Photo: Lucinda Williams | By Tom Lanham, Paste Magazine | Three years ago, as the pandemic tightened its stranglehold on artists everywhere, alt-country firebrand Lucinda Williams fiercely fought free of its constricting coils with possibly her angriest album ever, Good Souls Better Angels, featuring scathing screeds like the Trump-skewering “Man Without a Soul.” The gloves were off, the claws were out. She had finally had her fill of knucklehead truth deniers, and in a March 2020 interview swore she would never have a conversation with anyone ill- or uninformed again. She was already viewing Covid as a latter-day plague, she said. “Because it’s almost Biblical, isn’t it? And what’s next? Locusts?” And she explained her Good Souls songs thusly: “Remember back when there were political songs like “Ohio”? And it felt so good back then, to feel that feeling of ‘We’re all in this together.’ Otherwise, it’s just complacency.” And she couldn’t help it, she added. With two ardent Methodist minister grandfathers in the family, preaching was simply in her blood.
The multiple Grammy winner, now 70, was so full of venomous vitriol at the time—and so unwilling to suffer any fools gladly—in the interim, it was fun to imagine just how angry her next batch of songs, her 16th, would turn out to be. But the Good Souls followup, the new Stories from a Rock and Roll Heart, is nothing that neither she nor her fans could ever have predicted. Coupled with her just-published memoir Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, the material reveals a softer, more reflective side of the composer, who is—above all else—just grateful to be alive, after she suffered a debilitating stroke on November 17 of 2020. A blood clot on the right hemisphere of her brain severely impaired motor skills on the left side of her body; she was forced to re-learn in rehab the most basic of abilities, like walking and even strumming the guitar. It wasn’t until July of 2021 that she felt confident enough to go onstage again—as wheelchair-bound opening act for Jason Isbell at Denver’s Red Rocks—but the crowd’s overwhelming reaction brought her to her feet, as well, by set’s end.
Which is nothing compared to the huge rally of support Williams received in the studio while cutting Stories with her husband, manager, co-writer and producer Tom Overby. Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson chipped in on the sessions, as did Jesse Malin, Margo Price, Buddy Miller, Angel Olsen, and even Bruce Springsteen and his wife Patti Scialfa, who added vocals to two anthems, “New York Comeback” and “Rock ’N’ Roll heart.” Her longtime road manager Travis Stephens picked up any guitar-playing slack, Ray Kennedy signed back on as co-producer. And Williams, once fiercely protective of her solo songwriting, opened up her craft to co-composers like Malin, whose 2019 Sunset Kids effort that she and Overby had co-produced. Inspiration was where she found it—Tom Petty for the stomping “Stolen Moments,” the late Bob Stinson on “Hum’s Liquor,” somber reminiscences such as “Jukebox,” “Never Gonna Fade Away,” and “Let’s Get the Band Back Together,” and tougher grapplings with maturity, mortality in “Where the Song Finds Me” and “This is Not My Town.”
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Read the full, lengthy, article here:
https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/lucinda-williams/lucinda-williams-interview-stories
Photo: Lucinda Williams | https://www.facebook.com/LucindaWilliams/
Lucinda Williams Talks About Recovery, Reflection and Her Rock ‘N’ Roll Heart
