Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

I went back and forth about including this album. I’ve written about it before; about a year ago I found it to be one of the, uhhh, least good-sounding examples of country singer-songwriting I’d ever heard. In my own words, “the first part of the album sounded like it were written by an AI caricature of a country artist.” In my notes I wrote that it was “like a country album made by a Rhode Island socialite who took a connecting flight through the Atlanta airport once,” which is a great line that I kind of regret not using, despite the unnecessary meanness.

So in the end I gave this album a re-listen, to see if I’m evolving or if I’m just the same old overdramatic little kid I was a year ago.

I still think “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” is the title, and type of lyric, that probably represents what someone from an entirely different country thinks represents the American South. I don’t know why that feeling is so strong, to be honest. For one, a Southerner would say “tires” instead of “wheels” and pronounce tires like “tahhurz”, and also it wouldn’t be a car it would be a truck, and also a gravel road is only for folks who can afford such luxuries. Plus the sound of tires crunching on a gravel road is the kind of surface-level stereotype imagery you associate with poor rural life when you’ve only ever seen it in movies, kind of like imagining the American West as coyotes howling and cowboys singing around a fire. It’s like painting with nothing but primary colors, like a child’s oversimplified view of what a tree looks like, all bright green with no understanding of the subtle desaturated tones that make up the reality.

There’s been a lot of critical acclaim for this album through the years. But for me, it’s just cloying. Lucinda’s singing voice sounds forced, the country-ness and folk-ness of the album sounds forced, her southern accent sounds forced, and even a few examples of really solid songwriting can’t override those feelings for me. I even played this album for my wife to see if I was just being weird, and she laughed when “Car Wheels” came on, then got a little mad at how (sorry) awful Lucinda’s voice sounds on that song, thinking I was playing a joke on her. Oh well. We tried.

From the roundup Greatest Albums of 1998.