Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is the fifth studio album by Lucinda Williams. It was recorded and co-produced by Williams in Nashville, Tennessee and Canoga Park, California, before being released on June 30, 1998, by Mercury Records. The album features guest appearances by Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris. Read more on Last.fm.
Lucinda Williams (born January 26, 1953) is an American rock, folk, and alt-country songwriter and singer. A three-time Grammy Award winner, she was named "America's best songwriter" by TIME magazine in 2002.
Williams has garnered considerable critical acclaim but her commercial success has been moderate. She has a reputation as a perfectionist and as a slow worker when it comes to recording; six years passed between the release of her second and third albums. Read more on Last.fm
Lucinda Williams has never tried to be something she’s not. There are more technically adept singers, but they can’t emote the way she does. There are more complicated lyricists, but they can’t cut as deep as her words. She’s always been upfront in a way that’s unsettling, confessional in a manner that’s courageously vulnerable. It’s as if she takes all her clothes off, sits in a bathtub with her guitar, and presses record.
Car Wheels On A Gravel Road is her masterwork, her private plunge into the odd beauty of the rural South. It’s all rotted floorboards and laundry on the line, drunken husbands and bitter friends. These aren’t songs Carrie Underwood could sing with any kind of believability. It takes the rough hewn, honey on shattered glass warble that Lucinda perfects every year she gets older. It takes the lack of mainstream sentiment, the embrace of mortality, of brokenness.
It takes a motherfucking woman.