Lucinda Williams Is Too Cool To Be Forgotten

Lucinda Williams—the alternative country pioneer who has been churning out highly acclaimed, groundbreaking albums since 1979, won three Grammy Awards and received multiple lifetime achievement awards for her songwriting brilliance—picks up the phone just after the second ring while I’m trembling on the other line at the prospect of speaking with a legend whose hit songs have stuck with me since I first heard them in the back of my mother’s car at age eight. The warmth in her voice when she answers the phone grounds me instantly; a sense of comfort washes over, as if I’m speaking to an old friend.

Williams has been a famous musician for longer than I’ve been alive, yet she recalls what it was like to step out on stage before anyone knew her name. She looks back on that time in her career with an unexpected fondness—particularly the time she opened for Tom Petty back in the ‘80s. “[His audience] wasn’t paying that much attention, and then he went out on stage with me one time … and introduced me to his audience himself,” Williams recalls, adding “bless his heart,” in exactly the charming accent you’d expect. “This is a testament to how sweet he is,” she adds. Since that pivotal moment opening for Petty, Williams’ main goal on her journey of playing shows on the road hasn’t changed much. “The goal would be to introduce people to the songs from the new album that came out recently … and get more people excited about the music,” says Williams. I was curious if an artist like Williams gets sick of playing the same hits on stage for so many years, but she reveals to me that if there were any songs she ever got sick of playing live, she just wouldn’t play them. Her favorites to perform, though, are in line with what her crowds seem to embrace the most: “Blue,” “Lake Charles,” “Drunken Angel” and a cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” during which Williams enjoys getting audiences clapping and singing along.

As Williams’ songwriting has been revered for generations, earning her a BMI Troubadour Award back in 2022, I had to try to dig a bit into where those decades of inspiration come from. She cites the writings of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor as influences lingering since her teen years. “I just read everything that was out by her [O’Connor] … I fell in love with Southern Gothic writers,” says Williams. She goes on to explain how two photography books she found at a little shop in Nashville influenced her songwriting, one being Juke Joint by Birney Imes. “There was one photograph in his book that showed some kids at a pool table and on the wall behind them, it said, ‘Too cool to be forgotten’ … I didn’t know what that meant, but it spoke to me somehow and it ended up in that song,” says Williams of her song “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten.” She also mentions the book Appalachian Portraits by Shelby Lee Adams, whose intimate portraits of real, rural Appalachian families struck a chord for her. 

Williams’ approach to songwriting took a hard turn, against her will, over the last few years since the star suffered a stroke back in 2020. “I haven’t been able to play guitar since I had a stroke … That’s made it harder to write songs,” she explains. “I’ve still been doing it because I can make enough of a chord just to get a note and then I just create the melody in my head.” At this point in the songwriting process, Williams reaches for a device with the Voice Memos app and records whatever melody comes to mind, lest she forget. She’s nostalgic for “noodling around on [her] guitar,” but her ability to spontaneously conjure a hit melody using only her imagination is a testament to her genius. Williams adds that now, lyrics more often come first in the process, in the absence of her instrument. “It’s like a puzzle, kind of,” she says. Once she bares her soul on paper, the melody and arrangement follow, and the lyrics are altered to fit back into that tune. 

“Trying to take good care of myself and all of that helps me feel more balanced and optimistic, because I have to feel that way before I can really be creative.”

While Williams’ career post-stroke has challenged her approach to her craft, it’s also made self-care even more key to her longevity as an artist and performer. “These days I concentrate mainly on my recovery … I go four days a week to physical therapy and work with physical fitness trainers,” Williams tells me when I ask her how she manages to avoid burnout after so many years on the road and the stage. “That’s part of feeling better and if I feel better, I’m gonna feel more inspired,” she says. “It’s all connected.” Williams tells me that the “tortured artist” stereotype is a myth—one that she dispels through her lived experience as a legendary musician. “When I get to that point where I’m feeling tortured and horrible and down and … everything’s going wrong, the last thing I feel like doing is working on a song,” she discloses. “If you’re wallowing in hatred and self pity and disgust, it’s pretty hard to [write a song]. You gotta pull yourself out of the muck and mire,” she continues. “Trying to take good care of myself and all of that helps me feel more balanced and optimistic, because I have to feel that way before I can really be creative.” What a lesson to those who wear their suffering as a badge of honor.  

Williams’ hefty discography isn’t the only display of her brilliance in raw, vulnerable writing. Her tell-all memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, was released last spring. In some ways, the process wasn’t too different from what Williams had been doing for most of her life. “When I was younger, I kept a journal … so I was used to writing about my experiences, and the kind of songs I write are kind of journalistic anyway, you know … I was good at telling the stories behind the songs,” she explains. The biggest challenge in putting the book together, Williams admits, was the deadlines. Williams struggled with her perfectionism nagging at her to keep rewriting as deadlines approached, and she admits that she prefers writing songs, a process that puts her in charge. She comically thanks me for acknowledging the struggle of being a perfectionist stuck in a cycle of deadlines. Williams’ desire to pen a memoir was born of a fantasy of what that process might look like—“I had heard about writers and novelists tak[ing] a year off, you know, almost like a sabbatical [to] write the ‘Great American Novel,’ living in a little log cabin somewhere in Nevada … That was the fantasy I had in my head,” she confesses. “Come to find out that wasn’t the case,” she says with a warm chuckle. Though she casually chats about the process in jest, Williams’ memoir tells the ugliest and most tender truths of her journey—life-altering trauma and lighthearted anecdotes alike. She notes that the writing process was rife with trial and error. 

“I think it’s great any time people listen to music that’s rooted in folk and country and blues, because, you know, folk music was always called the people’s music when it started.”

I feel a sudden need to ask Ms. Williams what she thinks of country, bluegrass, folk and adjacent genres’ explosion in mainstream popularity over the last few years—perhaps it’s knowing that her seminal Grammy Award-winning album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road is often credited for popularizing the meshing of rock and country that’s so commonplace today (“that Americana genre, I guess now that’s what they call it,” says Williams). She humbly acknowledges her significant contribution to the genre and finds its current presence in pop culture ironic. “The very music you describe is what kept me from getting a record deal at first because they said my music fell on the cracks between country and rock,” Williams explains. “They had to figure out how to market it and there wasn’t a market for it yet.” She names a few current artists she enjoys—Margo Price (who’s opened for Williams before) and Jason Isbell (with whom she also toured, and whose documentary she tells me is a great watch)—and she seems to be thrilled that roots music is en vogue with a young, alternative crowd. “I think it’s great any time people listen to music that’s rooted in folk and country and blues, because, you know, folk music was always called the people’s music when it started—the whole point of it was to pass stories around,” Williams explains, spoken like someone who really has lived through the experiences that cultivate this sort of music and has spent their life creating and appreciating it. 

Lucinda Williams and her band are currently on the “Alone & Together Tour” with Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs. Catch their stop in Salt Lake City at The Eccles Theater on Tuesday, September 17. 

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