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Lucinda Williams performs at the Across The Great Divide benefit concert in Los Angeles, Calif., on Oct. 19, 2018.Jesse Grant/Getty Images

For Lucinda Williams, 1992’s Sweet Old World was a difficult album to make, at a chaotic point in her career. Slotted between her critically well-received eponymous LP in 1988 and her southern-music classic and commercial breakthrough Car Wheels on a Gravel Road a decade later, Sweet Old World is a melancholy disc devoted to themes of longing and loss. The title ballad addresses suicide, and every time she sings it now on stage, Williams asks herself if she wants to go back to that place.

So what did Williams do last year for Sweet Old World’s 25th anniversary? She recorded the whole thing all over again, complete with a slightly altered title, This Sweet Old World. This is the woman who sang on her 2016 album Ghosts of Highway 20, “You make me cry. Why don’t you die? Go away, bitter memory.” And now she’s picking at scabs. What would possess an artist to revisit a sore spot?

“With the Sweet Old World album, the songs we do live have grown so much,” says Williams, speaking from her home in Los Angeles, on a break from a 20th-anniversary tour of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road that brings her to Toronto on Nov. 13 and 14. “The band I have now is different. My voice is different. We just wanted to go in and see what we could do.”

Williams is not alone. Paul Simon’s latest record, In the Blue Light, features 10 songs from his solo catalogue recast in a jazzy light (if not a blue one). St. Vincent’s new MassEducation is a vocal-and-piano version of 2017’s Masseduction. And Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Polaris Prize-winning Power in the Blood from 2015 includes new considerations of old songs, including a radically modernized take on 1964’s It’s My Way.

There’s no one explanation as to why artists recut albums and songs. Sometimes the reasons are commercial (often having to do with ownership rights); other times the motivations are artistic. In the liner notes to In the Blue Light, Simon explained that he chose to reimagine the songs he thought were “almost right, or were odd enough as to be overlooked the first time around.”

It’s a contentious subject, though, messing with memories and the Mona Lisa. When nineties arena rocker band Def Leppard began rerecording its catalogue material a few years ago, frontman Joe Elliott cheekily referred to the carbon-copy cuts of Pour Some Sugar on Me and Rock of Ages as “forgeries.” Def Leppard was feuding with record label Universal Music Group, which owned the rights to the classic recordings. The band owns the new versions, to do with what they choose, with a bigger cut of the licensing fees going to them when the “forgery” songs are sold for use in films, commercials or video games.

There are those who feel original albums and iconic songs should not be remixed (the process of rebalancing the original components of the recording), let alone rerecorded. The debate involves those who might feel they have an emotional or professional ownership stake in the original music.

“I think of an album as a snapshot of a moment in time,” says Gurf Morlix, an early Williams collaborating partner who produced the original Sweet Old World. “The way I see it, the producer and artist enter into a pact to make a great album. As far as Sweet Old World goes, I haven’t heard the new version. I question Lucinda’s motives in redoing it, but maybe she had a good reason.”

Calling it her “stepchild album,” Williams feels Sweet Old World never got enough love when it was first released. “It kind of fell between the cracks. We just wanted to make what we have sound better."

Colin Linden is a Juno-winning Nashville-based musician and producer who has worked with Williams. He’s against duplicating music, but has no problem with recastings. “The songs on Sweet Old World are great, and she continues to develop as an artist,” he says. “In some ways, the new album revalidates the power of the songs.”

Of the same mind is folk-music icon Sainte-Marie. “I think of a song like a Shakespeare play: different cast in different cities in different years. You can't kill a good song.”

You can kill a golden goose, though. Some artists, especially legacy acts, risk alienating fans (or at least confusing them) with remakes. “People can accomplish that with live recordings,” says the Band’s Robbie Robertson, speaking about rebooting old material. “Going into the studio, that’s tough to me. I would have trouble with copying stuff that I think is carved in stone.”

Canada’s Loverboy re-recorded its hits for its 2012 album Rock ’n’ Roll Revival. The version of Working for the Weekend is faithful to the cowbell-intro original but easily discernible from it. “It’s our song, we can do whatever we want,” says guitarist Paul Dean of Loverboy, set to perform at this month’s Grey Cup Festival in Edmonton. “But I’ve never heard from a fan of ours having any issues with our re-recordings or the different live versions we do.”

Every song needs a second chance, then. And if a stone-cold nostalgia fiend did have a problem with remade music, it’s not like the new songs are replacing the old ones. Sweet Old World from 1992 is on Williams’s Spotify page right along with the 2017 update. “They’re not supposed to be compared,” the Grammy-winning songwriter says. “The new recording is a rebirth, not a remake. We just wanted to get it right.”

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