“Changed the Locks” by Lucinda Williams

Lucinda Williams put "Changed the Locks" on her self-titled third album in 1988 and sent it out as a single the following year, and it plays like a door being slammed and bolted twice. She wrote it alone and produced it with Gurf Morlix, with Dusty Wakeman co-producing and engineering.

Morlix is a one-man string band here, credited on acoustic, electric, lap steel, pedal steel and resonator guitars plus mandolin and bass, and he sings too. John Ciambotti also plays bass, with Doug Atwell's fiddle, Chris Gaffney's accordion, Skip Edwards' keyboard, John "Juke" Logan's harmonica and Steve Mugalian's washboard in the mix and Jim Lauderdale and Pat Quinn on backing vocals. One critic heard a woman pulling herself out from under abuse to stare down the person responsible, NPR called it a barn burner, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers covered it for the 1996 soundtrack to She's the One.

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