At 62 years old Lucinda Williams’ career has hit a high note. Her most recent album Down Where the Spirit meets the Bone recently won Americana Album of the Year, she’s recorded two albums in less than 24 months, and she’s touring the world.
“I think I’m an anomaly because of the age I am – my career is on a pretty fast roll right now,” she says on the phone from her home in LA. “I am definitely more successful than I have ever been.”
After close to four decades in music, she’s now also taken the reins of the commercial side of her art. She recently formed her own recording label, Highway 20, ended her contract with her publishing company Warner/Chappell, and appointed her husband as manager. “Well, he manages me when he can!” says the feisty songwriter in her thick southern drawl.
Lucinda and her band, which includes Stuart Mathis of The Wallflowers, her long-time bass player David Sutton and drummer Jonathan Norton, will play a show at Vector Arena on December 4. The large space will be transformed into an intimate theatre venue. It’s been three years since Lucinda graced our shores.
“I’m really looking forward to coming over there – it is such a beautiful country and the band is really excited about it. We just got off the road a few weeks ago and we have all been enjoying it; we are like a family.”
The songwriter, who in the past has gained a reputation as a perfectionist with long gaps between albums, has clearly hit her stride. She recorded much of her upcoming album The Ghosts of Highway 20 at the same time as Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone.
On stage at the Americana Music Honors and Awards Show in Nashville earlier this year.
The upcoming album is named after the highway that runs through the towns of Lucinda’s childhood in the southern states of America, and the album includes a song written about her father Miller Williams, who died in January this year, titled If My Love Could Kill.
Miller, a well-respected poet, was a poignant influence in Lucinda’s life, and his death from Alzheimer’s disease was a major loss – one she dealt with through songwriting.
“I’m saying in that song, ‘If my love could kill, I would kill this monster that has come in and taken you from me.’” It is just one of the tracks in his honour.
The second, Dust, is inspired by one of his poems of the same name. “It’s a short, succinct poem that says, ‘Sometimes the sadness is so deep the sun seems black and you couldn’t cry if you wanted to, and even your thoughts are dust.’”
Lucinda and her two siblings were raised by Miller. Her mother had severe mental illness, and while she remained part of the family, her father took charge of raising the children. “It was all agreeable. She was smart, she was brilliant and she was always still part of the family, but we stayed with Dad, which was highly unusual and somewhat controversial in those days.”
Lucinda’s creative bond with Miller started early. “I started writing poems and little stories, as soon as I was old enough to write. The most important thing he taught me about songwriting was ‘Don’t ever censor yourself, be brave and have the strength to be able to write about anything you want to write about – don’t hold back.’”
For years she ran her lyrics past him before they made it to the recording studio. “The last album I did that with was Essence [released in 2001]. I asked him if he had any comments and he said, ‘No, I think this is the closest to perfection that you’ve ever come.’ I said, ’Does that mean I have graduated?’ and he laughed and said, ‘Yeah’.
“I am glad I graduated before I lost him. Now I am on my own,” she says.
Emotionally, however, she’s not alone. Lucinda’s husband of six years, music executive Tom Overby, knows exactly what she is going through, having lost his father just months before. “My dad died in January this year and Tom’s dad died in November before that of a similar thing. It is just the worst disease; I am hoping they will find a cure for it.”
In September 2009, Lucinda married Tom onstage, with Miller performing the ceremony. It was a nod to Hank Williams, who also married publicly in New Orleans in the early 1950s. The singer, who has documented her tumultuous relationship history in albums such as West (2007), says Tom has provided a stable force in her life and is the right man for her – a man she wishes she’d met in time to have children with.
“By the time I got in a situation with the right person – Tom – it was biologically too late. But whenever I say to him, ‘I wish we had a baby,’ he goes, ‘Honey, I am your baby.’”
Performing with Elvis Costello in 2001.
The legendary songwriter who has toured with the likes of Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and recorded with Elvis Costello and Steve Earle is impressed with the state of country music in 2015.
“When I say country, I think of Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson and Hank Williams – older stuff. Now you have a new generation who are blending rock with that early country, which they have an appreciation for. That is good, they are carrying the torch.
“There is a guy called Jamie Johnston – he is one of my favourites. If you put his album on and you didn’t know it was a younger guy, you would think it was from the 60s or 70s – he has this really cool voice and he is in his 30s. It is really heartening.
“There’s a lot of that in Nashville right now. When I was there in the 80s, it was so much more conservative. There is still the mainstream country machine there, but that doesn’t dominate the city as much as it used to. It is amazing how much it has grown, in a good way. It is much more cosmopolitan, and there is a new woman mayor, who is really liberal.”
Lucinda and Tom are now considering a move away from the busy streets of LA. “We have been spending a lot of time in Nashville and thinking of making a move there because it is so much less stressful [than LA]. A lot of our friends have moved to either Austin or Nashville and that’s the most important thing to me – where my friends are.”
It was in Austin that Lucinda ‘cut her teeth’ in music between 1974 and 1984. “There was a great songwriter scene there and I had a place to go and play my songs in front of an audience. I have always had an instinct for the right place at the right time.”
She moved to Mississippi in 1978 to record her first album, Ramblin’, followed by Happy Woman Blues in 1980. But it was in 1988 after moving to LA, being signed to Rough Trade Records and releasing self-titled album Lucinda Williams, that her career was elevated.
“The first time I was able to make a living from my music was sometime in my mid-30s, when I got that deal with Rough Trade Records and toured Europe. That’s what got the ball rolling, but I had been playing in bars and writing songs for a good 15 years before that.”
What kept her going? “The love of doing it and also the support of other songwriters.”
In an industry where the perils of addiction lie dangerously close and many don’t make 62, Lucinda says it is “common sense” that got her through. “I have dabbled in things, as probably most of us did, but I always had that little angel on my shoulder and devil on the other shoulder that kept me from going too far one way. I wasn’t ever exposed to the really dark drugs like heroin. I had a healthy fear of that kind of thing.
“I started out in the 60s when it was more about raising your consciousness. I didn’t have any desire to be all downed out. I was more into smoking pot, psychedelics and trying to find God so, you know, I did my share of mushroom and LSD up to a point, but that was in the late/mid 1970s. It has been a long time since. I don’t even smoke pot any more – it makes me paranoid because it is too strong – and I quit drinking hard liquor because that made me too drunk. So now I just drink red wine – and I never got into cigarettes.”
She says while some things have changed, the most important things have stayed the same. “I haven’t really changed that much since I was a kid. Part of me still has that sense of wonder – that’s what my dad used to call it. He told me one time, ‘Never lose your sense of wonder, always try and stay in touch with that part of yourself.’ It is sometimes hard to do, but you know that’s what art is – you can touch that part of yourself, through your art.”
Lucinda Williams plays Vector Arena in Auckland with support from The Warratahs on December 4. For tickets, go to ticketmaster.co.nz
Words by: Nicola Russell
