LUCINDA WILLIAMS’ BIG INTERVIEW (NEVER MIND SHE'S ONLY 5'5")

LUCINDA WILLIAMS’ BIG INTERVIEW (NEVER MIND SHE'S ONLY 5'5")

On surviving a stroke, collaborating with her soulmate, and missing Tom Petty

Jaan Uhelszki

Lucinda Williams is one of the most celebrated songwriters of her generation—named by Time in 2001 as “America’s Best Songwriter, ” ranked by CMT as one of the 40 Greatest Women of Country Music, and included in Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time list.

She’s received an honorary doctorate of music from the Berklee College of Music, she was inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame, and her 1998 breakthrough album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. This year she was elected as a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.

But despite all these accolades, honors, and love from her peers—Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa made an appearance on two of the tracks off 2023’s Stones From a Rock n Roll Heart, as did Margo Price, Angel Olsen, and Tommy Stinson—you’d be hard-pressed to convince Lucinda Gayl Williams that she is any different from the rest of us. You even see flashes of self-doubt at times, the kind of impulse that makes her strive harder, write better, always try for more—and makes friends and fans protective of her. “Emmylou Harris is always giving me advice.” (When she’s not praising her, famously saying Lucinda “could sing the chrome off a tailpipe!”)

When Heartbreaker guitarist Mike Campbell asked her to appear on a track for his new album Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits, she demurred and all but refused until he convinced her. “Lucinda was doing my interview show with me [The Breakdown on Sirius], and at the end of it I asked her, ‘Would you be interested in maybe singing on a song for my new record?’ She was so shy about it. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m not good at that. I don’t know if I could do it,’ she told me. I begged her. And I begged her some more. She finally said yes. She went in there and she worked hard. It really felt like she needed the confidence that we believed that she was doing it good, but she really surpassed my expectations, and she brought that song to a whole other level.” It went so well that they decided to tour together this fall, in what they’re calling the Alone & Together Tour: Lucinda Williams and Mike Campbell and the Dirty Knobs.

“Excuse my French,” continues Campbell, “she’s a tough bitch. [That song] ‘I changed the locks’! You know, she can be that person, like ‘Don’t fuck with me.’ She’s both things. She’s a hurt little girl that you think needs help, and probably doesn’t, and she also has this don’t-mess-with-me biker chick thing."

That’s part of the anomaly and the charm of Williams. Tough but tremulous, a biker chick with messy rock ’n’ roll hair and too much eye makeup; she’s a study in contradictions, but somehow it all comes together in both her art and her demeanor. A demeanor that is so accessible and open that fans come up to her all the time like she’s an actress on a

reality show and corner her in Whole Foods and tell her about their own romantic conflagrations, explaining how songs like “Metal Firecracker” and “Changed the Locks” saved their lives and gave them courage to get rid of bad men and extricate themselves from abusive relationships.

But then there is also something about Williams that is not like the rest of us. Despite the talk about online shopping, lucky numbers, and bass players, there’s a no-nonsense quality and a shrewd intelligence that is never at rest. “I’m always writing a song in my head,” she admits.

It’s what makes her a three-time Grammy winner and a beloved American icon. But strip away the protective layers and she’s Bob Dylan in a blonde wig, Richard Hell with better poetry, and Neil Young, but emotionally more dangerous. According to Elvis Costello: Keith Richards in a feminine form.

A wounded dreamer, a romantic adventurist in thick black eyeliner that rings her long-distance eyes. At 71, after a debilitating stroke in November 2020, she was back performing by May 2021, at a COVIDdelayed wedding of a friend, and then two weeks later at a tribute for ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons. By October 2021 she was writing new songs—along with her husband, Tom Overby (the first time she’s collaborated, ever), releasing 2023’s Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart, almost a companion piece to her memoir Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You—with its songs of reflection, endurance, long friendship, and the bittersweet awareness of time slipping by (along with the people she loves). She can no longer play guitar after the stroke—her left side was partially paralyzed—but strangely, her singing has gotten better, her voice deeper and more nuanced, her pacing more considered. You can almost hear her thinking while she sings.

“They say that sometimes happens after a stroke. When part of the brain is injured, another part takes over. People have been telling me since my stroke, 'Your voice has never sounded better,”’ Williams says. At work on her next album, and about to tour with Campbell in the fall, she confides to CREEM about soulmates, how she doesn’t want Chrissie Hynde mad at her, and why she’ll never get over the loss of her friend Tom Petty.

When you started writing songs and singing, did you feel you had some mission? A purpose? Yeah. But I wasn’t sure how to verbalize it or what it was consciously, but I just knew that was something I was supposed to be doing. My heroes were people like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. I grew up in the ’60s and started playing guitar and all that back then. Music was tied in with change and rebellion and, like, art could make a difference. It was all about getting the message across and changing the world and using your art to change the world.

Well, then, did you have a premonition about the way your life was going to go?

I always knew what I wanted to do. In 1965,1 decided then that I wanted to do this. I always knew that I had something, and there was always something propelling me forward. I was 12 in 1965, and I loved Peter, Paul and Mary, and Joan Baez, with her regal air and almost stoic beauty. They [both] would wear shifts. It was almost like an Audrey Hepburn thing, only they were singing folk songs. I thought, “I want to do that too.’’

You could have gone the other way like other girls at that time, seen the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and said, “I want to meet Paul!”

I actually identified more with a certain Beatle, probably, [than wanting to be a Beatle’s girlfriend]. I identified with male artists like Bob Dylan. I discovered Dylan that same year. That was a very pivotal year for me; ’65 was when I first heard Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited. A student of my dad’s brought it over to the house. My mother turned me on to Joan Baez because she was a musician and she was really into a more bohemian lifestyle, had studied piano and studied music for years and years. [My parents] weren’t living together anymore at the time, but I would go and visit her. She was into Leonard Cohen and Joan Baez.

You’ve had a long, storied, successful career. Looking back, what don’t they tell you about enduring as an artist, or maybe the question is, what don’t they tell you about aging as an artist?

It’s the kind of thing that I assume all people think about. Everybody deals with getting older in their personal lives, so even connected with the music world it’s pretty much the same thing. But the truth is: You’re on your own. Nobody prepares you for it, and there aren’t really any rules to speak of.

But haven’t you always felt on your own? You’ve said you’ve always felt different, an outsider.

Yeah, pretty much. Wait, you mean as an artist, or just as a person?

Both. I think that they’re connected. I mean who you are as a person is who you are as an artist. I don’t think you can ever separate the two.

That’s important to see that. It’s true.

Very few artists have such an intimate relationship with their audience like you do. So maybe the question is, can you separate the art from the artist? In short: Are you the same on stage as you are off stage?

I’m the same. I think going back to my performances and my fans and everything, I think it’s probably my approachability is what most surprises people. I’ve heard of them saying things about how surprised they were that I was so approachable and open and friendly to the people who come see me play. And I am. I’ve always been that way, and I’ll always be that way. It just comes naturally to me, nobody told me to do that. I just talk with them after the show, like if they want something autographed or they want to take a picture and because they’ve been standing out there waiting to get in, and sometimes in the rain.

You don’t know how unusual that is. There are only a few who are nice. I love Chrissie Hynde, but Chrissie Hynde can be a handful. It depends on how sane I feel when I interview her, whether that bothers me or not.

I love her too, and I have loved her and tried to figure her out for years and years. Because we’re friends at this point, you’d think I have. Nope. I figure anybody who has my phone number and I have his or her phone number is basically a friend. If I can text them at any given hour of the day or night, that’s a friend. And I have that with her. She’s like an older sister. Or an older brother. She’s so tough. And rough. But don’t put that in here. I don’t want her to be mad at me. [Laughs] Have you read her book?

I think that’s cute and I want to put that in there. No, I haven’t read it yet.

I read it and I loved it, I thought it was great. She told me she decided to be nice for once, in the book. She said, “I didn’t want to go to the dark side. I decided to be nice this time.”

At what point did you know you really made it? Oh God, it was probably a culmination of things. Going to the Whole Foods Market and having someone who works there come up and say, “Hi, I don’t want to bother you, but I just wanted to tell you how much your music means to me.” And that sort of thing. And that would happen. It would happen more and more, and I started to realize, wow, more people know who I am than I realized. Then, like, all the interviews that I’d be asked to do with different magazines like this one. I was a huge fan of CREEM magazine back in the day.

What do you think your greatest strength is? My greatest what?

Strength. Like what do you do better than anyone, what’s your superpower?

Oh. Wow, that’s kind of a difficult question. I ve never been asked that before, I don’t think. This might be kind of an unusual answer, but compassion. I think I got it from my father. And he wrote a great poem called “Compassion” that I turned into a song, and I recorded it.

Do you have any rituals to conjure a song? Or do the songs show up all the time?

They just kind of flow in. I don’t want to sound spacey or woo-woo or anything, but that’s how it happens.

But you are a little woo-woo, and you know it makes you more understandable. I like that about you.

Really?

Yes.

Well, I don’t want people to think I’m just kind of this, oh, the moon and the stars and the sun, uh, yes, wow.

I get it. Okay, what is the best compliment you’ve ever received?

I was doing a show recently and a man in the audience yelled out, “You’re the best songwriter since Hank Williams!” I was just, wow, I said thank you and I just felt humbled.

Didn’t your dad once tell you it’s no accident that you were born the same month that Hank Williams died, in the same year?

Yeah, he told me that pretty early on. The same year and month that I was born. Not the same day. But before I was born. I was born on January 16, 1953. [Hank Williams died January 1, 1953.] And before you ask, no, we weren’t related.

So you come by that woo-woo thing naturally, huh?

Stop it.

Can you talk a little about your creative process?

How to write songs? You just dig into your subconscious. That’s what I do. I see myself as a vessel, and I just let it come through me. When I write, I go into a certain kind of place where I just see what happens and see how it flows. Mine sort of goes in stages where initially there is that flow thing, and I get inspiration and ideas in some of the lyrics, and then I have to sit and work on it. That’s part of the craft of being an artist, and I don’t know how to explain it all. But a lot of it is just kind of allowing yourself to be open for it, whatever it is, to the art or whatever, the muse to flow through. But then there’s a part of your rational, logical brain that has to take that and decipher it and put it all together. I mean, it’s so hard to verbalize. It’s hard to take something that’s so cerebral and put it into words. Car Wheels, that was one of those times that I would wake up in that half-awake, half-dream state and think of a line. And with this sort of line or image in my head, I would get up and go write it down.

Do you usually dream your songs?

Yeah, I do dream songs, and I never can remember the songs I dream. But I know they’re in there and I know they’ll come out.

You used to say you always write better songs when you’re miserable. I don’t feel that’s true anymore.

I can’t write when I’m real miserable. I mean, when I’m real miserable I don’t want to do a damn thing except sit in front of the TV and channel-surf. Or go shopping. And they’re both drugs, so when people are miserable they want to take drugs. They want to do something that’s a drug. Eat, watch TV, shop, whatever.

But you do seem happier—for a long time, actually—since you met your husband, Tom

Overby.

My life is divided into before Tom and after Tom. He’s an exception to all the rules. He’s actually my antitheses. He’s the only man I could ever be with for the rest of my life, because he is just so grounded, and he doesn’t overreact. That’s not to say that he doesn’t get grouchy and have his bad days, but we don’t belittle each other. We just don’t go there.

In an interview you did with Katie Crutchfield from Waxahatchee, you called him your soulmate. Did you know that right at the very first? Pretty close to the beginning of when we were together. I mean, I’m sure you’ve probably experienced that. You know, it’s just one of those invisible woo-woo things again.

Now you’re just toying with me with that woo-woo stuff. After your stroke, you and Tom collaborated on some of the songs that became Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart. Was this the first time you wrote together? Yeah.

Were you surprised that he had it in him? Like were you surprised how good he was?

I was. I was very surprised. He was real shy about it. Turns out he had been interested in creative writing for a long time. And he enjoyed it and he was pretty good at it. Which I wasn’t aware of, but anyway I'd be working on a song and he would come up and say, “I just wanted to show you these lines I just wrote down and you don’t have to use them but I just want you to see.” And at first I thought, “Oh, no, what if I don’t like it? That’s going to open up a whole problem. ” But I would read them and they were pretty good. And then over time it just kind of built into a working creative arrangement. Like he would give me lyrics and sometimes I would have something started and he would add to it, or sometimes he’d give me something and I would start from scratch with what he’d given me and arrange the lyrics and write the melody and make it into a song.

Will you work collaboratively on your next album?

Yeah, we’ve already started. We’ve got some songs that were started before that we’re going to look at and try to finish, and we both, we’re coproducers. And we don’t always agree on everything.

What did you learn about yourself after you had your stroke?

The part that stands out is the prevailing inner strength. I am stronger than I thought I was. People mention that a lot to me. They come see me play, and they’ll send me notes or emails and messages of stuff and say how inspiring I am that I got back out there. I didn’t really consciously set out to prove something, but it just kinda came naturally, I guess. Tom kept booking shows and we did rehearsals and

all of that. I mean, life just went on. It never really occurred to me to stop. I’m glad I didn’t.

I always thought you and Tom Petty were the link between the common man and woman and like the rock gods on Mount Olympus.

That’s how I felt about him. I felt that we had, I felt a connection in that way with him and his music and everything.

I so love “Stolen Moments,” the song that you wrote about Petty on Stories From a Rock n

Roll Heart. Like a ghost in your mind, he just shows up in these little scenarios: at a stoplight in Los Angeles, out of the window of a plane... He had such a big heart, a deep heart. He asked me to go out on the road with him in the late ’90s, and his fans didn’t really know who I was and everything. It’s the usual sort of classic opening up for the big headlining star thing. The fans weren’t really interested in me, and Tom realized that. He knew what was going on because he’d been there, and that’s one of the things I grew to love about him. He was very compassionate. He had that ability. And so one night early on, there was an event that occurred that left me just loving him even more. I was getting ready to walk out on stage to the microphone on one of those early dates when I was opening for him [in 1999], and Tom came out on stage, which was really unusual. He normally wouldn’t have done that, but he walked with me to the microphone and proceeded to introduce me to his audience, and said, “You need to pay attention to this artist because she’s really good and I want you to focus and give her your undivided attention.” Something like that. And I was just amazed, but that’s who he was. He never lost that. He never lost that part of him.

“IT NEVER REALLY OCCURRED TO ME TO STOP, I'M GLAD I DIDN'T.” -WILLIAMS, ON RECOVERING FROM HER 2020 STROKE

“I ALWAYS CRY WHEN I'M WRITING A GOOD SONG.”

You were on tour with him on that last-ever tour in 2017?

Yeah. Another amazing part of the story was that Tom asked me to open his very last shows he did at the Hollywood Bowl. Somebody’s got a beautiful photograph of the two of us standing backstage, smiling. Both of us are smiling with our arms around each other like buddies.

Two beautiful blondes from the South.

Yeah. When we opened those shows, we didn’t know they were going to be the last shows. But you know, two or three days later he was gone.

Did you suspect anything was wrong?

Nobody did.

Heartbreaker drummer Steve Ferrone played drums on a lot of tracks on your last album, and you appear on “Hell or High Water” on Heartbreaker guitarist Mike Campbell’s upcoming album Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits too. So you’re still kind of in that Petty universe.

Yes, I know, and I love Mike. He’s got a home studio at his place in L.A., and it wasn’t too far from our house in Studio City. So we went over there and I got to spend some time with him and sang on the song that he’d written and recorded. I thought it was going to be too high to sing and I wouldn’t be able to reach the notes, and he said, “Yes, you can. Come on. Just give it a try.’’ And sure enough I gave it a try and it worked. I was listening to him on his part in the song and his voice and I said to him real quietly, “I can hear Tom." He turned to me and said just as quietly, “This isn’t about him.” So then I felt terrible for saying that, but I just realized, I gotta be sensitive about their relationship. I was there to see tears in Mike’s eyes when we went to the memorial for Tom Petty, and Mike came up and I could tell he’d been crying. It was so heavy and intense. I’m still mourning the death of Tom Petty. I mean, I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it. It just really hit me hard.

This is what surprised me about you, that when I went to your house you were so neat. There

was a place for everything and everything was in its place. I remember you had trail mix in little packages, and when I dropped a few raisins on the counter, you scooped them up right from under me.

I know. Yeah. I probably got that from my father, a little bit from my mother. I’m sorry.

That always stuck with me. I remember you had a lot of Day of the Dead stuff on your walls.

I collect Day of the Dead stuff, and I collect folk art. A lot of folk art, and Santeria stuff. The Catholic voodoo stuff. Bleeding hearts and weird stuff. When I first started traveling around, I would collect salt and pepper shakers, but then I had trouble figuring out a way to display them at home. And therein lies the challenge with collecting things: You have to have a place to put them.

And you move around a lot.

Yeah. I’ve moved around a lot.

I was surprised when you moved back to Nashville. Does that make you feel more Southern?

No, I’ve always been steeped in my Southernness, and I love being Southern, and I’m proud of being Southern. It completely defines me.

What’s home for you? Is there any place that you feel safe in?

I feel good here right now. I mean, that’s why I’m here. Wherever I feel good is where I’m going to be. I have a real good support group of friends here. I've just always kind of moved to the place that felt right at the time, and always had an instinctive feeling for where that was.

When you look in the mirror what do you see? Myself but older. I like to tell people how old I am. I don’t care, because then their jaws drop and they go, “Oh my God, you’re not...” So then that just feeds my ego. My dad always said, “The alternative to getting old is?”

Dying?

Right. He also used to say, if I complained about stuff in my career, “Look, you could be working at Walmart."

What can break your heart?

Seeing a really distraught homeless person on the street.

What heals you?

My music is very healing when I get up and play. And I don’t think I want to sometimes. I’ll be out at a club and hearing some friends, and then oftentimes at the end of the night it’ll be one of those situations where people get up and do a song or whatever. You know, I’ll be sort of in a lonely mood, and I’ll be thinking, “Oh, I don’t really want to." And then I’ll get up and sing, and I’ll remember why I did this in the first place. So definitely, yeah, my music.

Is it more healing to write or is it more healing to perform?

Both are healing. I get great satisfaction when I’ve written a song, when I’ve completed a song. And I always cry. I always cry when I'm writing a good song. I write songs on the kitchen table, which probably has a lot to do with being a waitress when I was young. When I’m writing a song, I always know that I’ve got a good song, that I’ve connected into the center, the spiritual core of the song, and it’s connected with the core of my being and everything. Like I’ve found that spot, the G-spot of the song, as it were. And I cry. And then I know that, okay, I have a new song born. Even if it’s not completely finished, that doesn’t matter. That’s all just in the craft part of it. I’m talking about the soul and essence of the song that is born, and then I might spend some time cleaning it up and fixing it up, and adding another verse or whatever, or not.

What kind of people are you attracted to?

I’m really drawn to brilliance, and that’s the thing. Yeah, that’s what really turns me on at the end of the day, is humor and brilliance. It used to be bass players.

Do you have a motto you say?

I don’t usually say it to other people because some of the mottos I like are so connected with these kinda showy stereotypes, like, “Let go, let God."

I say that one too. What’s wrong with it?

Nothing. I mean, we all need to have something to cling to. When it gets to the point where we feel like we’re drowning and miserable, it’s okay to “let go, let God.” I can’t figure it all out right now, today.

I asked Dolly Parton once what hers was and she told me, “God’s radiant light shines through me.” And I’m not really religious, but I started saying it when I’m on planes and it really calms me down.

Bless her heart. Well, that’s how I feel when I say mine. It helps me let go and just throw myself open to the powers of whatever the universe is going to do. It’ll be figured out, and sure enough it usually is figured out at some point. Maybe not right then, but like a year later sometimes it’ll happen and you go, “Oh, right, okay.”