World Without Tears

World Without Tears was produced by Mark Howard and Williams for Lost Highway and released on April 8, 2003 (the US CD date appears as April 22 in one MusicBrainz entry). It was made in a studio set up inside a 1920s Los Angeles mansion, not named; Howard had engineered U2, Dylan's Time Out of Mind and Emmylou Harris's Wrecking Ball, and uDiscover calls the result essentially a live album. Williams sang and played acoustic and electric guitars, with Doug Pettibone on electric guitars, harmonies and mandolin, Taras Prodaniuk on bass and harmonies and Jim Christie on drums, Wurlitzer and vox organ. It runs 59:53.

It debuted at 18 on the Billboard 200 with 54,000 copies in its first week, sold about 415,000 in the US by 2008, and reached 48 in the UK. Metacritic scored it 87. Spin's Robert Levine heard a return to the painful sensuality of the specific, Entertainment Weekly's Will Hermes called it profoundly carnal, and the Los Angeles Times's Robert Hilburn a rock 'n' roll workout. It earned 2004 Grammy nominations for Best Contemporary Folk Album and, for "Righteously", Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. The vinyl adds "Buick Blues" and a Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan song, "Hang Down Your Head".