The Private Canon: Waiting in the Car for Lucinda Williams
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Lucinda Williams is most decidedly not from L.A.—La. is more like it—but I associate her music indelibly with driving all over the City of Angels in the summer of 1989, the first I spent in L.A., when I landed a job as a "runner" (i.e., a car-bound errand boy for a film company) between my junior and senior year of college, making that my first full calendar year in what I think of as my second hometown (after Phoenix). I had picked up Passionate Kisses, a weird cassette EP that cobbled together the studio version of the title track, from Williams's self-titled debut of the year before, with a series of live radio performances, most at L.A.'s Pacifica station, KPFK, most of them blues covers ("Nothing in Rambling," "Going Back Home," and "Disgusted"). "Kisses" towered as a country standard from the first hearing (I especially relished the dissonance on the pre-chorus, on the repeated "Shouldn't I have this"), and the blues covers had a playful and lusty twang, with her smoky voice sneering as well as soaring with a wounded pride.
But the song that stopped me in my tracks was "Side of the Road," an original but also a live recording. Unfolding with a stately, scenic gait, it's a sort of not-quite-break-up song, a wistful farewell to a road not taken. The singer asks her lover to pull over and wait while she goes for a walk in the fields, just to see, "if only for a minute or two," "what it feels like to be without you." She wanders by a farmhouse and wonders what kind of domestic scene is playing out in there, and whether the couple is still happy with each other—if the woman still takes "her hair down at night." (This outside-looking-in scene always puts me in mind of this priceless Seinfeld story.) In case the decisiveness of her opening ambivalence wasn't clear, she doubles down in the final verse:
Lucinda Williams is most decidedly not from L.A.—La. is more like it—but I associate her music indelibly with driving all over the City of Angels in the summer of 1989, the first I spent in L.A., when I landed a job as a "runner" (i.e., a car-bound errand boy for a film company) between my junior and senior year of college, making that my first full calendar year in what I think of as my second hometown (after Phoenix). I had picked up Passionate Kisses, a weird cassette EP that cobbled together the studio version of the title track, from Williams's self-titled debut of the year before, with a series of live radio performances, most at L.A.'s Pacifica station, KPFK, most of them blues covers ("Nothing in Rambling," "Going Back Home," and "Disgusted"). "Kisses" towered as a country standard from the first hearing (I especially relished the dissonance on the pre-chorus, on the repeated "Shouldn't I have this"), and the blues covers had a playful and lusty twang, with her smoky voice sneering as well as soaring with a wounded pride.
But the song that stopped me in my tracks was "Side of the Road," an original but also a live recording. Unfolding with a stately, scenic gait, it's a sort of not-quite-break-up song, a wistful farewell to a road not taken. The singer asks her lover to pull over and wait while she goes for a walk in the fields, just to see, "if only for a minute or two," "what it feels like to be without you." She wanders by a farmhouse and wonders what kind of domestic scene is playing out in there, and whether the couple is still happy with each other—if the woman still takes "her hair down at night." (This outside-looking-in scene always puts me in mind of this priceless Seinfeld story.) In case the decisiveness of her opening ambivalence wasn't clear, she doubles down in the final verse:
If I stray away too far from youNeedless to say this expresses an independent, unpinnable spirit stereotypically associated with men, especially in song. I won't pretend that restless sentiment isn't part of the song's resonance for me, but to hear this spiky self-possession from a woman does more than blandly universalize or generalize it. It also renders female subjectivity with undeniable immediacy and force. "Passionate Kisses," come to think of it, achieves a similar feat, albeit in a poppier vein. But "Side of the Road" is the one that really hit me, and in fact may have been the first feminist song to get under my skin and move me emotionally (this was before I'd discovered Liz Phair, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Fiona Apple, etc.).
Don't go and try to find me.
It don't mean I don't love you.
It don't mean I won't come back and stay beside you.
It only means I need a little time,
To follow that unbroken line
To a place where the wild things grow,
To a place where I used to always go.
Musically the song is pretty straightforward, though there's something about its rising-and-falling progression that feels unpredictable and fresh no matter how many times I hear or play it. The chords of what I think of as the verse are E-B-C#m-A-B, and what I think of as the chorus starts on an F#m—a paradoxical minor lift—before rotating through A-E-B. There are even a few small dissonances—the guitar adds a 2 to the A chord of the verse, which puts a chill right under the word "side"—and there's a nagging second interval in the chorus, a C# over the B chord:
And I can't help but notice a little sixth (G# over the B chord) that curls up off the end of the second line in the second and third verses:
By the way, it turns out I'm not the only dude who's cottoned to the song:
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