Ranking my favorite Lucinda Williams albums

After 2007’s West, I lost interest in this once great singer-songwrier-band leader, frustrated by her lethargic yawp and the sponginess of her arrangements; but she recorded three of my favorite albums of the last thirty years. The only other album that deserves a devoted listen is 1980’s Happy Woman Blues.

1. Lucinda Williams (1988)

Although not a debut, the eponymous album has the swagger of one: a dozen songs with surefire hooks specializing in the poetry of economy, with a voice that, to use a description of one of her characters, knows where the best bars are yet hasn’t made a habit of frequenting them. From opener “I Just Wanted to See You So Bad” to future Tom Petty cover “Changed the Locks, Lucinda Williams records the fictionalized unburdening of a life mastering the complexities of getting by. Because it’s on Rough Trade the album’s been called “alternative country,” but, really, alternative to what country? Patty Loveless’ Honky Tonk Angel, released the same year, boasts a rangy cowpunk momentum too (and did I mention Dwight Yoakam?), which might explain why Loveless eventually covered Williams. My favorites: “Crescent City,” the Cajun-inflected hoedown about siblings who partied on Saturday night before the party caught up to them; and “Side of the Road,” a woman’s plea for quiet and a time to think that, because guys are stupid, must double as an assurance to the worried boyfriend.

2. Sweet Old World (1992)

Duane Jarvis and co-producer Gurf Morlix’s guitars chime and grind like early Mellencamp, put in the service of somber material, spooked by ghosts. On “Six Blocks Away” Williams sounds a verse away from collapsing into tears. Further evidence: the glistening title track, the eulogy to a sibling with rugged good looks and a helluva R&B collection and a bad attitude called “Little Angel, Little Brother,” perhaps the same one commemorated in “Crescent City.”

3. Essence (2001)

In a long-interred review for The Miami Herald, I praised Essence for being the real Time Out of Mind, and this was before learning that Tony Garnier and Charlie Sexton supplied the guitars, mixed into a soup that never congeals into TOOM’s opaque bisque: listeners, for example, can hear every lick on the outro of “Out of Touch” while Williams leaves herself room to bask in erotic abandon. And bask she does. This was the last time I believed her drawl.

4. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998)

This beloved album brought Williams her first sales and serious glossy interest at the moment glossies stopped mattering, but she deserved it. The fitful manner in which she recorded Car Wheels on a Gravel Road shows: some of it is masterful songwriting (the title track, “I Lost It,” “Metal Firecracker,” “Lake Charles”), another segment sits there (“Concrete and Barbed Wire,” “I Lost It,” “Right in Time”). Thanks to Car Wheels, I discovered the eponymous debut

5. World Without Tears (2003)

The material sounded convincing when I saw her open for Neil Young during the Greendale tour. Paul Westerburg’s 14 Songs was an inspiration, she said, so points for originality. She and Westerberg would care about real live bleeding fingers and broken guitar strings — they want you to share their pain. “Righteously” helps.