Lucinda Williams is not going down without a fight
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"It was all very biblical," says Lucinda Williams of the series of events that dominated her 2020. First came the tornado that damaged her Nashville home, followed not long after by the COVID-19 lockdowns that ground much of America to a halt. Then, that November, the alt-country legend behind touchstones like 1998's revered Car Wheels on a Gravel Road had a stroke, which affects her ability to play guitar to this day.
But as the title of her upcoming album, Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart, suggests, there's a fighting spirit in Williams that won't give up. A theme of "don't count me out, I'm not done yet" runs strongly through the record. "My New York Comeback," "Never Gonna Fade Away," "Last Call for the Truth," and "Let's Get the Band Back Together" all take it on fairly directly, while even the melancholy "Jukebox" (which tackles the LP's other major theme of loneliness) ends with an image of Williams as the sole patron at last call, the one who stuck it out until closing time.
"There was that feeling that you're fighting against something, the whole pandemic thing," Williams says, explaining how it came to inform so much of the project. "So that was definitely in the air, that sense that you have to be strong and fight against this negative force. And so that came through in some of the songs."
"And your stroke," pipes in her husband and manager Tom Overby.
"Right. Oh, yeah," she replies, as if underlining her refusal to accept defeat. "And my stroke that I had."
Danny Clinch Lucinda Williams
Thanks to prompt treatment at Vanderbilt Medical Center and physical therapy and rehab follow-ups, Williams says she's doing well, something supported by the fact that she played more concerts in 2022 than she did in any single year since 2017. Her 2023 tour schedule is similarly packed. "I'm recovering. It's a slow process, but I'm getting there," she says.
But there is one downstream effect of the stroke that forced a substantial change in the way she plies her craft: It turned a songwriter who has primarily worked solo over the course of four decades into someone who now operates as a team — with Overby, road manager Travis Stephens, and singer-songwriter Jesse Malin in varying combinations — out of necessity.
"I can't play guitar right now," says Williams. "That made a big difference as far as songwriting to me. Actually, that was one of the reasons I fell into collaborating — because I wasn't playing. That was one way of being able to work on songs, if I had somebody else who was able to play and work on the music with me a little bit. But I expect that to come back at some point, just like everything else has. Because I couldn't even walk at first, and now I can walk, and I can do things I wasn't doing before. So I'm trying to think positively about it."
Collaboration isn't the only new approach Williams tries out on Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart, which boasts appearances from Bruce Springsteen, Patti Scialfa, Margo Price, Buddy Miller, Tommy Stinson, and Angel Olsen. "Where the Song Will Find Me" features a string arrangement, which offers a dimension the singer hadn't previously explored. "We wanted to break some new ground somewhere," Williams says. "You like to feel like every time you make an album, you're not just making the same thing over again. So that makes me feel good — that it kind of stood out as something new and different."
Danny Clinch Lucinda Williams
That's important to a musician who's been as prolific as Williams has during the second half of her career. The elapsed time between her 1979 debut, Ramblin' on My Mind, and 2001's Grammy-winning Essence was 22 years, the same amount of time between Essence and Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart. Yet she's made twice as many albums during the latter period, practically in defiance of the typical trend of more established artists losing their creative urgency (if not necessarily their creative power) as they grow less young. As for why she's become so much more productive later in her career, Williams has an explanation.
"I'm a freak," she says with a laugh. "I'm an anomaly. I've been out touring even though I can't play guitar, got my band backing me up, and I go out and sing. And people are saying that my voice is sounding better than it did before my stroke: 'How is that possible?'"
"And that's a big part of it," Overby adds. "She is singing great in the studio. She actually has gone from despising the studio to loving being in the studio now."
Williams has been so productive, in fact, that she has nearly completed her next album before Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart has even been released, something that would have seemed preposterous to fans in the 1980s and '90s, who were forced to wait an agonizing four, six, or even eight years between releases.
"Basically, the Rock n Roll Heart album is part one of two. We've got another record almost done that we're going to finish," says Overby, who expects it to come out in 2024. "There's three songs we thought were gonna be the centerpiece of [Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart ]. But they kind of didn't fit with this group of songs. So we got three real corkers just sitting there ready to go already."
But first, there's Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart, on which Williams, bloodied but unbowed, pushes through the loneliness of the pandemic, and life in general, and scrabbles out a rousing and sometimes raucous affirmation that she's still here and she's not going down without a fight. Asked if she considers herself a rock & roller, Williams doesn't hesitate.
"Yeah, I do," she says. "Definitely. Even when I was playing acoustic guitar by myself, that was more because it was convenient to play. I didn't always have a band. But I always had ideas in my mind for rock & roll songs, and my attitude was always rock & roll. I became a singer-songwriter sort of by default."
Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart is out June 30.
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