This came out in 2003 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Lucinda Williams is a woman of constant sorrow. At least, it seems that way on her misleadingly titled seventh album World Without Tears.
Laced with heartache and sorrow, steeped in loneliness and disillusionment, these 13 achingly beautiful songs capture the notoriously uncompromising singer-songwriter adrift in a stark, candlelit landscape of woozy country waltzes and raw-boned, deliberately paced roots-rockers. Opening cut Fruits Of My Labour sets the tone with its languid tempo and vibrato-soaked guitar swirls, which are echoed in longing ballads like Ventura, the old-timey Over Time, the torchy Worlds Fell and the chilly Minneapolis.
The hour-long set is by no means a one-dimensional affair, though. First single Righteously is a sexy, funky little pout powered by searing, Coltrane-inspired guitar solos and one of Lucinda’s steamier vocals — she just turned 50 this year, but the way her bittersweet pipes purr lines like, “When you run your hand all up and run it back down my leg / Get me all worked up like that” will practically melt the wax in you ears. It righteously breaks the hypnotic spell cast by those ballads, while the gnarled blooz-stomp of Atonement, the ragged Rolling Stonesy jive of Bleeding Fingers and the plain-spoken folktronic monologue of American Dream also go a long way from keeping Lucinda from getting stuck in a Cowboy Junkies-style rut.
Stylistic variety aside, though, it’s the refrain of American Dream — “Everything is wrong” — that more succinctly reflects Lucinda’s perspective on World Without Tears. Or as she puts it on the title cut: “If we lived in a world without tears / How would bruises find a face to lie upon? / How would scars find skin to etch themselves into?” And how, we could ask, would Lucinda Williams find anything to write songs about? If we’re lucky, we’ll never know.
