Lucinda Williams - The Ghosts of Highway 20 [2LP]

Lucinda Williams follows the long road home on The Ghosts of Highway 20, her 2016 double album, pressed here on two LPs in a gatefold jacket with a digital download card.

Interstate 20 cuts across the Deep South through towns that shaped her childhood, and Williams uses it as a map of memory, loss and faith. The album came not long after the death of her father, the poet Miller Williams, and that shadow falls across several songs. Released on her own Highway 20 label, it was nominated for Album of the Year at the Americana Music Awards.

Dust sets one of her father's poems to a slow, smoky groove, and House of Earth turns a Woody Guthrie lyric into a sultry, slow-burning blues. Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz trade guitar lines that shimmer and drift across the whole record, giving it a hypnotic, unhurried pull, and she reshapes Bruce Springsteen's Factory into something weary and close to the bone.

The long closing meditation Faith and Grace rolls on and on, as if she cannot bear to let the road end.

Patient, haunted and deeply human, this is Williams writing at the height of her late-career powers, and it rewards a full evening with the lights turned low.