Lucinda Williams Live @ The Fillmore West CD

Personnel: Lucinda Williams (vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar); Lucinda Williams; Doug Pettibone (guitar, lap steel guitar, pedal steel guitar, mandolin, harmonica, background vocals); Jim Christie (keyboards, drums, percussion); Taras Prodaniuk (bass guitar, background vocals).
Audio Mixer: Michael Dumas.
Recording information: The Fillmore, San Francisco, CA (11/20/2003/11/22/2003).
Lucinda Williams has earned a reputation for her meticulous approach to making albums, but a careful listen to her work suggests that she isn't trying to make her music sound perfect, she just wants it to sound right, and she isn't afraid to spend the extra time waiting for the charmed moment to get caught on tape. This attitude seems to be borne out in her first-ever concert album, Live @ The Fillmore, which manages to sound carefully considered, and a model of "warts and all" authenticity at the same time. Recorded during a three-night stand in San Francisco, the album captures Williams' band in superb form -- Doug Pettibone's guitars, Taras Prodaniuk's bass, and Jim Christie's drums merge into a tight and emphatic groove machine that can match Williams's many moods, whether she's quietly contemplative on "Blue," rocking out hard on "Changed the Locks," or howling the blues on "Essence," while the deeply resonant recording and mix gives them the royal treatment. Williams herself is a slightly more complicated matter here -- her performance is deeply into the spirit, so much so that sometimes her melismatic wanderings and broad phrasing sound like they're verging on caricature. But this is clearly a recording of a performance, and by the time we get to the end of disc two, the broad strokes have coalesced into something quite remarkable; as Williams searches through the nooks and crannies of her songs, you sense she's discovering things that she didn't expect to find, and it's a tremendous thing to hear. Lucinda Williams is an artist who writes from her soul, and she's thoroughly unafraid of letting her passion show when she sings. If that makes for strained technique, it also results in very real art, and this album offers a privileged glimpse of a singular songwriter in full flight. ~ Mark Deming
Never one to tread the expected path, Lucinda Williams followed her big breakthrough album, CAR WHEELS ON A GRAVEL ROAD, with a pair of low-key records full of sad, quiet, fragile songs (interrupted by the occasional barn-burner). LIVE @ THE FILLMORE concentrates heavily on those latter two releases, unleashing all the intense, burning emotions that lay at their core, making plain the inherent frisson lurking below the surface of such ostensibly laconic tunes as "Lonely Girls" and "Righteously." Meanwhile, songs that already had plenty of bite in their studio versions are pumped up to an even more electrifying, visceral level (a bold, crunching "Changed the Locks;" the roaring, bluesy "Joy"). The debt Williams and her band owe to Neil Young & Crazy Horse is illuminated on "Are You Down," and, elsewhere, a spoken intro finds the singer laying bare her affection for ZZ Top. Clearly, revelations of all kinds abound on this double-disc concert document.Rolling Stone (p.79) - 3 stars out of 5 - "She and her impeccable three-piece band give her songs' meticulously recorded original versions a run for their money..."
Uncut (p.102) - 4 stars out of 5 - "[T]he intensity builds relentlessly until, by the second disc, she's working overtime..."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.99) - 4 stars out of 5 - "Sorrowful, fierce, heartbreaking and unhistrionic..."