Grammy Award winner Lucinda Williams is releasing her first live album titled Live @ The Fillmore. It was recorded at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco CA in early 2004. The double album includes such favorites as "Joy", "I Lost It", "Essence" and "Blue", but Williams digs even deeper into her past with gritty versions of "Pineola" and "Changed The Locks". Other songs featured are from the highly-acclaimed, Grammy-Nominated 2003 release World Without Tears.Live @ The Fillmore features one of the best bands on the road today, with guitarist, pedal steel and background vocalist Doug Pettibone, anchored by Taras Prodaniuk on bass and Jim Christie on drums and percussion. Their performances of Williams' songs are an extraordinary balance of aggression and finesse that perfectly complement Williams' unique vocal style and songwriting.
Few artists take the sort of emotional risks that Lucinda Williams does. Pouring her all into songs of hurt, need, and desire, she turns every live performance into an adventure, as the first concert recording of her career attests. Coproduced by Williams, Live at the Fillmore showcases her raw wound of a voice and the rough edges of her band in all their unvarnished glory, as the music cuts across conventional categories of country, blues, folk, rock (and rap) to strike a distinctly personal chord. Even the pacing is risky. Whereas most artists plan their sets to hit hardest at the beginning and end, Williams inverts the dynamic, sustaining a mood of reflective melancholy for extended stretches that open and close the album, while building to an explosive climax in the middle. With the selection dominated by recent material, the first eight numbers are like a sweet ache, as the wistful country of "Ventura" and "Reason to Cry" and the folkish minimalism of "Lonely Girls" explore the fringes of emotional fragility. Then Williams and band flex their musical muscles, shifting into the bluesier side of her artistry on "Change the Locks" and "Atonement," extending the desperate intensity of "Joy" over almost eight minutes, and offering homage to Neil Young's Crazy Horse on "Righteously" and "Essence." Backed by the barbed-wire guitar of Doug Pettitbone over the bare-bones rhythms of bassist Taras Prodaniuk and drummer Jim Christie, Williams tells the crowd, "We got the mojo workin' tonight." --Don McLeese
Recommended Lucinda Williams Albums
Lucinda Williams | 
Sweet Old World | 
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road |
Essence | 
World Without Tears | 
Ramblin' |
