Sweetness and Light

With Little Honey , Lucinda Williams gets happy. Her fans will be happy too

Danny Clinch

Williams' ninth album combines love, goofiness and topflight guitar.

While assured of her status as a great American singer, Lucinda Williams has never been most people's idea of an easy one--someone whose music you'd trot out at a wedding, say, or any other event where keening is frowned on. Williams isn't po-faced; she's so tough that misery, mostly in the form of doomed men and rotten luck, never stands a chance. It's just that in the Williams songbook, misery never seems to stop coming around, which is why the first track on her ninth album, Little Honey, is such a shock. It's called "Real Love," and it's not about losing...

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