West is the eighth studio album by American singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, released on February 13, 2007, by Lost Highway Records. The album debuted at No. 14 on the Billboard 200, selling about 57,000 copies that week.[1] According to Nielsen SoundScan, the album had sold 250,000 copies in the United States by October 2008.[2]
The track "Are You Alright?" was featured during the closing scenes of an episode of House ("Fetal Position"), which first aired April 3, 2007.[3] It also appeared in the fourth episode of the HBO series True Detective, which first aired February 9, 2014.[4] The track "Rescue" was featured on a season one episode of Brothers and Sisters (episode 18, first aired April 8, 2007).
West was met with critical acclaim. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 69, based on 28 reviews.[8]AllMusic remarked "Williams is nothing if not a purely confessional songwriter. She continually walks in the shadowlands to bring out what is both most personal yet universal in her work, to communicate to listeners directly and without compromise", and concluded that the album "will no doubt attract more than a few new fans, and will give old ones, if they are open enough, a recording to relish".[9]
The Village Voice critic Robert Christgau said Williams "affects authenticity as shamelessly as her role model, Bob Dylan, but with respect to all the other noble old pros deploying blues and country readymades, the craftiness of Williams' vocals, meaning their unnaturalness, secures their vitality. She doesn't fake spontaneity--she honors it as one of the constellation of life virtues she hopes her songs evoke and subsume."[15]Rolling Stone ranked the album at No. 18 on their list of the Top 50 Albums of 2007,[18] while the track "Are You Alright?" was ranked at No. 34 on their list of the 100 Best Songs of 2007.[19]
