice seemed bigger than ever: she was obviously tapped in and growing, bracing in itself to witness. Still, when she sat at her keyboard and intoned those first lines — Baby see how I been living, then a verdant prism of goldenrod and violet and tangerines and persimmons and sugar cane, which I can only call sublime — I was not prepared. The air felt charged with a caliber of acute presence I mostly associate with cemeteries and bodies of water.
I was 29, and I am not sure that ‘Fruits of My Labor’ would have made tremendous sense to me at any other time. The song was defenseless. In a catalog of such rigor and weight — songs delineating the particular comforts a man loses in death, songs that trace a lover’s words in her veins like blood, songs with Dylan-esque poetry collages traversing rock history, serpent handlers, angels, the ineffable — here was a lovesick song about flowers. Not only about flowers, but about the work of writing a preternaturally perceptive song about flowers — “traced your scent through the gloom til I found these purple flowers,” Lucinda sings to explain — and also about how the work was tiring, and it was OK to say it was tiring. It felt like Lucinda pulled the veil back on the whole artistic process — despondency, isolation, inspiration, transforming. Listening that first time, every word glowed like lights of many colors in an otherwise pitch-black night.
I was at a point in my ever-emerging adulthood where I was finding that achieving in your work does not necessarily make life easier. I was finding that it does not automatically exorcise the void, nor make clouds disappear, that the eradication of a problem, many times, creates room for new and potentially more stubborn ones, buried away by the subconscious. Myths about the human heart that I thought I’d debunked revealed themselves to be persistent. Intellectualizing could clear me only so far. “It’s a myth that if you do what you love, you’ll be happy all the time,” Lucinda told me. “I have a problem with melancholia… being kind of down. Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to not feel that way: What does complete happiness feel like? Where’s the joy that I thought was going to come with all this?” I am not sure that Lucinda Williams fans are particularly well-equipped to know. But ‘Fruits of My Labor’ helps.
“A lot of this song is about fame and success in that way,” Lucinda told me, “Because that’s one of those things that… you can’t reach out and touch it, but it’s there, and it changes you and changes everything around you and how people see you. And you don’t have to be real famous for that to happen — just a little touch of it. It goes along with the, ‘You achieved this, why aren’t you happy?’ thing. Fame would be one of those things you’ve achieved. And it does make it hard from a romantic point of view, trying to bring someone into your life when you’re going through all that stuff. So that’s what I was trying to say.”
In 1980, on Happy Woman Blues, Lucinda sang, “Gonna get in my Mercury and drive around the world/When I reach that mountain top, I’ll stand with flags unfurled.” But as Emerson said: From the mountain you see the mountain. And on ‘Fruits of My Labor,’ she had reached no destination: “Got in my Mercury and drove out West, pedal to the metal and my luck to the test,” still betting miles to begin again.
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At that point, I asked Lucinda, What were the fruits?
“More free time?” she asked, the question in her voice.
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‘Fruits of My Labor’ is a requiem, a road song, an escape hatch, a poem. I also hear it as a labor song. Lucinda always had a labor consciousness. Coming from a family lineage of radical progressives and union organizers, citing the intellectuals of the folk revival as formative influences — as a teenager she even distributed ‘Boycott Grapes’ leaflets at the grocery store in solidarity with Filipino-American farm workers on strike — she was primed to identify creative work, correctly, as labor.
The possibility of locating joy in work, the socialist artisan William Morris once said, lies in three “hopes”: “hope of product” (songs), “hope of pleasure in the work itself” (writing, recording, performing), and “hope of rest.” Without rest, Morris seems to say, one cannot hope to be anything but disillusioned by the promise of fulfilling work.
How to square the necessity of rest with restlessness? How to make sense of this equation in a world that still refuses, too often, to take the work of women seriously? That treats our high standards as neurotic perfectionism — as was too often the case for Lucinda in the press at the height of her fame — or as overbearing? That asks women, historically and constantly, to work harder? (Lucinda: “That's true all the time with everything.”) I think of the implications, of stress and how it wreaks havoc on us, caring about music so much that the thing that saves you becomes what wears you down. I hear ‘Fruits of My Labor’ as evidence of negotiating these lines from 1979 to 2003: a testament to how hard Lucinda worked.
I hear it, too, as an anthem for an era of reckoning with the mythology of “doing what you love”. As a person who was sold this promise young — I was a teenager when ‘Fruits of My Labor’ was released in 2003, as a generation was being told to work hard, do what we love, then swallowed by vortexes of joblessness and debt — the song has been an antidote to exhaustion and chronic overwork. As the labor journalist Sarah Jaffe writes, “work won’t love you back.” It is a peculiar dichotomy to have music, my ultimate obsession, at the heart of such a cold fact — music being what has always made the world feel most alive to me, even when I felt like I lost control over my life, and I have usually felt like I lost control because of work, work around music. I know it’s capitalism, not music, that can make me feel like I’m drowning. When I am lost in the waves of all of this, I often pull up ‘Fruits of My Labor’.
It is not a song I can ever remember listening to with another person. ‘Fruits of My Labor’ is a song I most often turn to when I’m at sea in my desk chair with a blank page and the curtains drawn to trick myself into believing I’m writing at dawn. It’s a reminder that I’m not the only person who has sat alone with my thoughts and wondered how life got so very confusing, wondered if I can be satisfied, wondered if I can regain the plot, wondered if I can work through my doubts and come out with some beauty.
There is power in how ‘Fruits of My Labor’ does feel resolved. In the face of the endlessness of the work, it is a complete thought: an invitation, in its slowness and ease, to put the pen down, if only for a moment.
Lucinda said ‘Fruits of My Labor’ is about how hard she is on herself. She sang the names of literal fruit because it felt good to sing them. It felt good to eclipse with the light of open vowel sounds and brilliant flashes of color, to hold onto flowing slant rhymes and clarity. “Lemon trees don’t make a sound/Til branches bend/And fruit falls to the ground” — but you’ll notice them now.
Sometimes I listen to ‘Fruits of My Labor’ and imagine Lucinda in her Mercury headed West, “pedal to the metal,” as she sings, and her “luck to the test,” crossing the country alone. I think of another monumental alt-country song from 2003, by Gillian Welch, who was known, in her earliest sets, to cover Lucinda’s ‘Crescent City’. Gillian’s own ‘Look at Miss Ohio’ finds its titular pageant queen taking control of her destiny, fleeing a doomed would-be marriage: “Gonna drive to Atlanta,” Welch sings, “and live out this fantasy.” I imagine Miss Ohio and Lucinda passing each other on their respective journeys towards opposite coasts, starting over, becoming someone else, ever-searching for joy in song and in rest.