Arts & Entertainment

Persevering Songstress Lucinda Williams Returns To The Cap

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November 6, 2024

By W.B. King–

When The Hudson Independent caught up with the multi-Grammy-winning singer and songwriter Lucinda Williams by phone from her home in Nashville, she joyfully reflected on her latest recording effort—paying homage to musical heroes, The Beatles.

“The idea of recording at Abbey Road, recording Beatles songs at Abbey Road, it just seemed like a cool idea, so we were just crazy enough to try to pull it off,” Williams shared of the kismet experience she and her band undertook while gigging in London earlier this year. “You know, it’s kind of scary. We didn’t want to sound like a cover band.”

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The seventh release in her “Lu’s Jukebox series,” Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road, features 12 choice tracks by the Liverpool troubadours. The album, slated for an early December release, will include classic tracks like “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Get Back” and “Something.”

When asked if it was challenging selecting what songs to include from the Fab Four’s impressive 188 original song catalog, she said with an exasperated laugh, “I know, tell me about it.” Similar to how she approached singing songs since age 12, she revisited the music, trying to make sense of it as only she could.

“The response has been really good, really positive, and people have been saying, ‘We stayed true to the original song, while it still sounds like me.’ We used a lot of the same guitar riffs that they did,” she shared, adding that past tributes to the pandemic-inspired “Lu” series features music by Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and The Rolling Stones, among others. “We managed to pull it off, somehow.”

The process of picking what Beatles songs to feature was largely trial and error. While Williams loves the entire catalog, she said not all songs jived with her vocal register. “A lot of them are more complicated than they seem on the surface. At first, I thought, ‘Oh, this is gonna be easy—they’re Beatle songs, what could be easier?’ But a lot of them ended up being quite a bit more complex than I anticipated.”

Among challenging tracks was “I’m So Tired,” from The White Album (1968). Over the phone, Williams sang multiple iterations of her vocal approach to theoretically understanding the melodic underpinnings of the opening line of the tune—John Lennon’s phrasing initially threw her for a loop.

“The very first line, it’s this weird, minor thing that it does, and I kept over singing it. It wouldn’t work, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it,” Williams shared. “He doesn’t jump up that that far on that first line. The note barely moves and once I figured that out, then I was able to do it right…It actually sounds like he’s tired.”

A Sweetheart

Over the course of her celebrated career, which began with the first of her 15 studio albums, Ramblin’ on My Mind (1979), Williams has worked with artists like Bonnie Raitt, David Byrne, Yo La Tengo, Jason Isbell, Robert Plant, Margo Price, Rosanne Cash, Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris, among countless others.

It wasn’t until 2017, however, that Williams, a self-proclaimed “Beatles fanatic,” actually met one of the original mop tops—a group that provided the soundtrack to her early life (she was 11 when the Beatles first performed on Ed Sullivan in 1964). She was asked to celebrate Ringo Starr’s annual “Peace and Love” birthday celebration in front of the Capitol Records Building in Los Angeles. Among celebrants was Joe Walsh, David Lynch, Jim Keltner, Nils Lofgren, Matt Sorum and Edgar Winter.

“He invites all these luminaries, all his pals and buddies, to come and sit and jam on the temporary stage for his birthday, and I got invited to one of those. That’s why I got to meet him and everything, and he is just a sweetheart,” Williams offered, adding that she was too “shy” to perform. “The real honor of it was just to go and be there and meet him.”

Among other bands that caught William’s ear when she was a teenager in the 1960s were The Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, The Doors and Cream. She recently heard a hit tune by the latter group on TV and happily reminisced.

“It still sounded great—didn’t sound dated or anything. It still sounded very contemporary and fresh, and I realized how great the lyrics were,” she said. “Jack Bruce was so great. I love his voice.”

Not Your Typical Career Trajectory

By the time Williams was 18, she and her family had moved 12 times, which is among countless and heartfelt reflections in her skillfully penned memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You (2023), which landed on The New York Times bestsellers list.

“A couple of years ago, I was in a bar in New York and an older gentlemen came up to me and asked me what I was working on. I said this book. He’d had something to do with the music business. He told me, ‘Don’t write about your childhood. Nobody wants to read about that. Just write about your music. Just pick a part of your career to write about,’” Williams wrote.

“But my childhood informs so many of my songs. Some listeners hear these memories and feelings in my songs. One woman came up to me after a show at the Dakota in Minneapolis and asked, ‘Did you have a rough childhood?’ I nodded my head as I was making my way backstage. ‘I thought so,” she said.”

Indeed, her childhood was challenging. So poor, her mom would often borrow bread from neighbors and Williams slept in a dresser drawer opposed to a crib. By the mid-1960s, she and her siblings witness their parents’ divorce. Her mother, an amateur pianist, suffered from mental health and alcohol abuse issues.

“Her maternal instincts or maternal abilities were taken from her by her mental illness. We were close until she passed away in 2004, but after a certain point I didn’t depend on her for anything. I learned at a very early age that I wouldn’t be getting from my mother what most kids get from their mothers, stability and warmth and reliability and support,” Williams wrote, adding that she reveled in her mother’s capacity for reading, interest in psychotherapy and introducing her to artists like Judy Garland, Ray Charles, Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen.

Williams’ father was a gregarious, progressive thinker. A social drinker who favored gin and tonics with a twist of lime, he was a literature professor and poet who gained custody of the children—never admonishing his ex-wife, he simply said, “It’s not her fault. She’s not well.” In 1996, Miller Williams, who penned over 25 books and was a professor emeritus of literature at the University of Arkansas, was chosen to read a poem at the second inauguration of President Bill Clinton.

“My father was first a scientist and then a poet—not your typical career trajectory—and always scrambling around for teaching jobs,” Williams wrote, noting that both her grandfathers were ministers. “He didn’t get a permanent teaching job until I was eighteen.”

A lifelong fighter of injustice in all forms, one of her father’s closest friends was George Haley whose brother, Alex, wrote Roots: The Saga of an American Family.

“When I say, ‘I’m a southerner,’ many people think, ‘That must mean you’re racist, you’re this, you’re that.’ There are all these stereotypes associated with being southern, which is a whole problem in and of itself. I think that’s why my dad instilled in me, ‘We are southern, and we have to fight the people who think that all southerners are racists, all southerners are hicks, all southerners are stupid.’ That’s how I was raised. That’s my South,” Williams noted.

A Rock and Roll Heart

Noting that writing a book is a “different beast altogether” from songwriting, Williams told The Hudson Independent that she referenced other memoirs written by peers like Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless: My Life as a Pretender (2015), Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (2016) by Carly Simon and Broken Horses: A Memoir (2021) by Brandi Carlile.

“It was quite an undertaking for me because I never done anything like that before. I know how to write songs,” she said, adding that it took a couple of years to author the book because life tends to get in the way of such pursuits. “I know what to do and what not to do and all of that [when writing songs], but I didn’t have any kind of template to go by When I sat down to write that book.”

In a certain respect, living a transient life as a child prepared Williams for a gypsy-like occupation. “I probably got it in my blood because I do like to move around a little…always have one foot out the door wherever I am,” she shared. “I’m always someplace else.”

Williams’ lifelong musical journey was sidelined in 2020, but it was not due to the tornado that ripped the roof from her Nashville home or for taking a well-deserved break after releasing her Grammy-nominated album, Good Souls Better Angels, or COVID-19—rather she was sidelined by a stroke. After diligent therapy and rehabilitation, she eventually bounced back, although she’s not a hundred percent, yet.

“I can’t play guitar right now, still I’m trying, but it’s just really hard on my left hand. It’s kind of feels like arthritis. Sometimes when I try to get my fingers to make the chords, it’ll hurt really bad, so I’m just not playing right now,” she said. “But I’m singing my ass off. I’m blessed in that regard because I know people who have had strokes, and they weren’t as lucky as I’ve been.”

Along with her memoir, Williams also released Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart (2023), which featured guest appearances by Bruce Springsteen and Margo Price and was produced by Ray Kennedy who also produced her groundbreaking album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998).

In celebration of sharing her songs and insights to a devoted fanbase for more than 45-plus years, Williams was honored in 2023 during the annual Americana Fest Pre-Grammy Salute at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. Among artists performing and cheering her on were Mumford & Sons, Dwight Yoakam and Molly Tuttle.

Joy

When Williams returns to The Capitol Theatre on November 9, she will be backed by her longstanding band, Doug Pettibone (guitar and pedal steel), Marc Ford (guitar), David Sutton (bass) and Butch Norton (drums; alternate Brady Blade).

“Thank God, I got them. They have by back in more ways than one,” said Williams who noted she is working on new material for an album. “It’s a great band. We have a good time together. We like traveling together, so it’s like a family.”

Williams said the band looks forward to returning to The Cap. The “original rock palace,” as billed, holds great esteem among many of her peers. “People seem to really like the venue a lot,” she said. “We’re looking forward to getting up there.”

Fans, she added, can expect to hear songs from her entire catalog, along with choice covers like Neil Young’s “Rocking in the Free World,” among others. “I try to pull one or two songs from each album and put them in a certain order, so they work well together. At the end, we usually end up doing a rousing rendition of my song, ‘Joy.’”

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