Pitchfork

Among singer/ songwriters, Lucinda Williams is a bonafide living legend. It's no thing to mention her in the same breath as Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Problem is, she's not exactly prolific. It took her six years to work, rework and further fiddle with Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. But it paid off. The record gives new musical meaning to the words "spare" and "honest."

It's with a deft touch that Williams goes about mesmerizing. This isn't an opus, a concept album or a confessional. This is an American album by an southern, American songwriter. The impact the South has had on Williams is all- encompassing-- sometimes liberatingly so, as on the shyly optimistic "Lake Charles;" sometimes suffocatingly so, as on the heartbreaking "Greenville." Williams's secret is allowing us to think] she doesn't have any secrets.

Car Wheels lays bare, everyday stories of life, loss and love. The title track is a bittersweet piece of her childhood, "Metal Firecracker" is for an old boyfriend (to whom, ironically, she utters the line "All I ask/ Don't tell anybody the secrets/ I told you"), and "Drunken Angel" is a painful ode to a musician/ lover (possibly herself) lost in a bottle. But the power behind the music is in that Williams writes songs like Hemmingway wrote prose: less is more, and truth is liberation.

Like the stories she sings, Williams is well worn, and her voice is strained and imperfect. But when she wants to hit the high notes, like on the instant road- house anthem "I Can't Let Go" and the Deep South crooner "I Lost It" (an old Williams standard charmingly recast), she does so with perfection.

Taking six years to put together an album would be career suicide for most musicians, but Williams isn't most musicians. Time will tell if Car Wheels On A Gravel Road will truly be considered a classic, but I can tell you now that it's one of the year's best.