Dark is the new blushing bride

“Anoint my head/ With your sweet kiss/ My joy is dead/ I long for bliss …”

Moaning at the misconceptions: Williams says she’s a “positive person.”

No, it’s not something I scrawled on my 9th-grade Social Studies book cover after Jessica Santelli told me that Tim Jordan told her that he didn’t want to slow dance with me to that REO Speedwagon hit. Instead, it’s a lyric from Lucinda Williams’ song “Unsuffer Me,” off her recent release West (Lost Highway, 2007). This lush, lounge-infused Quaalude of an album is rich with heartbreak (her mother’s death; the usual passel of no-count lovers) and the dim hope of distant happiness. Then again, all Williams’ albums fit that bill, so just how much “unsuffering” must one woman endure?

Actually, ruminative lamentations aside, Williams may be singing a new tune.

Less-passionate kisses

After decades of dating bass players, Williams appears to have caught a break/ got a clue/ settled down. She’s now planning her wedding to Tom Overby, a music-biz exec who presumably lands far from what the songwriter once described as her type: “The perfect man? A poet on a motorcycle. You know, the kind who lives on the edge, the free spirit,” Williams told Esquire five years ago.

This year, she explained to Harp, “All my boyfriends were rock ‘n’ roll guys, and some of them were younger … that wasn’t what I needed, obviously. I guess it’s an immaturity thing; you keep trying to find what you need and you have to knock on a lot of doors.”

In West‘s liner notes, her dedication of the album to Overby reads breathlessly junior-high. But Williams’ engagement announcement was also officially released on the honeymooning Web site lovetripper.com.

“Country crooner Lucinda Williams, who penned Mary Chapin Carpenter’s 1993 hit ‘Passionate Kisses,’ has found a musical muse in her fiancé,” reads the passage, posted last June. “The singer’s happiness … is apparent in the songs on her forthcoming CD, which will feature an ode to love, ‘Plan To Marry.’”

Interestingly, no such song appears on West—although in the wistful title track, she “look[s] off in the distance and blow[s] a kiss” to someone.

It’s not that Williams doesn’t, finally, deserve true love—but her grown-up romantic stuff doesn’t quite hold up to her trademark attitude-riddled odes to bad men. West does include one or two of the latter-type tunes, including “Come On,” the singer’s kiss-off to a guy she squarely disses for poor performance. Such a song might sound a bit unseemly for a 54-year-old woman—but it’s part of her legacy. “Right in Time,” from her breakout, Grammy-winning album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, was too controversial for Good Morning America because of a line about moaning at the ceiling.

Not that disapproval from the likes of Diane Sawyer stopped Williams from singing the sexy verse on national TV.

Because, somehow, Lucinda Williams can get away with cranking out lusty rockers. At an age when some of her contemporaries are taking the grandkids to Disney, she’s strutting around in jeans purchased in the Juniors department, boasting oversized ink work and asking an errant lover to “unbound my feet, untie my wrists … fill me up with ecstasy.” Even indie darling Neko Case, at age 36, was gently reamed by one critic as being a bit too old to get back “That Teenage Feeling” (as expressed in a song by that title from her own recent album).

When it comes to love, Williams gets carte blanche. “Critics go into raptures over her, especially men, who are forever scrambling, like suitors, to outdo each other,” notes No Depression.

Moreover, her fans are a dedicated group who get her love of Coltrane, tight jeans and bad men.

“Why should I listen to … whatever, when I can listen to John Coltrane?” the singer demanded of Esquire.

For anyone who can answer that question (I suspect it’s rhetorical), West‘s dirge-like strains will be welcome listening. Though, even as Williams’ signature askew drawl rises through the instrumentation, the album’s jazzy backdrop is a determined step away from laconic Americana, maybe best explained by—at long last—the love of a good man.

Or perhaps Williams was never really that into twang to begin with.

“I hate it when people think I’m dark,” she recently told Relix. “I’m actually a really positive person.”

Lucinda Williams performs at Thomas Wolfe Auditorium on Sunday, March 18. 8 p.m. $35. 259-5544.