Lucinda Williams [Reissue]

This album was Williams' breakthrough, with excellent songs.... A 20-track bonus CD offers a 14-song live set from that time and some very nice radio performances. [Mar 2014, p.105]

This self-titled album, released on UK indie Rough Trade in 1988, began her journey to becoming a household name. In a newly remastered 2-disc edition, Lucinda Williams blossoms all over again.

A well-known perfectionist, it took her eight years to craft and release these tunes that fly by in just under 40 minutes. Every one is a gem.... This is the first title on Williams’ own label--a new album is due in mid-2014--and is essential listening for every Lucinda fan and anyone even tangentially touched by her timeless music.

Listening again proves it to be that rarest of beasts: a perfect work. There’s not a chord, lyric, beat or inflection that doesn’t pull at the heart or make it soar.

The most trad of Williams trad-rock classics, as instantly recognizable as Sgt. Pepper. [No. 106, p.60]

Each song is a story. And that’s greatness in this kind of music.

With hindsight, the Rough Trade album with its seamless mix of folk, blues country, cajun and rock can be seen as the album that launched the phenomenon we would come to know as alt.country. [Feb 2014, p.97]

Its return is to be celebrated, not just for the bonus disc of a previously unavailable live show, but because it illustrates the formation of a blueprint (tough country-rock, literate confessional lyrics) that would serve Williams well for the next quarter century.

An Americana classic.