Description
Sometimes, an artist will hit a sweet spot of creative lucidity in which the work just seems to pour out of them with clarity and conviction, untainted by compromise or constructed motives.
That’s the place that Lucinda Williams has been operating in for the past year and a half, producing enough quality material to follow last year’s double-album Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone with another double-album of equivalent potency.
The songs on The Ghosts of Highway 20 have the unerring ring of truth about them, shining glimmers of light into dark and unpalatable corners of life. It speaks volumes about the standard of her work that covers of Springsteen’s grim account of blue-collar misery “Factory” and Woody Guthrie’s unflinching prostitution song “House of Earth” don’t stand out as anything special, just further examples of the hard times covered elsewhere on the album.
