Today’s album is the first in my top ten 1992 records that I discovered well after the year it was released. Lucinda Williams simply wasn’t on my radar back then.

But she was very much on my radar a decade later, after I fell in love with Car Wheels On a Gravel Road and started gobbling up the rest of her catalog.

Sweet Old World is Williams’ fourth album, and a close cousin to the 1988 self-titled record that established her as a songwriting force. The songs are short and sweet, often romantic.

Several songs on this album center on the suicide of a close friend, and today’s SOTD (‘Little Angle, Little Brother’) is situated among them in a way that suggests the deceased party might have been Williams’ own brother. That’s not the case, but this song certainly has a melancholy air that invites the connection.

It would be six years before Williams released another album, the fussed-over masterpiece Car Wheels On a Gravel Road, after which she became much more prolific. But despite being lost a bit in that shuffle, Sweet Old World remains a highlight of her discography.