Earworm of the Day: Lucinda Williams - World Without Tears

I wrote about World Without Tears, the album, once already, and anyone who reads this site on a semi-regular basis knows it's very Lucinda-friendly in here. I like to say that during the 90s, when every other girl had a Liz Phair or a Courtney Love, I had a Lucinda Williams. "World Without Tears" was actually released in 2003, and is still one of my favorite songs from the 00s, though it's overshadowed by some of her other releases like Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which nabbed her a grammy for best contemporary folk album. WWT is still up there with her best, and this version of the title song is lovely.

Although she's generally labeled a contemporary singer-songwriter, her sound is heavily steeped in country. I grew up with country music, something I'm often loathe to admit when bands take their names from the antebellum south, or that country music, in general, is thought to be the domain of the mudflaps-and-confederate-flag crowd. (There's some underlying classism in those assumptions, too, which I've already explored quite a while back.) Lucinda made it okay to like country music.