Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams' fifth album, reached the shops on Mercury on June 30, 1998, recorded in Nashville and Canoga Park, California, with Williams co-producing and Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris dropping in as guests. It's the record where her long run of critics' darling albums turned into a real commercial breakthrough.

Rock, blues, country and folk all bleed together here, the guitars dusty and ringing, and Williams sings like every word cost her something, her voice cracked and drawling and utterly unhurried. The title track, "Right in Time", "Joy" and the Grammy-nominated "Can't Let Go" are the roadmarks. Critics fell over themselves: it topped the Pazz & Jop critics' poll as the best album of 1998, and it took the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. It spent over five months on the Billboard 200, became her first gold record, and remains her best seller, with 872,000 copies sold in the US as of October 2014.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.