“Every Saturday, Paste will be revisiting an album that came out before the magazine was founded in July 2002 and assessing its current cultural relevance. This week, we look back at Essence, the Grammy-winning 2001 album that followed Williams’ magnum opus Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.”
“After toiling in relative obscurity and then in the partial shade of cultish appreciation, singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams bowled over most of the known rock universe with 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Her unique strengths — elliptical but evocative song-stories, distanced vocals and naked emotions, and a not-quite-country lilt and twang — had been […]”
