On 'Good Souls Better Angels,' singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams is unsparing, whether she's excoriating the president or detailing her own domestic abuse and depression.
On Wednesday, the original members of Los Angeles punk band X dropped their first new studio album in 35 years, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I was a little activist in high school,” Williams says. She read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” put a poster of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata on her bedroom wall and distributed boycott grapes leaflets at the grocery store. She attended anti-war demonstrations and felt the “rush” of linking hands with fellow protesters while singing “We Shall Overcome.” She got kicked out of her New Orleans high school for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.
It wasn’t until the English indie label Rough Trade came across her demo and released her 1988 self-titled record that she caught a break. “It took a European punk label to get me, which tells you a lot,” she says. Amid the new album’s political righteousness, its highlight is “Big Black Train,” a quavering reflection on tidal depressions and how they can sweep you away. “I don’t wanna be no special rider,” Williams croons. “I don’t wanna get on board.”
While Williams has sung of toxic relationships before, like on the foreboding “Car Wheels” ballad “Greenville,” she calls “Wakin’ Up” the “farthest out” she’s gone. In harrowing detail, Williams recalls the night everything came to a head, when she escaped: “He pulled the kitchen chair out from under me / He pulled my hair / And then he pissed on me / Next thing I swear / He wants to kiss on me.”
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