Car Wheels on a Gravel Road


Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is the fifth studio album by American singer-songwriter 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.
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album, and received a nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for the single "Can't Let Go". It was Williams' first album to go gold, and remains her best-selling album to date, with 872,000 copies sold in the US as of October 2014. Universally acclaimed by critics, it was voted as the best album of 1998 in The Village Voices annual Pazz & Jop critics poll.

Recording

After signing a record deal with Rick Rubin's American Recordings label, Williams began recording songs for Car Wheels on a Gravel Road in 1995. The album was originally made in collaboration with Williams's long-time producer and guitar player Gurf Morlix. According to Morlix, the recordings were "90% done," but Williams shelved them and redid them in Nashville. In the middle of the re-recordings, they "butted heads in the studio" and ended their partnership. She also worked with Steve Earle who said of the experience that it was "the least amount of fun I’ve had working on a record."
The final version of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was produced by Roy Bittan. Williams incorporated country and blues elements into her modern roots rock style for the album.

Critical reception

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was met with widespread critical acclaim. Reviewing for Entertainment Weekly in July 1998, David Browne found Williams' hard-edged evocations of Southern rural life refreshing amid a music market overrun by timid, mass-produced female artists. Richard Cromelin of the Los Angeles Times said her "resonant, resolute and reassuring" answers to the questions romantic passion and pain pose are as ambitious as the "rich", commanding sound she crafted with producers Steve Earle and Ray Kennedy. NME magazine said Williams transfigures "American roots rock into a heady, soul-baring and, would you believe, unabashedly sexy art form", while Uncut credited the album with "repositioning country-blues roots rock as contemporary Southern art" and offering listeners "a sense of life and place that leap from every line and guitar lick". Village Voice critic Robert Christgau argued at the time that she proves herself to be the era's "most accomplished record-maker" by honing traditional popular music composition, understated vocal emotions, and realistic narratives colored by her native experiences and values:
At the end of 1998, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was named one of the year's best albums in many critics' top-ten lists. It topped the annual Pazz & Jop poll and earned Williams a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album, although AllMusic's Steve Huey later said it was her "least folk-oriented record". In a five-star retrospective review, About.com's Kim Ruehl credited the album with solidifying Williams' status as one of the best singer-songwriters of all time, as she "single-handedly marries the genres of traditional and alternative country, roots rock and American folk music so smoothly, it almost feels like magic." In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine called the record an alternative country masterpiece and ranked it number 304 on their list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and ranked 305 in 2012 revised list. In The Rolling Stone Album Guide, David McGee and Milo Miles said it is a masterpiece of timeless quality and greater depth than anything else by Williams, who offers a perfect collection of "faces, fights, keening swamp guitar and sighing accordion, strong drink and stronger lust in an album about places shadowed by memory". The music writers of The Associated Press voted it one of the ten best pop albums of the 1990s. It was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums, in which it was voted number 836.
Based on such rankings, the aggregate website Acclaimed Music lists Car Wheels on a Gravel Road as the 303rd most acclaimed album in history. It also ranks as the 60th most acclaimed album of the 1990s and the fifth most from 1998.

Track listing

All tracks by Lucinda Williams except where noted.
  1. "Right in Time" – 4:35
  2. "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" – 4:44
  3. "2 Kool 2 Be 4-gotten" – 4:42
  4. "Drunken Angel" – 3:20
  5. "Concrete and Barbed Wire" – 3:08
  6. "Lake Charles" – 5:27
  7. "Can't Let Go" – 3:28
  8. "I Lost It" – 3:31
  9. "Metal Firecracker" – 3:30
  10. "Greenville" – 3:23
  11. * Emmylou Harris on harmony vocals
  12. "Still I Long For Your Kiss" – 4:09
  13. "Joy" – 4:01
  14. "Jackson" – 3:42
;Deluxe edition bonus tracks
  2. "Down the Big Road Blues" – 4:07
  3. "Out of Touch" – 3:50
  4. "Still I Long For Your Kiss" – 5:00
; Deluxe edition bonus disc
  1. "Pineola" – 4:18
  2. "Something About What Happens When We Talk" – 3:44
  3. "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" – 4:42
  4. "Metal Firecracker" – 3:39
  5. "Right in Time" – 4:32
  6. "Drunken Angel" – 3:27
  7. "Greenville" – 3:46
  8. "Still I Long For Your Kiss" – 4:39
  9. "2 Kool 2 Be 4-gotten" – 4:53
  10. "Can't Let Go" – 3:51
  11. "Hot Blood" – 7:38
  12. "Changed The Locks" – 4:19
  13. "Joy" – 6:08

    Personnel