“Are You Alright?” by Lucinda Williams

"Are You Alright?" opened the book on West, Lucinda Williams's eighth album, as its first single in 2007, and it's a song she wrote alone. It rides a deep, lazy groove and keeps circling back to its title question, a plain-spoken check-in with someone who's gone, and that simplicity is the whole trick: it's about how much you can miss a former lover without saying anything fancy at all.

Robert Christgau, reviewing West for Rolling Stone, called it one of her greatest songs, and the magazine later placed it at No. 34 among the 100 best songs of 2007. Television heard it too: it turned up on House and The Sopranos that same spring, and years later on True Detective.

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