DOWN TO THE BONE

Before Rob Christgau and the then-Voice staff voted Lucinda Williams’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road Pazz & Jop’s best album of 1998, we can remember picking up the CD (from Walmart, no less) and being blown away by this woman with a conservative’s twang and a liberal’s feminism, or at least that’s how she seemed at the time to a pre-teen just becoming aware of America’s coastal vs. heartland binary. But politics weren’t important then, and this kickass lady who wore dramatic eyeliner and sang about heartbreak in a way that still made her seem strong reminded us of our aunts and big sisters and various late-night diner waitresses — those beautiful, whiskey-dunked, and gracefully hardened women who had, to boil it down, been through some shit. We wanted to be like Lucinda then and we still do now, just after the release of her 11th studio album, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone. Hear her, as confident in her rage and grief as ever, as she performs it tonight.

Mon., Nov. 17, 8 p.m., 2014