Lucinda Williams - What You Don't Know - Non-Album Tracks (1989-1993)

Lucinda Williams was criticized for the slow pace of her releases in the 1980s and 1990s, putting out a new album about once every six or seven years. (She's picked up the pace since then.) But I've happily discovered she had lots of stray tracks. For instance, it turns out she had enough material between 1989 and 1993 to release another solid album of mostly original material.

The first five songs here have been released as bonus tracks on some editions of the 1989 album "Lucinda Williams." But they deserve more exposure than that. They all come from in studio radio appearances. I included one of them, "Sundays," on my previous stray tracks collection, "In My Girlish Days." But that version was a full-band performance, and this one is a significantly different acoustic one.

Six of the remaining eight songs are still officially unreleased. This is a shame, because they're all fine songs, and the sound quality is very good too. Three of them, "Motherless Children," "Stop Breaking Down," and "Tonight I Think I'm Going to Go Downtown," are covers, with the last one of those being a duet with David Byrne of Talking Heads fame. Most of these unreleased songs come from concert bootlegs, with the audience noise removed.

One of the remaining songs that has been officially released, "Pancakes," is also a song I put on the "In my Girlish Days" album. But this version and that one are drastically different, as suggested by the fact that this version is three and a half minutes shorter.

In short, in the late 1980s and 1990s, Williams was peaking with the most acclaimed albums of her career. If you like those albums, you should definitely like this one too.

01 Goin' Back Home (Lucinda Williams)
02 Dark Side of Life (Lucinda Williams)
03 Nothing in Rambling (Lucinda Williams)
04 Disgusted (Lucinda Williams)
05 Side of the Road (Lucinda Williams)
06 Factory Blues (Lucinda Williams)
07 Wild and Blue (Lucinda Williams)
08 Motherless Children (Lucinda Williams)
09 Burning Desire (Band of Blacky Ranchette & Lucinda Williams)
10 Drivin’ Down a Dead End Street [Early Version of He Never Got Enough Love] (Lucinda Williams)
11 What You Don’t Know (Lucinda Williams)
12 Stop Breaking Down (Lucinda Williams)
13 Deportees [Plane Wreck at Los Gatos] (David Rodriguez & Lucinda Williams)
14 Tonight I Think I'm Going to Go Downtown (David Byrne & Lucinda Williams)

Sundays (Lucinda Williams)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16376584/LUCNDWLLMS1989-1993WhtYuDntKnw_atse.zip.html

For the cover art, I used a photo of Williams in concert in 1992.