After enduring hardships, Lucinda Williams hangs on to her hopefulness

DANNY CLINCH

LUCINDA WILLIAMS

Since 2020, hard-rocking three-time Grammy Award winner Lucinda Williams has experienced enough tumult to exhaust a less determined person — including a tornado, a stroke and the pandemic.

Despite these hurdles, she perseveres. A cutting-edge recording artist for more than four decades, the Louisiana native received high praise for the stunning songs of survival and reflection on her 2023 album, Stories From a Rock N Roll Heart (Highway 20 Records/Thirty Tigers), and plans a December release for her Lucinda Williams Sings the Beatles From Abbey Road album, which will be Vol. 7 in her Lu’s Jukebox series of live tributes.

In 2023, she also released a spellbinding book, “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir,” which is full of vivid images of her difficult childhood and journey in the music industry. Like her music, the memoir enmeshes us into her life, with evocative details that connect us to unfamiliar towns and characters.

Her memories and matter-of-fact delivery provide deep insights into her incomparable songs, always delivered through her sensual, compelling and raspy voice. Thoughtful and defiant, she is a formidable force, unafraid to call out social injustices.

Her upcoming tour will include shows at The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, Nov. 9; White Eagle Hall in Jersey City, Nov. 10; The McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, Nov. 22; The Ocean City Music Pier, Nov. 23; and benefit concerts for Jesse Malin (also featuring Jakob Dylan, Willie Nile, Butch Walker and others) at The Beacon Theatre in New York, Dec. 1-2.

I spoke with her from her home in Nashville, during a brief reprieve from her heavy touring schedule.

The memoir’s title is a line from “Metal Firecracker” (see video below) from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998). In the song, she sings:

Once we rode together in a metal firecracker
You told me I was your queen
You told me I was your biker
You told me I was everything
Once I was in your blood and you were obsessed with me
You wanted to paint my picture
You wanted to undress me
You wanted to see me in your future.

DANNY CLINCH

LUCINDA WILLIAMS

She described “Metal Firecracker” as “one of my favorite songs to sing. It’s an unrequited love song … It’s about someone I was trying to get involved with who was pulling away — one of these hot one minute, cold the next things. Back and forth, back and forth, which is usually enough to drive you out of your mind. He was in my band for a while. He came up with the term ‘metal firecracker.’ We were on the tour bus and I was wanting to take things a little further than he did.”

She asked him, “Where is this leading?”

“He said, ‘I think we should wait till we get off this metal firecracker before we get into anything serious,’ ” Williams said. “He meant the tour bus. We got off the metal firecracker and I’m thinking the tour ended and now things will develop and move into a more positive place. And, of course, it didn’t.”

And you were left vulnerable, having told him your secrets.

“Yeah, exactly,” she said.

Many of her songs are erotic and filled with awakening desire. Listen to the title track to 2001’s Essence, “Something About What Happens When We Talk” (from 1992’s Sweet Old World), “Right in Time” (from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road) or “Passionate Kisses” (from 1988’s Lucinda Williams). She even makes being alone sound enticing. In “Side of the Road” (from Lucinda Williams), she gently sings:

If only for a minute or two
I wanna see what it feels like to be without you
I wanna know the touch of my own skin
Against the sun, against the wind
I walked out in a field
The grass was high, it brushed against my legs
I just stood and looked out at the open space.

She acknowledged, in her memoir, that she has been labeled an erotic songwriter, adding, “I don’t disagree.”

LUCINDA WILLIAMS

Eroticism, she said, is cerebral and emotional, not just physical. “The brain is the real erogenous zone, at least for me, so I have to connect with somebody intellectually and almost spiritually in order to be attracted to them physically, and that rarely happens immediately … really honest, substantive conversation could be superhot … very often a good conversation is more memorable than fucking.”

In the gorgeous “Something About What Happens When We Talk” (see video below), her message is clear. She sings, “Conversation with you was like a drug/It wasn’t your face so much as it was your words … but all I regret now is I never kissed your mouth.”

I asked her about her attraction to a type of man that she describes as a “poet on a motorcycle” in her memoir.

“It was this kind of fantasy of the perfect man,” she said. “Really smart, but manly. Kind of tough. A motorcycle guy with a good brain who reads the New York Times book reviews … they had to have a good brain because otherwise I get bored.

“My dad even asked me one time, ‘Honey, I thought you wanted to meet someone like me.’ ‘I do, Dad,’ I said. ‘Then why do you go out with these rough-and-tumble motorcycle guys?’ he said.

“I did want to meet somebody like him, with his mind and intellect. I got pretty close with (her husband and manager) Tom (Overby). He doesn’t ride a motorcycle, but that’s okay. It’s more important that he’s really, really smart. He’s a voracious reader. I can be doing the New York Times crossword puzzle and ask him a question that I don’t know the answer to … and he’ll know it. I just love that.”

In her memoir, Williams references Southern Gothic poet Frank Stanford as a man that was the “epitome” of the deep-thinking roughneck. (He is best known for his 1977 epic poem “The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You”). He and Williams met in 1978 and their relationship lasted only about two months before his death at 29 years old. He killed himself “by shooting a handgun into his chest,” she said.

Williams’ haunting, cinematic 1992 song “Pineola” documents his suicide with raw, sparse lyrics. “Sometimes it takes a long time to get a song right,” she says. In the song, she shares feelings of shock and numbness when she learns of his death. singing “I could not speak a single word/No tears streamed down my face/I just sat there on the living room couch/Starin’ off into space.”

At his funeral, she is in a daze. “I think I must’ve picked up a handful of dust and let it fall over his grave,” she sings.

She writes in her book that “Bus to Baton Rouge” (from Essence) is one of her “most documentary songs.” It’s about her mother’s parents’ house in Baton Rouge.

Describing their home, she sings, “the company couch covered in plastic/Little books about being saved/The dining room table nobody ate at/And the piano that nobody played.”

She references her mother’s sexual abuse by her mother’s father and older brothers, singing:

The driveway was covered with tiny white seashells
A fig tree stood in the backyard
There are other things I remember as well
But to tell them would just be too hard.
Ghosts in the wind that blow through my life
Follow me wherever I go
I’ll never be free from these chains inside
Hidden deep down in my soul

The cover of Lucinda Wiliams’ memoir, “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You.”

Williams’ mother was diagnosed with manic depression and schizophrenic tendencies. Without the benefit of today’s medications, she could not avoid frequent hospital stays throughout Lucinda’s childhood.

When I asked Williams about songs that still move her during performances, she mentioned this one

” ‘Bus to Baton Rouge’ is about my mother’s family, which is a whole other story from my father’s family,” she says. “There’s more darkness there and confusion and misdirection. They didn’t have that openness and progressiveness — open hearts and open minds like my dad’s parents did. My mother’s mental illness is connected with her upbringing … My dad would always talk about that — she was a music major at Louisiana State University when she and my dad met. She wanted to go on and play music professionally. She never talked about it, but he would talk about it. He said she wasn’t supported to do that.”

Not only was she not supported, but she was abused as well.

“Right, and that’s what’s underlying it. It’s between the lines. I didn’t make it real obvious in that song.”

I heard that in your lyrics.

“Not everybody’s gonna see that,” she said. “You’re the first person who has ever mentioned that — no has ever picked up on that.”

Do you think your writing is strongest when you feel haunted by something or somebody?

“Yes, yes, yes, with a capital Y,” she said. “Whether it’s an old lover or something with my mother or with my childhood. That’s a great way of describing that. Haunting.”

It’s always there.

“Yes, it’s always there and you can’t get rid of it,” she said. “It’s almost like if I write about it, I’ve dealt with it and put it to bed.”

Is it therapeutic to write about it? “Yes, it’s my form of therapy.”

Well, you’ve helped people by sharing these experiences.

“Thank you, I love talking to someone like you because you get it,” she said. “I don’t have to try to stumble over words trying to explain it to you because you already understand.”

We talked about Joan Baez’s revelations about abuse that she shared in her 2023 documentary “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise” and with me in this NJArts.net interview.

“I read her book ‘Daybreak.’ I loved her back in the ’60s. When I was first learning how to play guitar and learning songs, she was one of the folksingers I looked up to. I wanted to be her.”

MILLER WILLIAMS

Lucinda’s late father, poet and professor Miller Williams, provided her with other influential guides from his literary world, including Flannery O’Connor. In this Arkansas PBS interview, he defined poetry as “the use of language to communicate more than the words seem to say, in a way that involves the reader or listener so that when the words have been read or heard, the reader or listener feels like a co-creator of that passage.”

“Wow, I haven’t seen that one,” she said.

Does that sound like what happens with your fans: co-creating with you?

“It very much does,” she said. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”

In her memoir, she discussed her mother’s mental illness in a steady, calm voice, like you would a physical illness.

“Addressing my mother’s mental illness as an illness was important to me … it was important to speak about it openly because there’s still so many taboos about mental illness,” she said. “People are still afraid to talk about it and seem to pull away when it’s mentioned. It’s still this dark, mysterious unknown thing that happens to people … I was trying to approach it just as if someone had cancer or diabetes.”

You did a great public service, sharing her struggles.

“Thank you,” she said. “I really, really appreciate you saying that, because that was my focal point.”

Williams has been surprised at times by the revelations she uncovers in her songs. When her father first heard her sing “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” he recognized that the song was about her childhood trauma. She hadn’t realized that.

There is a line in the song about her: “Child in the backseat, ’bout 4 or 5 years old/Lookin’ out the window/Little bit of dirt mixed with tears/Car wheels on a gravel road.”

Was it helpful when your father saw you in “Car Wheels”?

“Yes!” she said. “That was a strange and bittersweet reckoning. I had performed that song at a place in Nashville called The Bluebird and he was in the audience … he was backstage when I got off the stage. He came up to me and told me how sorry he was. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and looked at him like, ‘Huh?’ He said, ‘That new song you wrote — that was you in the back seat — a little bit of dirt mixed with some tears.’ It hit me like a sledgehammer. I had not consciously realized that I was writing about myself. It took him listening to it and recognizing me in the song before I realized it. At the same time, he felt the need to tell me he was sorry.”

What a beautiful moment. “It was so beautiful and bittersweet,” she said.

Lucinda Williams, in a vintage publicity photo.

Do you think you will write another book that continues where you left off?

“The idea of it is being tossed around,” she said. “I was just so relieved to be done with that one. It’s hard work. It’s emotionally draining and time-consuming. I wrote it all by hand because I can’t type — one of my regrets is that I never learned how to type.”

Williams picked up her first guitar at 12 and started writing at an even younger age. She remains passionate about writing and, in fact, conjured a new song shortly before our interview.

“I have this new song bouncing around in my head from earlier today,” she said. “I was in the bathroom. It usually happens when I first get up and my brain is in a certain space.”

An open space?

“Yeah, it seems to be like that,” she said. “I feel real creative at that moment when I’m first waking up. You’re just coming out of the dream state. You’re not fully awake. It’s just a really good creative time.”

What was the song about?

“About love — wow, how original,” she laughs. “It’s a refrain that came into my head. Sometimes it will be just one line that pops into my head. I get a melody and I start singing it. I’ll sit down and play with it or mess with it to see if anything happens.”

She recites the lyrics: “It was like, ‘You love me/You don’t love me all the way/You love me just enough to make me stay.’ Something like that. I was trying to get it to sound like an old soul song. Like Otis Redding.”

In “Where the Song Will Find Me” (see video below) from Stories, she sings about the moment when she first finds lines for a song.

“It feels great when the initial spark comes in,” she said, “but then it really feels better if I take the time to sit down with it and try to turn it into something, because a lot of times the sparks come in, and if I don’t pay attention to them and take the time to work with that idea, then I might lose it. I hate when that happens.”

The cover of Lucinda Williams’ album, “Stories From a Rock N Roll Heart.”

After her stroke, Williams changed her writing process, since she could no longer play guitar. Previously she would write lyrics, then play the guitar to come up with a melody, and then edit the lyrics. Now she relies on a team that includes Overby, New York troubadour Jesse Malin (who has been partially paralyzed since May 2023 from a spinal stroke) and Nashville guitarist-songwriter and tour manager Travis Stephens.

She started collaborating with Stephens “sitting around the kitchen table,” she said, adding “I’d have a few ideas floating around in my mind. He’d grab his guitar to accompany me while I sang this idea and it would grow from there.

” ‘Where the Song Can Find Me’ was largely written by Tom. He came up with the idea and the initial lyrics and gave them to me and I’d look at them and come up with the melody and maybe edit the lyrics.”

Both Williams’ grandfathers were preachers, and her father was a professor. She said the stage provides her with a different way to express her beliefs.

She added that her father, in his homemade autobiography for his children, wrote that the classroom was like his pulpit. “It’s great to have because I was able to draw on that when I wrote my book,” she said. “He made a correlation between his father preaching and him being a poet and trying to turn the world on to poetry. I think he saw it as almost a calling. Something that he was giving to people in the same way that his father would chant from the pulpit.

“His father wasn’t a preacher in the sense that most people think. He was very progressive. He would talk about current events and how war wasn’t necessarily the answer and the crumbling of society — topics that weren’t necessarily Bible-related. He might use a story from the Bible as a metaphor.”

Miller Williams read his poem “Of History and Hope” at Bill Clinton’s second presidential inauguration in 1997. In it, he encourages an examination of the past and expresses hope for the future. He writes: “We mean to be the people we meant to be, to keep on going where we meant to go.” (see video below).

“I was there,” says Lucinda “I was bursting with pride. I was asked to perform at the reception that includes the President and his wife. I went with my band and we performed.”

Are you hopeful about the upcoming election?

“There’s a part of me that’s hopeful and there’s another part of me that says, ‘Be realistic and get ready to be let down,’ ” she said. “I’ve been so let down in the past that I feel like it might not be okay to be hopeful. But I’m basically a hopeful person. I won’t allow myself to go through life not feeling hopeful.”

I think remaining hopeful is a good survival skill when things look bleak.

“I bet Joan Baez sounded more hopeful.”

Not so much, I said.

“She’s probably comparing it to the heyday of the ’60s when everything was about love and peace and bright colors and flowers,” Williams said. “I am hopeful underneath it all.”

The cover of Lucinda Williams’ “Good Souls Better Angels” album.

She wrote about Donald Trump’s character in 2020’s “Man Without a Soul” (from her Good Souls Better Angels album), declaring:

You are a man without truth
A man of greed, a man of hate
A man of envy and doubt
You’re a man without a soul …
There’s a darkness all around you to cover all your hiding
There’s no light in your eyes

I wondered if “This Is Not My Town” (from Stories) referred to the Trump Era.

“It was actually from an earlier song that I revised,” she said. “Initially, it was more of an unrequited love song. Then it morphed into a feeling (of being) an outsider, which was the general spirit of things during Trump’s time. We were divided a lot. I remember talking to my sister and finding out that my cousin was going to vote for Trump and discussing with my sister whether or not we should ever be connected with this person again. That’s how heavy it was. Finding out, ‘Oh my God, he’s going to vote for Trump,’ and it would be a person you were socially engaged with … It was a strange time.”

Well, we are back here again. “I know, I can’t believe it,” she said.

Tell me about your collaboration with Malin.

“Bless his heart — I just adore him,” she said. “I got introduced to him through Ryan Adams several years ago. They were close. Ryan had produced one of Jesse’s albums. They were both in New York and I was in and out of New York City a lot. So we crossed paths and got to be friends. Tom and Jesse and I would hang out when we got to New York. We were kind of like the Three Musketeers.”

You call him your spiritual advisor in your liner notes.

“Really? I forgot that — he kind of is like the guru of the streets.

“It was almost surreal when Jesse had his stroke not too long after mine. But his was even more serious because it was a spinal stroke. He had a lot more to combat when he was recovering. He didn’t know if he was going to be able to walk again. He said he couldn’t stand up onstage so he was going to sit down when he finally did start performing again. Then he said, ‘But I can’t sit down onstage — it’s rock ‘n’ roll. You don’t sit down when you’re playing rock ‘n’ roll.’ And I said, ‘Come on, Jesse, I’ve been doing it and you can do it, too. You can make it look cool.’ He did. He got over the hump.

“I saw a video clip of him when he’s using his walker and he’s dressed just like he’s usually dressed, with his rock ‘n’ roll cap, black leather jacket and jeans, with his sunglasses on. He’s walking through the East Village with his walker. I felt like he’s just taking the bull by the horns: Like he’s saying, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna walk with my walker where everybody can see, but I’m gonna look cool doing it.’ ”

LUCINDA WILLIAMS

I think the song “Never Gonna Fade Away” (from Stories) speaks to the perseverance that you both have shown.

“Yeah, I think he and I both have good survival skills, to use your expression,” she said. “I like that so I will use it.

“I started working with Jesse when he asked Tom and me to co-produce one of his albums (2019’s Sunset Kids) and asked me to work on his songs with him. They were already written. I’d spend some time editing. His songs might have 25 verses. He’s very prolific and he’d have these great songs with great melodies and ideas, but I’d have to ask him, ‘What are you trying to say? What’s the focal point?’ I’d trim the fat a little bit. I realized what a great songwriter he was … when I was able to delve into his own material. I was really impressed.”

Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa provided backing vocals on Stories songs “New York Comeback” and “Rock n Roll Heart.” Did Malin rope in Springsteen?

“He definitely did help rope Bruce in,” she said. “You’re the first person who picked up on that.

“We were working on one of the songs for the new album and Tom said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could have Bruce on this?’ and ‘What are the chances of tracking him down?’ Jesse, of course, popped up and said, ‘Leave it to me, let me see what I can do.’ Sure enough, he got ahold of Bruce and before we even got into the studio, Bruce’s wife Patti wrote a lovely email to Tom saying how great the songs were.”

That was so nice.

“I know, that was so sweet,” Williams said. “She wrote, ‘Nobody’s writing songs like that anymore.’ So you could tell there was an enthusiasm about it from their side. Both of them jumped in and added vocals. We didn’t suggest anything. We just left them to their own devices. I still get a thrill every time I hear Bruce’s voice jump out.

“I played with him one time at Shepherd’s Bush in London. He happened to be in town and came to check out the show. He ended up sitting in on a couple of songs. And Tom and I chatted with him and met him for dinner during his Devils & Dust Tour — one of his acoustic shows that were mind-blowingly good.

CRISTINA ARRIGONI

Jesse Malin and Bruce Springsteen.

“Our initial contact was so strong. There’s a connection between us. He feels it and I feel it. It’s a combination of things, probably. I think we have a lot in common as artists — being misunderstood by the industry.”

There are a lot of references to New York on Stories. In fact, the CD features a photo of Williams on a New York City terrace. “The photo shoot was with Danny Clinch,” said Williams. “I think he lives in New Jersey. He’s a phenomenal photographer. Over the years he’s worked with a lot of rock bands and gives photos a rock ‘n’ roll edge.”

I mentioned that the album’s “Stolen Moments” made me cry.

“That’s another one that Tom created the seed for,” she said. “It wasn’t about anyone in particular, initially, but we were grieving the loss Tom Petty during this period. When we were writing it, it hadn’t been too long since Tom had passed away. It was a heavy time. losing him.

“He had asked me to open some of the very last shows that he did at The Hollywood Bowl, which was a big deal to me and showed how supportive and wonderful a person he was. He was always helping out other artists. He remembered what it was like trying to gain recognition.”

She opened for him one weekend, and by the next Monday, he was gone. “It was absolutely devastating, so I decided to dedicate that song to him,” she said.

The album is dedicated to another fallen musician, Bob Stinson of The Replacements.

“His brother Tom Stinson contributed to the track ‘Hum’s Liquor,’ written for his brother,” Williams said. “Another Tom Overby idea. He was from Minneapolis so he knew all of the Replacements guys and was there during the formation of that great music scene. Tom was living in an apartment in downtown Minneapolis. He would look out of one of the windows in his apartment and could see Hum’s Liquor across the street. Every morning he would see Bob Stinson walking down the street to go into the liquor store at 9:45 am. The song sprang from that. (Stinson) was troubled and had a lot of demons to fight off.”

Is “Never Gonna Fade Away” (from Stories) about overcoming difficulties?

“When I first wrote it, the song was called ‘I Just Want to Fade Away,'” she said. “Tom insisted on changing it to ‘(I’m) Never Gonna Fade Away.’ … It’s just that feeling when everything is caving in on you and you can’t take it anymore. You just want to disappear and fade away. Go somewhere, be by yourself, and hide. Get away from people, or certain people.”

What made you change it? “Tom insisted on it every day, every minute, every hour.”

Was this his way of saying you two would get past adversity?

“Yeah, several of the songs were about surviving,” she said, naming “New York Comeback,” “Never Gonna Fade Away” and “Hum’s Liquor.” “It was an almost apocalyptic (time). We had just moved into this house in Nashville and a tornado blew through and took off the roof of the porch. COVID reared its ugly head and I had my stroke.”

The cover of Lucinda Williams’ self-titled 1988 album.

Was “Let’s Get the Band Back Together” about celebrating after COVID isolation ended?

“That’s exactly what it is. Another one of Tom’s ideas. When we play it live, the crowd really likes it. They can tap their feet and people sing along with it.”

Where does “Rock n Roll Heart” come from?

“It goes back to when I started playing music and was trying to get record deals,” she said. “People didn’t know how to describe my music or where I fit. I fell in the cracks between country and rock. I talk about that in the book a little. In the music business world, it became a running joke: What bin are you going to find my records in, in the record stores? Country? Rock? Folk? Pop? Tom was always insistent that I was not country. He was going to make sure people knew. ‘You’re rock ‘n’ roll, damn it.’

“But it’s also saying I can survive all that because I’ve got a rock ‘n’ roll heart. I’m a fighter.

“It also says in the song, ‘You don’t have to be a work of art,’ (meaning) you don’t have to be perfect.”

After listening to her catalog recently, I find it difficult to pick a few favorites. It is like asking myself to pick a favorite tree on a gorgeous fall day when the leaves turn beautiful shades of orange, yellow and red. They are all breathtaking.

For more about Williams, visit lucindawilliams.com.