Review: Lucinda Williams brings 'Ghosts' to the World Cafe Live

Lucinda Williams used to have a reputation as a difficult perfectionist,  a Southern storytelling songwriter who was anything but prolific. It took six years, for instance, to follow-up her mournfully beautiful 1992 album Sweet Old World with the Steve Earle-produced vernacular masterwork Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.

That was then, this is now. On Wednesday, Williams put on a terrific two hour show at the World Cafe Live, that was the  first of two sold out back to back nights. It was in support of The Ghosts of Highway 20, a fine new collection of rutted road songs that finds her in the middle of a creative renaissance. Not only is the patient, scuffed up, deeply soulful Ghosts a double album.  It's also, along with 2014's similarly excellent and expansive Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone, her second twofer to come out in the last year and a half.

Maybe mortality is motivating her. "Doors of Heaven," one of many standout showcases for versatile and fluid guitarist Stuart Mathis, the featured player in the adept trio who backed Williams and also opened the show as Buick 6,  was a gospel stomp that ripped and roared, and it's one of many Ghost songs that look death in the eye.  Miller Williams, the singer's beloved father who was a highly regarded Southern poet, died on New Year's day last year, and on both Spirit and Ghosts, the singer adapted one of his poems into a song. The one she performed on Wednesday, "Dust" was an unblinking minor key brooder with seize-the-day message embedded in its bleak conclusion: "Even your thoughts turn to dust."

Dressed in a black leather jacket and jeans, Williams was engaging and in good spirits throughout the evening. After playing the title song to Car Wheels, she made the connection to Ghosts, noting that she was a little girl in the backseat ("Little bit of dirt, mixed with tears") in the former song, but now as she revisits her past, "I'm the one driving the car."   Her famously warbling, sometimes wavering drawl has grown thicker over the years, and as the evening gathered gravitas as it went along, she explored her lower range effectively, especially on an impressively executed cover of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come."

That wasn't the only cover: Ghost's "Faith & Grace," a take on Fred McDowell's version of a gospel standard, cast a hypnotic spell,  and Woody Guthrie's timeless "Ain't Got No Home," got big cheers for a newly discovered lyric that refers to the folk singer's Coney Island landlord, who happened to be Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump's father.

One other surprise: Amos Lee, who Williams called "one of my favorite songwriters," came on to sing a lovely mid-set duet on Sweet Old World's affecting "Little Angel, Little Brother."  Williams was hoping to get him back on stage for "Get Right With God," her percolating closer about preparing for Judgment Day, but with the Philadelphia singer nowhere to be found, she carried on on her own.

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