Lucinda Williams is not simply intimidated, however it could be arduous for any musician to not shudder on the activity earlier than her.
The mission? Document an album of Beatles songs — solely one of many best-known catalogs in standard music — in the identical London studio the place a lot of the originals had been made. She and her band had simply three days.
The outcome, “Lucinda Williams sings the Beatles from Abbey Road,” turns into public on Friday. It is the seventh in her sequence of “Lu’s Jukebox” initiatives and the primary one which will likely be made accessible on streaming companies.
The Nashville-based singer-songwriter delivers her tackle 12 Beatles songs, most of them from the band’s later interval. She takes on hits just like the Paul McCartney ballads “Let it Be” and “The Long and Winding Road,” while also choosing the more obscure “White Album” cuts “Yer Blues” and “I’m So Tired.”
“It felt like the Holy Grail,” she stated. “This is where the Beatles recorded. And we’re going to go in there where they made all of these majestic, classic, amazing songs?”
Abbey Highway was the concept of her manager-husband, Tom Overby, and so they blocked out a small period of time earlier than a British tour earlier this 12 months. Her Beatles fan producer, Ray Kennedy, stated he believed Williams was the primary main artist to make use of the London studio to remake the band’s work.
And, sure, it was intimidating. Fortuitously, it was a contemporary, working studio and didn’t really feel like working in a museum. One quirk was the management room was on a unique flooring than the place the musicians had been, and Williams repeatedly climbed the steps to listen to playbacks. “The engineers all looked at me, like, ‘what are you doing here,’” she stated.
Stripping down songs for the band to construct up once more revealed complexities they hadn’t anticipated. She significantly loved John Lennon’s “Yer Blues.” “The depth and the edginess and the grittiness of it type of stunned me,” she stated.
They caught to the fundamentals of her rock band’s sound. The orchestral prospers of “The Long and Winding Road,” for instance, are changed by an organ and pedal-steel guitar.
“My greatest fear was, I didn’t want to sound like a cover band doing Beatles songs,” she stated. “And everyone I’ve talked to about it said you don’t have to worry about that, that you achieved your goal of staying true to the songs while still sounding like you.”
Throughout the pandemic, Williams made six “Lu’s Jukebox” initiatives, themed in-studio live shows. They included Tom Petty and Bob Dylan songs, albums of Southern soul, ’60s nation classics and vacation music. She made a disc of Rolling Stones materials solely days earlier than having a stroke in November 2020.
Offered largely by mail order, they have not been accessible to stream, though a spokesperson stated they’re prone to be made accessible in that format sooner or later.
