I’m very excited. I got an email the other day advertising a pre-order sale of the new Lucinda Williams album, Blessed. It’s due out on March 1.

This will be Williams’ fifth album in ten years, which is pretty impressive for a woman who put out only four albums in the 20 years prior to that.

Around the turn of the millennium, she shook off the perfectionism that made her spend 6 years on Car Wheels On a Gravel Road and started churning out records that were rougher around the edges.

And that was a good thing. While none of her albums since Car Wheels has been its equal, they have all been wonderful in their own right — brilliant, emotional and messy.

Essence was the album that kicked off her current streak back in 2001. It’s a mostly quiet and somber affair with a couple of exceptions. The first is ‘Get Right With God,’ which I featured on the blog last December.

And the second is the title song, ‘Essence.’ This is a hard-boiled, grungy blues song that treats drugs as a metaphor for lust, or maybe it treats lust as a metaphor for drugs. It’s sexy and scary and it’s one of the many reasons I’m excited as hell about a new Lucinda Williams album at the end of the month.