Author: Chris Herrington

Like most people who cared about such things back in 1998, I thought Lucinda Williams made a career album with Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, that painstaking document of and testament to Southern identity. Fifteen more years down the road, it’s unclear how conventional wisdom has settled on the matter, but I’ve rethought my position, now prizing even more Williams’ 10-years-earlier eponymous breakthrough, Lucinda Williams. Where Car Wheels now feels like something to admire — scratch that, something to wonder over — Lucinda Williams has coiled its way around my heart.

It’s a less perfect record, and maybe that’s partly why it cuts deeper. Car Wheels may peak at the very beginning, but every song is of a piece. Lucinda Williams is comparatively uneven. Half the songs are brilliant; the rest offer companionable support. The breathless, yearning opener — “I Just Wanted To See You So Bad” — rushes by in 21 lines, nine of them a repetition of the title refrain. “Changed the Locks” is a love-gone-wrong song that builds steadily toward the cosmic, managing to be horrified and comic all at once. “The Night’s Too Long,” a fictional story of a small-town girl moved to the city, and “Crescent City,” an autobiographical sibling song, are sketches so precise you can feel the cool moisture coming off the beer bottles in the bars where one song ends and another begins. And then there are “Passionate Kisses” and “Side of the Road” — twin titans about the imperatives and limits of romantic love that are at once visionary and also grounded in the everyday. Throughout, Williams’ breathy, marble-mouthed, tinglingly evocative vocals — her signature, if anything is — are just a little more naked and open than they’d ever be again.

The simpler secondary songs — the straight country “Price To Pay,” the alt-country Velvet Underground “Like a Rose,” the lonely lament “Am I Too Blue” — give the album some room to breathe, and they grow more lovely all the time. The closing Howlin’ Wolf cover? A turf grab. Not just a declaration of artistic support but one of artistic equality. Williams will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the album by playing it start-to-finish to open her show this week at Minglewood Hall.

Though she’s another blonde, female, indie-but-not-really-alt country/folk singer-songwriter with a colorful (Southern) family background, Elizabeth Cook is not quite an artist of Williams’ magnitude. But at her best she can fool you into thinking she is. “Mama’s Funeral” is an autobiographical family song that matches Williams at her own game. “Heroin Addict Sister” is one no one could quite match. Both of those are from Cook’s most recent and best album, 2010’s Welder. And while Cook’s career album (so far) isn’t as classic as either of Williams’, it’s also less distant in the rearview mirror.

She’s funnier, on record and — oh boy — in person, where she topped headliner Todd Snider at last year’s What the Folk Fest at the Levitt Shell and where she’s got several memorable Late Show with David Letterman interviews waiting on YouTube for your discovery. And that makes her more relatable. Cook is a mortal. She’s one of us.

Sometimes she’s smarter too, in an everyday way — humor and brains tend to go together, after all. In Cook’s musical world, an El Camino isn’t a signifier of retro cool (see Williams’ “Lake Charles”) but a signal that, hey, this dude hitting on you at the bar might be a little creepy. And she doesn’t romanticize her unreliable musician boyfriend as a “Drunken Angel” but instead — on “Rock n Roll Man” — punctures his self-conscious cool.

Cook, who hosts an “outlaw country” show on satellite radio, is a cult artist — self-penned gems like “All the Time” and “Girlfriend Tonight” are ace Nashville readymades even if Nashville doesn’t know it — but one whose cult is growing, as witnessed by her Levitt Shell return this week, this time with a night all to herself.

Lucinda Williams

25th Anniversary Show

Minglewood Hall

Tuesday, September 10th

7 p.m., $30 in advance,

$35 at the door

Elizabeth Cook

The Levitt Shell

Thursday, September 5th

7:30 p.m., free

For Memphis rap pioneers Three 6 Mafia, it was a long road to the top and a short stay. First formed in 1991, the group — led by the core duo of Juicy J and DJ Paul — built a regional empire the hard way, selling CDs out of proverbial car trunks before partnering with local indie distributor Select-O-Hits to branch out further.

By 2005, though, more than a decade of real-life hustle and flow finally paid off in a major way, with the Sony-released album Most Known Unknown topping both the rap and R&B album charts and a career-best single — the epic, nearly elegant “Stay Fly” — becoming the band’s most commercially and critically successful recording.

The following spring, the group found themselves the improbable owners, each, of a little gold statue named Oscar, winning Academy Awards for “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” from Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow.

But what felt like a breakthrough at the time was soon revealed to be a culmination instead. The band swiftly traded in on their celebrity over their art, starring in the short-lived MTV reality series Adventures in HollyHood, and didn’t release a follow-up to Most Known Unknown until 2008’s Last 2 Walk, which, starting out quick but falling off just as quickly, broke a four-album streak of gold or platinum album sales. A long-rumored next album, Laws of Power, remains unreleased.

But a funny thing happened on the way back down: Co-founder Juicy J, who, like others in the group, had long moonlighted as a solo artist in mixtape and indie form, found himself with both a grassroots hit in the form of the strip-club anthem “Bandz a Make Her Dance” and a fruitful new collaborator in the form of younger breakout rapper Wiz Khalifa, who later made Juicy J a partner in his Taylor Gang imprint.

In the youth-oriented world of commercial hip-hop, artists aren’t supposed to reinvent themselves, win over new fans, and find new levels of popularity more than 20 years into a career. But Juicy J, whose major-label solo debut, Stay Trippy, was released via Columbia Records on August 27th, is living proof that it can happen.

“It’s a blessing, man,” Juicy J says of his journey, initial humility morphing into well-earned pride. “It’s hard to stay in this game. It’s one minute you’re hot, the next minute you’re not. To be an OG from then to now that’s still moving forward, almost like a brand-new artist, is huge. You can’t count many rappers that have done that.”

This solo reinvention was not by design.

“It wasn’t planned. I didn’t expect it. I was just doing mixtapes,” Juicy J says by phone from Pittsburgh, where he was airport-bound to make a Las Vegas show. “I just never gave up. I felt like I still had so many songs in me that people needed to hear, so I just kept working. Then, all of a sudden, my name started getting out. People started noticing and paying attention.”

Unlike most rappers who build an online following to attract label attention, Juicy J was already signed to Columbia, but being signed to a major and having them actually release an album are two very different things, as too many local rappers can attest.

“I already had a deal, but they weren’t really pushing the song at first,” Juicy J says. “I put it out online for free. Gave it to the fans.”

It was the groundswell success of the single that got Columbia to refocus on an artist already in their stable.

“It’s harder now. You have to have a little bit of buzz going on for yourself,” Juicy J says. “Columbia was watching me while I was making my mixtapes. It took a minute for them to call me, but they saw what I was doing. [They thought,] this guy has hustled his way back up and gotten his name back out there, and he’s still signed with us. So they were happy about that. Which is all good. It’s all business. They’re putting me in a lot of work right now and pushing my album, but nothing is ever going to be easy. I’m still grinding and still hustling.”

“Bandz” has been followed by singles “Show It,” “One of These Nights,” and the current “Bounce It,” which is smoother than “Bandz” and features a surer rap flow from Juicy J. Among the high-wattage guests on these songs and others on Stay Trippy are rappers Wale, Young Jeezy, and Lil Wayne, R&B stars Trey Songz and Chris Brown, and hometown pop superstar Justin Timberlake. While the album has an illicit vibe, the violence that laced Three 6 Mafia’s music has mostly been exchanged for more realistic and perhaps more widely relatable vices in the form of drugs and strippers, as the album’s title and its smash single suggest.

“I think my solo stuff is a little different but with the same feel,” Juicy J says of the contrast. “We’re not living in 2002 or 1998 anymore. Back then, it was a different kind of grind. But when you hear the album, you can still hear the Three 6 sound, but it’s more polished and mixed with the new. It’s relevant but still has a feel of back-in-the-day.”

The evolution has opened up Juicy J’s music to a whole new audience.

“I’ve still got the old fans, but I have new fans now that don’t know nothing about Three 6,” says Juicy J, who says he’s maintained a primary residence in Memphis. “Some of them have probably never even heard of [the group]. They don’t even know about my past.”

Hard-rock fans can rejoice in this five-band bill on Mud Island. The undercard includes We As Human, In This Moment, and Papa Roach, the latter of whom can claim one of the more enduring hits of the short-lived “nü-metal” era with the 2000 anthem “Last Resort.” But more interesting are the Memphis-connected bands at or near the top of the bill. Skillet was formed in Memphis in the mid-’90s by frontman and lone remaining original member John Cooper, and the band has become one of the biggest crossover success stories in contemporary Christian music. Now based in Wisconsin, Skillet was — as The New York Times noted earlier this summer — one of only three rock bands (along with the Black Keys and Mumford & Sons) to sell a million copies of an album last year. Headlining the show is the Florida-based Shinedown (pictured), which has navigated the ups-and-downs of commercial rock music over the past decade with much more grace and success than most of their cohort, selling more than six million albums over the course of the band’s run. The band’s local connection is in the form of hotshot Memphis guitarist Zach Myers, who still resides in the Bluff City — and can be found cheering on the Grizzlies from FedExForum floor seats when the band’s not on tour. The Carnival of Madness tour lands at the Mud Island Amphitheatre on Wednesday, September 4th. Gates open at 5 p.m. General admission tickets are $62.

Amy LaVere, the upright-bass-playing Memphis roots-pop chanteuse, has played with plenty of terrific guitarists since emerging as a significant solo artist with her 2006 debut, This World Is Not My Home. But, in that time frame, LaVere hasn’t played with someone who specializes in a vintage, twangy rock-and-roll and country sound the way John Paul Keith does. And with Motel Mirrors — the duo’s recently formed side-project band, which celebrates the release of a seven-song eponymous debut EP this week — Keith’s sound clicks with LaVere’s so perfectly that you’re likely to wonder why it took these local roots faves so long to find each other.

Though both have been popular fixtures on the local scene — Keith’s third album since landing in the Bluff City, Memphis Circa 3AM, arrives on September 17th — they didn’t know each other well until last fall, when Keith first approached her at Craig Brewer’s annual Halloween party about working together.

“I was trying to take over her record,” Keith says now, with a laugh. “I’ve always wanted to work with her. I always thought it was a natural fit. On her records, she never quite does that country or rockabilly thing.”

LaVere agreed to a meeting — “she humored me,” Keith says — and made it clear her album, with Luther Dickinson producing, was in good hands. But LaVere was interested in working together and was looking for a way to play local weeknight gigs without interfering with her solo draw, which dovetailed with Keith’s own needs as a solo artist.

“Before we’d even wrapped the meeting, she’s taken out her phone and date book and was scheduling gigs,” Keith remembers. “She was texting me band names before I’d even gotten home.”

Keith, LaVere, and drummer Shawn Zorn — a regular member of LaVere’s band and a sometime fill-in with Keith’s One Four Fives — played their first gig as the Motel Mirrors at Mollie Fontaine’s Lounge a few weeks later. And now they have Motel Mirrors — a brisk, lovely collection of four originals (three from Keith, one a co-write) and three vintage covers.

“We got together and jammed on some stuff, and it was apparent we had to do duets,” Keith says. “It’s stupid if we don’t. This has to be like a Conway [Twitty] and Loretta [Lynn] thing.”

With Zorn completing the trio, LaVere and Keith worked up a covers setlist in short order, featuring classic country duet crowd-pleasers such as Twitty and Lynn’s “After the Fire Is Gone” and “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly” and the Kendalls’ “Heaven’s Just a Sin Away.”

“We knew within the first rehearsal that it was a fit, a total no-brainer,” Keith says.

Working up original material for the project was more challenging, with both Keith and LaVere readying solo albums at the same time (LaVere’s is expected to be released late this year or early next year) and with writing duets taking both into new songwriting territory.

“I wanted to make sure it was romantic,” Keith says of the project. “That’s the central thing that’s interesting about a man and a woman singing together: She & Him do it. But there’s not a lot of that. It’s kind of gone away. We also didn’t want it to be kitschy or campy.”

Keith came up with three strong originals for the Motel Mirrors record, which was recorded at Ward Archer’s Music + Arts Studio and is being released, digitally and on 10-inch vinyl, via Archer Records. The opening “Meet Me on the Corner” is a dark-end-of-the-street anthem, with Keith and LaVere trading lines in anticipation of an illicit rendezvous. “Suddenly You” is a jaunty paean to newfound love that features LaVere’s slap bass in a way that’s been more common onstage than on record. “The Best Mistake I’d Ever Make Again” is a no-longer-a-couple’s fond look back at their “all-time favorite sin.” With “That Makes Two of Us,” the duo refashion a preexisting but unrecorded LaVere song into a post-breakup give-and-take.

Adding to those originals are three covers. They turn Buck Owens’ “Your Tender Loving Care” — which he re-recorded as a duet with Susan Raye — into a surging rocker. “As Far As I’m Concerned,” with Keith and LaVere echoing each other delicately, is a little-known gem from country pioneer Red Foley. And most striking of all might be “Dearest,” which you could I.D. as a selection from ’50s R&B duo Mickey & Sylvia even if — like most — you’re only familiar with their lone megahit, “Love Is Strange.” Keith and LaVere play it straight here, Keith mastering the distinctive guitar sound and his and LaVere’s voices blending perfectly. It’s dreamy.

While classic country duets were the original inspiration, the Motel Mirrors’ real sound is modeled more after the Everly Brothers, who layered doubled vocals and acoustic guitars over a simple rhythm section.

After playing a series of weeknight residencies at local clubs since late last year, the Motel Mirrors will play their first ever weekend Memphis show at the Young Avenue Deli to launch the record.

Motel Mirrors Record Release Show, with Mark Edgar Stuart

Young Avenue Deli

Saturday, August 24th, 9 p.m., $8

I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, at least when it comes to pop music, so let’s call the Band Perry a confusing pleasure. The sibling trio’s “backwoods Fleetwood Mac” vibe fed one of mainstream country’s most unlikely commercial and artistic success stories. And Kimberly Perry’s deep twang in conjunction with my fascination with the aesthetically inscrutable music video made 2011’s “You Lie” one of my most listened to singles that year. For most of the country, “You Lie” was second to “If I Die Young,” one of the biggest cross-genre hits of the past few years. The singles from this year’s Pioneer haven’t grabbed me the same way, though the current single, “Done,” vaulted to the top of the country charts. But Kimberly Perry’s artsy Everygirl charisma and her brothers’ unbelievably awful hair still make for good fun. I saw them as an opener at Snowden Grove a couple of years ago, and they put on a good show. The Band Perry play the Memphis Botanic Garden on Friday, August 23rd, as the penultimate performance in this year’s Live at the Garden series. Showtime is 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $45.