Listen to Lucinda Williams's Blessed

NPR has Lucinda Williams's new album, Blessed, which will be released March 1, streaming in its entirety:

Williams also offers up a touching requiem to a good friend in "Copenhagen," in which Greg Leisz and his various guitars really shine. She contemplates and questions war — and her changing attitude toward American politics — in "Soldiers Song," for which she adopts the perspective of a solider who's far away from his young family. (Only Lucinda Williams could make the line, "Baby tells the little one / Daddy's gone bye-bye" sound unaffected and totally sincere.) And in "Born to Be Loved," she rocks a sultry blues sound, but in a surprisingly optimistic way. It's the antithesis of "Seeing Black," in which she sings, "You weren't born to suffer / You weren't born for nothing / You were born to be loved."