Small but Mighty

Two nights ago in Jacksonville, at the Florida Theater, Lucinda Williams performed a few songs from her new album, "Essence." Those songs were unfamiliar to all but perhaps a few of the "small but mighty" four hundred who attended.

With the backing of a hot band, she toughed it through the first three songs from her Grammy winning 1998 album, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road." Memory kept bringing the words to the tip of her tongue in time to keep her place in the songs, but the thousands of empty seats in the beautiful Florida Theater clearly affected her like a phantom audience.

Lucinda looked out from the stage into the vast empty hall and asked the small audience in best seats up front, "Where is everybody?"

Evidently, her name was still unfamiliar in Jacksonville.

The four hundred experienced an empathetic performance by gifted professionals who were, to paraphrase one of her songs, too cool to overcompensate.

The grace under pressure thing, they had it in spades, Lucinda and her band.

"We are small but mighty," she smiled, with cheers echoing in the hall.

The songs from her new album are a little bit darker. One she didn't sing that night, Steal Your Love, is a definite hit in my book, in instant classic.

Go see her if you have a chance.