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Lucinda Williams, touring in support of her new double-CD album "Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone,'' wowed a sold-out Music Box Supper Club Friday night. from http://www.lucindawilliams.com/media.php

(Courtesy Lucinda Williams)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams has been compared in style and substance to Hank Williams Sr. (no relation), Bob Dylan and Keith Richards. She did all three of those legends proud Friday night at the Music Box Supper Club, where the capacity crowd almost stomped the floor out of the second story venue during her four rousing encores.

Williams, with her snare-drum-tight three-piece band, demonstrated why she is a time-tested triple threat of alt-country, folk-blues and hot rock. The Grammy award winner put on a show highlighting her song-writing skills, her sweetly unique vocal imperfections and powerful performing chops that made for a profoundly satisfying show.

Dressed in a leather jacket, leather pants and knee-high leather boots, Williams looked absolutely punk with her rats-nest, bleach-blonde coif. She brings disheveled to a proud new level.

Early in the set, she played "Drunken Angel" a tribute to her late friend Blaze Foley who died after being shot, as she told the audience during an argument that had nothing to do with him.

Known as "the poet of loss," Williams can write about heartache, heartbreak and life's down-and-outers like nobody's business.

"What would we do without beautiful losers," she asked the crowd citing three songs about male friends who had come to early ends. "We need those bad boys in our lives," she said before launching into another tribute to a lost friend who succumbed to a bad liver on the song called "Lake Charles."

Williams' father, Miller Williams, an accomplished poet and academic, provided the lyrics for the moving song "Compassion." Her songs touched frequently on the spiritual including a number called "Protection" in which the chorus includes the line; "I need protection from the enemy of love."

For an artist who writes so vividly and powerfully about love, loss and life, Williams seemed shy talking ever so briefly and almost inaudibly with the audience between numbers.

The song of the evening was the haunting "When I Look at the World," which begins as a litany of lifelong disappointment and rejection. But she comes back in the chorus with "But when I look at the world, in all its glory. When I look at the world, it's a different story." It was a brilliant, gut-wrenching ode to the duality of existence and the possibilities of redemption.

Her two-hour set concluded with four powerful encores for the adoring, sometimes rowdy audience. The band performed, the gospel stomper, "Get Right with God," the funky country, "Hot Blood" and concluded with Neil Young's "Rocking in the Free World." The rafters literally shook with that one.

Williams came out smiling for her final bow with a glass of red wine in hand.

"Just wanted y'all to know my management company is called "Hello Cleveland," she said smiling to her cheering fans.