Another great dies

Yeah tomic601, Lucinda can afford the best musicians now. For a while she had Jim Christie in her band, a great, great drummer. He quit Dwight Yoakam’s to join hers, and is on the Live At The Fillmore album and others.

On the original Sweet Old World, Gurf Morlix was her guitarist, band leader, harmony singer, and producer. He left after finishing the Car Wheels album, and moved to Austin, where he produces and records his own stuff. He has three or four albums available, all good imo.

Actually Steve, when I started buying Lucinda's albums (1988, the s/t album on Rough Trade. I had been introduced to her at Club Lingerie a year or two earlier, when her then-husband's band The Long Ryders performed. She was very shy.), I did buy them on LP (the s/t album wasn't even available on CD), and didn't buy my first CD until the albums I wanted were being released in that format only. When most record labels stopped making LP's, releasing albums on CD only, that's what I bought. I was happy for her when she broke through with the Car Wheels album, but didn't much like it's follow up or the one after that (though I now have changed my opinion of them ;-).

I lost interest in Lucinda, and moved on to newer favorites like Iris Dement, Buddy Miller and his wife Julie, John Hiatt, Rodney Crowell, Jim Lauderdale (he was in Lucinda's band on the Car Wheels tour, playing acoustic rhythm guitar and singing harmony), etc. It wasn't until I started reading you and others speaking of Lucinda's more recent albums that I again gave her a listen, and damn---she's better than ever!! A lot of her newer albums are on LP, and some of the originally-only-CD albums are now too. I gotten some of them, gotta get the rest. I have some of her albums on both CD and LP, some on LP only, some on CD only.

I'm not one who can't stand CD's, and have quite a few of them (somewhere around 3500, same number of LP's). Just like LP's, some sound better than others. I trained myself to not pick music to listen to with sound quality as the first criteria. I went down that path when I discovered the high end in '73, and it led to a shallow musical life ;-) . It's nice when it's there, but the music comes first, by far. 

I does, doesn’t it Steve? The contrast I would make between the two is that TSOW sounds like it was recorded in Memphis in the 1950’s, SOW in L.A. or New York in the 1980’s. TSOW is "smokier", deeper, "darker" (I like "dark"), much more soulful. SOW sounds rushed, somewhat superficial. I very much understand why she is unhappy with it.

It took Lucinda three tries to get the Car Wheels album right, loosing producers Steve Earle and Gurf Morlix (who later produced Mary Gauthier’s great Filth & Fire album) in the process. Plus, she has a better band on TSOW than she did at the time of the recording of SOW. She can afford them now. ;-)