LUCINDA WILLIAMS : LIVE @ THE FILLMORE

 

Disc One (49:53)

  1. Ventura
  2. Reason To Cry
  3. Fruits Of My Labor
  4. Out Of Touch
  5. Sweet Side
  6. Lonely Girls
  7. Overtime
  8. Blue
  9. Changed The Locks
  10. Atonement

Disc Two (65:41)

  1. I Lost It
  2. Pineola
  3. Righteously
  4. Joy
  5. Essence
  6. Real Life Bleeding Fingers And Broken Guitar Strings
  7. Are You Down
  8. Those Three Days
  9. American Dream
  10. World Without Tears
  11. Bus To Baton Rouge
  12. Words Fell

Label : Lost Highway

Venue : The Fillmore, San Francisco, California, USA

Recording Date : November 20, 21 & 22, 2003

Release Date : May 10, 2005

Review (AllMusic) : 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.

Review (Pitchfork) : Recorded over a pair of nights in San Francisco, this live disc mostly draws from Williams' two latest studio releases. For better or worse, Lucinda Williams has spent the past couple of years living down Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. On Essence and especially World Without Tears, she replaced the Southern storytelling, travelogue nature, and plainspoken poetry of her breakthrough with an increasingly confessional tone and a decreasingly friendly voice. Her disposition has never been exactly sunny and her voice has always been a little gauzy, but she's grown defiantly prickly; as she obsessed over a broken relationship, wondering how it could cause as much happiness as pain, her songs have become more emotionally explicit, her voice more boozily abrasive. "Ghosts in the wind that blow through my life/ Follow me wherever I go," she sings on "Bus to Baton Rouge", "I'll never be free from these chains inside/Hidden deep down in my soul." This trend toward extreme introversion crystallizes with Live @ the Fillmore, recorded over two nights in San Francisco. While the double live album is a time-honored tradition, Williams makes it immediately clear that this isn't going to be Double Live Gonzo! or Frampton Comes Alive! The first disk begins not with the requisite upbeat showstarter (although this version of "Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings" would have been perfect both sonically and thematically), but with a slow ballad- three of them, in fact. Obviously, this is not the Lucinda Williams of the Car Wheels on a Gravel Road tour (chronicled on a New West Records DVD, released concurrently). The 22 songs on these two disks are culled mainly from Essence and World Without Tears, with only a few from Car Wheels, Sweet Old World, and Lucinda Williams (and none from her first two albums). Instead of leading us through the South of "Crescent City" and "Jacksonville", Williams takes us first out to California on "Ventura", one of only three geographically defined songs on the set ("Pineola" and "Bus to Baton Rouge" being the others). Almost compulsively Williams airs her sins and misgivings on songs like "Fruits of My Labor", "Three Days", and "Are You Down", sounding both gushing and guarded. But her vocals, even on talking-blues songs like "Sweet Side" and "Righteously", reveal a woman living through all the messy frustration and unalleviated desire she's singing about. After a deliberately slow start, Live @ the Fillmore picks up considerably toward the end of the first disk. Williams spits venom on "Changed the Locks" and "Atonement", while her backing band, especially guitarist Doug Pettibone, generates ferocious bar-blues rock. The second disk reverses that trajectory, starting hard and fast but ending soft. The barreling momentum of "I Lost It" and "Joy" gradually gives way to the sexual/narcotic fervor of "Essence", the low simmer of "Are You Down", and the faltering disappointment of "American Dreams", which sounds even more like diluted Springsteen in this setting. The old Lucinda of Car Wheels reappears briefly on the final two tracks (both of which, ironically, postdate that album). She's there in the detailed memories and interior drama of "Bus to Baton Rouge" as well as in the delicate vibrato of "Words Fell". Both tracks are a little more hopeful than the equally gentle ones that begin this set, suggesting Williams has managed to exorcise some of those ghosts blowing through her life.

Review (Austin Chronicle) : For those who remember the six-year wait between albums in the Nineties, a live album by Lucinda Williams is a significant surprise. She's apparently over her perfectionist phase as Live at the Fillmore captures her with blemishes intact, screeching vocals and all. In fact, one has to wonder what the point of this release is. A 2-CD set recorded during 2004's World Without Tears tour, it also relies heavily on material from Essence, Tears' predecessor. The best live albums offer new insight into an artist and their music, but Fillmore does little of either. Songs such as "Ventura" and "Atonement" are given treatment best described as rote. For spice there's renditions of old faves "Pineola" and "Changed the Locks," but Williams seems disinterested in bringing her earlier material into the present, seemingly happy to get them out of the way. "Joy" finds her band, guitarist Doug Pettibone, drummer Jim Christie, and bassist Taras Prodaniuk stretching out a bit, but those who have either of Williams' last two discs will want to pass on this.