This Sweet Old World

Brand new sealed double album housed in a gatefold cover.

Sweet Old World is the fourth studio album by American singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams. It was released on August 25, 1992.^[1]

Sweet Old World was voted the 11th best album of 1992 in The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of prominent music critics.^[8] Robert Christgau, the poll's creator, ranked it 6th on his own year-end list,^[9] later writing that the album was "gorgeous, flawless, brilliant [with] short-story details ('chess pieces,' 'dresses that zip up the side') packing a textural thrill akin to local color".^[10] In a contemporary review, Audio magazine said Sweet Old World proves Williams is "a riveting writer and performer whose apparent simplicity is merely the entranceway to a rewarding artist of depth",^[11] while Stereo Review wrote "She delivers her searing lines without artificial sentiment or extraneous embellishment, just a wrenching directness that nourishes the spirit and knows no detour to the heart."^[12]

In a retrospective review for The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), David McGee and Milo Miles later wrote Williams was a "damned determined artist" on Sweet Old World, in which the perspectives of her previous work--"adult, Southern, female, sensual but neurotic"--were stronger and more focused.^[6] AllMusic's Steve Huey said it was just as good as her 1988 self-titled album, calling it "a gorgeous, elegiac record that not only consolidates but expands Williams' ample talents."^[1] Like her self-titled album, Bill Friskics-Warren wrote in The Washington Post, Sweet Old World showcased Williams' "sharply drawn odes to desire and loss", sung with a "grainy drawl" and backed against a "lean, bluesy roots-rock" sound.^[13]

On April 28, 2017, Williams performed the album in its entirety at Minneapolis' First Avenue nightclub; the live recording will be released to commemorate Sweet Old World's 25th year anniversary in August.^[14]  Emmylou Harris covered the title song on her album Wrecking Ball.