Lucinda Williams was only four songs into the rather rigidly planned first of her two sets Thursday night at L.A's El Rey Theatre when a guy near me curiously shouted out a request. "'Metal Firecracker'!" he hollered when the devoted hundreds on hand were at their quietest. Apparently someone didn't get the memo. "That's not on this album," drummer Butch Norton muttered. (Least I think it was Butch.) "We'll do that in the second half," Lucinda promised, unruffled by the guy's unawareness. "We're doing this entire album here." Doing "Essence," to be exact – the second of five albums the acclaimed singer-songwriter is currently playing across as many nights at El Rey, reviving and re-examining nearly two decades of on-again-off-again work in reverse chronological order. She began Wednesday with "World Without Tears" (2003), then moved on to Thursday's gem from 2001. Saturday night, at perhaps the most eagerly anticipated show in this series (soon to be repeated in New York), she will tackle her adored breakthrough "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," arguably the most lauded album of 1998. And then she will make her way through two collections loaded with songs she hasn't played in ages, "Sweet Old World" (1992) on Sunday and, the next night, "Lucinda Williams" (1988), which, though actually her third album, was the one that established her as something more than just another acoustic folkie stuck in the wrong era. At this point in the retrospective – the sort of rewarding undertaking many other veteran songwriters should consider – a revealing journey toward Lucinda's, er, essence is emerging, via 61 songs of sparse lyrical intensity and richly rootsy musicality whose totality reasserts Williams' ranking among the finest songwriters of the modern rock era. - complete article
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