Lil’ Ed Made His First Album in Ten Years

Lil’ Ed Williams and the Blues Imperials at the Ottawa Bluesfest in 2008.

Ten years is a long gap between albums for a working blues band. What makes Slideways unusual is that when Lil’ Ed Williams finally went back into a Chicago studio, the three men standing behind him were the same three who had been there for the previous thirty.

The record came out on 27 February through Alligator Records. It is the tenth album the Blues Imperials have made for the label, and it arrives with the band close to forty years old — an institutional lifespan that almost no group in any genre manages with its personnel intact.

A Band That Did Not Change

James “Pookie” Young plays bass and is Williams’s half-brother. Mike Garrett plays guitar. Kelly Littleton plays drums. Blues Blast Magazine notes all three have been in the band for more than thirty years, with Ben Levin added on piano and organ across eight of the thirteen tracks.

That continuity is the album’s actual subject, whatever the songs are about. A rhythm section of thirty years’ standing does not need arrangements explained to it, and the record was made accordingly: recorded, mixed and mastered in Chicago, captured live, with what Blues Blast describes as no studio tricks — the band plugged in and turned it loose.

Bruce Iglauer, who founded Alligator and has now overseen ten Lil’ Ed records, produced it with Williams. Iglauer has said it is his favourite of the ten, which from a label head about his longest-running act might be politeness, except that the specific quality he would be responding to is audible: this is a band playing, not a band being assembled.

The Slide Guitar Is Still the Whole Point

Williams learned from his uncle, the Chicago slide player J.B. Hutto, and he has never been coy about the debt. “JB taught me everything I know,” he told Chicago Blues Guide. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without him.”

The album title is not decoration. Thirteen tracks of jumps and shuffles are each marked by the same slide playing — a style that is more rhythmic than melodic, closer to a horn section than to the long sustained notes most listeners associate with the technique. It is the West Side Chicago approach, and Williams is one of the last players carrying it in an unbroken line from the man who taught him.

What keeps it from being a museum exercise is that the playing is genuinely unpredictable. Reviewers reached for the same word repeatedly: exuberant, thrilling, an explosion. On a record this consistent in tempo and instrumentation, the variation has to come from the lead line, and it does.

Twelve Originals and One Cover

Twelve of the thirteen songs are written or co-written by Williams — an unusually high proportion for a traditional Chicago blues record, where the standard practice leans on the catalogue. The exception is “Homeless Blues”, a Willie “Longtime” Smith song.

The originals are funnier than the form usually allows. “The Flirt In The Car Wash Skirt” is an up-tempo number with Levin’s piano pushing it along, and it lands differently once you know Williams spent years buffing cars at the Red Carpet Car Wash before the band could pay him. “One Foot On The Brake, One On The Gas” and “Make A Pocket For Your Grief” work the same seam of plain-language image-making.

Elsewhere the writing sits in the tradition without apology. “Bad All By Myself” opens the album with a man coming home late with whiskey on his breath and a partner leaving on a Greyhound. “Wayward Women” is a warning song. “Crazy Love Affair” carries a vintage Hound Dog Taylor feel, and “13th Street and Trouble” leans on Elmore James.

The Piano Player Is the Only New Voice

Ben Levin appears on eight of the thirteen tracks, splitting his contributions between piano and organ, and he is the closest thing the record has to a guest. In a band this settled, adding one keyboard player is a considerable intervention, and the album uses him selectively rather than across the board.

The logic is audible on the up-tempo tracks. A four-piece built around slide guitar has a hole in the middle of its frequency range whenever the lead line goes high, and piano fills exactly that gap without competing for the top. On the five tracks he sits out, the band reverts to the leaner configuration it has played live for decades.

It is a small decision, but it is the kind that separates a produced record from a documented one. Iglauer and Williams could have put keys on everything and smoothed the album into consistency. Leaving nearly half of it bare preserves the difference between the songs that want support and the songs that do not.

What Ten Years Away Did Not Cost

A decade between records usually damages a band. Players take other work, the live show drifts, and the return album has to re-establish an identity. None of that happened here, largely because the Blues Imperials never stopped playing — the gap is a recording gap, not a working one, and the group toured through spring and summer 2026 behind the release.

The distinction matters more in blues than in most genres. This is music whose primary transmission has always been live and whose recordings are, at best, a good night captured. A band that has been gigging continuously for ten years without recording has not been dormant; it has been doing the main thing and skipping the documentation.

The band was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2024, which is the kind of honour that often precedes a retirement record. This is not one. Blues Rock Review and Blues Blast both read it as a late-career highlight that stands comparison with the nine albums before it.

It is a different answer to age than the one Buddy Guy gave on his Grammy-winning record, which brought in five generations of guests to make its case. Williams brought in nobody. The argument for continuity is made by the continuity itself.

Where This Sits in Chicago Blues Now

Alligator has spent five decades documenting this music, and the label’s 2026 release schedule alone ran through Tinsley Ellis in January, Lil’ Ed in February, Selwyn Birchwood in March and Chris O’Leary in July. That is a functioning ecosystem rather than a heritage operation, and it is one of the few left.

Within it, Williams occupies a specific and narrowing position. The players who learned directly from the generation that built the electric Chicago sound are nearly gone. A record made by one of them, with the same band, in the same city, played live to tape, is a document as much as it is an album.

That word carries a risk, because documents are things people respect rather than play. The defence here is the material: thirteen songs about car washes, wayward women, bad decisions and Greyhound buses are not archival objects. They are working songs written for rooms where people are drinking, and they behave like it.

The band’s first gig paid six dollars, split four ways at Big Duke’s Blue Flame. Forty years later the split is the same and the personnel are mostly the same. That is the story Slideways tells, and it tells it by simply being competent in a way that took thirty years to become possible.