Lucinda Williams' 2CD

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With a new Lucinda Williams album expected this fall, her most rapturously acclaimed and best-selling album to date receives the expanded Deluxe Edition treatment. The two-CD "Car Wheels On A Gravel Road - Deluxe Edition" (Mercury/Lost Highway/UMe), released October 24, 2006, adds a pair of previously unreleased studio tracks plus an alternate version of "Still I Long For Your Kiss" heard in "The Horse Whisperer" and an entire previously unreleased 1998 live performance to a newly remastered edition of the singer-songwriter's most celebrated and beloved album.

Six years since her previous album, 1998's long-anticipated "Car Wheels On A Gravel Road" was worth the wait. The 13-song collection's passionate, sharply detailed accounts of love, loss and longing were matched by the deceptively laid-back intensity of Williams' performances and those of guest artists that included Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Charlie Sexton, Jim Lauderdale, Buddy Miller and the E Street Band's Roy Bittan. Topping many year-end critics polls and landing Williams her first gold record, the album also won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album, despite being her least folkish work. A masterwork of roots rock woven through with folk, honky-tonk country and blues, the album (her fifth) marked her artistic and commercial breakthrough after a near 20-year recording career.

Augmenting the original album on Disc One are two outtakes from the album's initial 1995 Austin sessions -- the Williams original "Out Of Touch" (which she would re-record for 2001's "Essence") and a stripped-down reading of the 1920s blues classic "Down The Big Road Blues" -- and the alternate "Still I Long For Your Kiss."

Disc Two captures a spirited live performance, recorded July 11, 1998 at Penn's Landing in Philadelphia for WXPN's "Live At The World Café" radio show. Featuring Williams' then-current touring band, the set encompasses nine numbers from "Car Wheels On A Gravel Road" (the title track, "Metal Firecracker, " "Right In Time, " "Drunken Angel, " "Greenville, " "Still I Long For Your Kiss, " "2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten, " "Can't Let Go" and "Changed The Locks") and four earlier favorites ("Pineola, " "Something About What Happens When We Talk, " "Joy" and "Hot Blood"). The concert as well as the Disc One bonus tracks have also been newly digitally remastered.

What was said of "Car Wheels On A Gravel Road" in 1998 is still true today: "In a world inundated with cookie-cutter, Lilith-ready wimps, " wrote Entertainment Weekly, "there's enough gravel on Williams' wheels to fill a West Texas dump truck."

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