Lucinda Williams Talks About Recovery, Reflection and Her Rock ‘N’ Roll Heart

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.”

But there’s still some serious socio-political fire in her furnace, Williams adds, pointing to her terse pedal-steel lament, “Last Call For the Truth.” “There’s always something to be pissed off about in this country, ya know?” She says. “But now I have bigger fish to fry.”

Paste: Where were you, exactly, on November 17, 2020? Were you angry, yelling at the TV like a lot of us when the stroke hit? What happened that precipitated that?

Williams: Yeah. I was watching TV. And when I first walked in the room, I didn’t know what was going on yet. And then somebody told me what was happening, but at first I thought, “Oh, they’re protesting something that Trump did, and they’re standing up and saying something about it.” So I thought it was a good thing at first, ya know? So anyway, I didn’t know all the details at first. Then I started watching it more closely, and reading about it, and to be honest I had mixed feelings about it. But it was just the protesters themselves—I didn’t realize that they were Trump supporters that he had kind of manipulated. I thought they were from the West, and that they weren’t, and they were protesting.

Paste: One minute, you’re yelling at the TV, and the next, you woke up in a hospital?

Williams: Well, when I had to go that day, the hospital day, it started out a normal day. But I just felt really tired and I had to lay down. Then Tom, my husband, Tom, came in and saw me laying down, and I was laying down on the floor actually, and he ended up on the phone with the doctor, and she said to call the ambulance—she recognized the symptoms, and thought it might be a stroke. So she told Tom to call the ambulance, which he did, and they came, the EMTs, and we told ‘em not to put the siren on, but they did anyway. But I was really lucky because the hospital that I went to is one of the best medical centers in the country—it’s Vanderbilt Medical Center—so they took really good care of me. And then, just a few days after I got in the hospital, they started me on rehab. They had a rehab unit in the hospital, so I had to start doing that every day, a little bit, with physical therapists and all, because I had to learn to walk again. I couldn’t even walk across the room without falling down. It’s really strange. It’s a brain thing—that’s what’s so surreal about it. I learned a lot about the human brain and how it affects the whole rest of the body and all, and my stroke was on the right side, so everything on the left side got affected—my left arm and hand.

Paste: How is everything now?

Williams: Everything’s good. I mean, I feel good, ya know? But my left arm and hand still aren’t completely recovered yet. But it’s my brain—if only they had something that they could stick in my brain or something to rewire everything.

Paste: How long were you in the hospital? And then when you went home, you continued with outpatient therapy?

Williams: Yeah. When I went home, then they came to the house and worked with me. I can’t remember how long I was in the hospital, but the therapy continued after I got home—they came over to the house once a week. But it lasted for several weeks, altogether. But now I have these hand exercises that I do, and I have a series of exercises, actually, that I need to be doing everyday, and they’re kind of simple, basic. Like, one of ’em is sitting in a chair, then standing up and sitting back down. You do a series of those, where you have to stand up without using any support, just your legs, so that helps. That works your core and your legs, and a set of those would be 10 or so, and you do three sets of 10 or 15 repetitions. All of that stuff helps. And they didn’t say anything about diet, but I was already a healthy eater before. But Western medicine doesn’t focus on that.

Paste: Did you explore any Eastern medicine?

Williams: Yeah. Over the years I have, not for my stroke, in particular, but over the years I’ve explored holistic medicine and all that. But when you’re having a stroke, you go to the nearest thing that you can find, ya know?

Paste: Music, of course was set aside for a while. But which came first? Writing your book or writing songs again?

Williams: I would say the songs first. We started going back in the studio and recording some stuff, and we started doing a few shows here and there. And I suppose I was kind of starting to work on the book a little at the same time, actually. But it’s hard to remember what came first in all that, because that’s something that’s still going on—I get confused about what day it is, what month it is and all that.

Paste: What’s your system for remembering?

Williams: Well, I’ve been doing okay as far as long-term memory stuff. And I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, a lot of press lately, and those have been going okay. Sometimes I have to ask Tom, When did we play wherever it was? Or something like that. Or what was the date that the book came out—that sort of thing.

Paste: What did you discover about yourself, your family during the writing process?

Williams: I think it made me miss my mother and my dad more, ya know? It made me realize how great they were while I was writing about them. Especially my dad—I just realized, “Wow! What a great person he was.” And my mother, too. They were both creative, and very open-minded and progressive thinkers. And my dad was funny—he had this really dry sense of humor, and my mother was funny, too, so they were fun to be around. So it’s just like anything—if you’re writing about it, it’s gonna take you back there. It’s kind of like writing in a journal, really—when you’re writing a book, you have to think about people reading it, so you have to just word things the right way so it reads well. That’s what I was trying to do.

Paste: You have to find your narrative voice. Which I’m sure was different from your songwriting voice.

Williams: Yeah. And in that regard, what I’ve learned in songwriting came in handy when I was writing the book, in describing things and just being able to put words together a certain way, so it came across on the written page.

Paste: What were some strange things you’d forgotten from your past?

Williams: There were a few things like that. This friend of mine who I went to high school with insisted that he remembered this story clearly, but when I heard it, I said, “Are you sure that happened?” And he said, “Oh, yeah!” And he said that when we were living in New Orleans, my dad let me have a party at our house and let me invite some friends over from high school, and this guy was there. And he said these thugs, these kids were coming down the street, and they started harassing him, and they were gonna beat him up. And he insisted that my dad came out on the front porch with a gun, and scared those kids away. And I said, “But we never had a gun around! That doesn’t sound like my dad!.” And he said, “Well, that’s what happened. Your dad saved my life!” And he swore up and down that that actually happened. But what kind of surprised me was how much I did remember. I was reading through an advance copy that we got yesterday or the day before, and I was actually amazed at some of the stuff that I had written that I remembered, and while I was reading, I thought, “This is pretty good! And wow, I wrote this! And I did this!”

Paste: I had no idea you lived in Chile.

Williams: Yeah! Santiago. That was an amazing experience—that was a big deal. It was back in 1963, and the terrain is just gorgeous, with these mountains in the background and very lush. And the people are just friendly, warm, and inviting, just beautiful people. And I discovered Chilean music when I was there, so it was a very creative place, and we met a lot of great artists. And my dad loved it, because there was such a thriving literary scene there. But he had a teaching job there. He had a grant, like a visiting professorship kind of thing, which ran out after a certain time, and he had to move to the next job. So we went back to Louisiana, where he was teaching at LSU in Baton Rouge and also in New Orleans, because in the States, he was teaching at different colleges, and the whole reason we moved so much was because he was following different jobs. So I was kind of like a military brat, except I was a writer’s brat. Or a professor’s brat.

Paste: Are you more aware of your own mortality now?

Williams: Oh, yeah. And stuff like that is always a wake-up call. I mean, I didn’t even know what a stroke was before I had one. And then I realized after a certain point that people didn’t know if I was gonna die or not, probably. And I kept wondering why, because I didn’t realize the seriousness of having a stroke until later, just as I learned more about it. I couldn’t tie my shoes! Stuff that you’d gotten used to doing all the time? It’s amazing, the toll it takes, ya know? But a blood clot is what it is, and when you think about that, it’s pretty scary. I had a blood clot in my frigging brain. So now I’m on blood thinners and all that, and they also found out something really weird—after they did a bunch of tests, they discovered that I’m apparently missing the gene that…because everybody gets blood clots, ya know? Fairly regularly—it’s the normal thing in the human body. But there’s a gene that most people have that breaks up the clot in your body, just automatically, a little guy in there who goes around with a hammer and breaks up the blood clots. But apparently, I’m missing that gene, missing the gene that breaks up the clot. Because they were trying to find out why it happened, and now that’s what I’m curious about—what leads to a stroke? Is it stress? What is it? But they don’t really know. So now I’ve got to find a good nutritionist and try to follow that road.

Paste: Hopefully, you had good insurance.

Williams: Yes. I had good insurance. And over the years, I’ve played a lot of benefits for musicians with no health insurance.

Paste: I just talked to Tommy Stinson last week, and he’s got a great new album out as the duo Cowboys in the Campfire. But he found time to pop up on your album, too.

Williams: Really? I don’t have a copy yet, and he’s supposed to come to town. I’m in Nashville, and he’s in New York, but he said he was gonna be in Nashville for a bit, so I’m looking forward to his visit.

Paste: And while we’re on a Replacements tangent, Tommy’s late brother Bob Stinson figures into your album, too, right? In “Hum’s Liquor”?

Williams: Yeah. And I read the Replacements book Trouble Boys, and it’s really good. And aptly titled. I’ve been collaborating a little on some of these songs, so this was one of the songs that Tom brought to the table. He had an idea for it because Tom is from Minneapolis, and he had an apartment there, and before he went to work every morning, he would look through his down town window, and there was a liquor store right by where he lived. And he would see Bob Stinson walking into the liquor store like clock work every day, at the same exact time. Like, he could set his watch to it almost. So he came up with the idea for that song, and we sat and worked on it. And somebody else who jumped into the collaboration was Jesse Malin—he’s great, and he actually brought a rock ‘n’ roll element to some of the songs, like “New York Comeback.”

Paste: And another couple of folks popped up on that song—a certain Mr. Bruce Springsteen and his wife, Patti Scialfa.

Williams: Yeah. We were sitting here at the kitchen table, and Jesse Malin was in town, and he was over at the house and we were working on maybe “New York Comeback” or something, and Tom has always been a huge Springsteen fan, and Tom said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get Bruce on this song? Just to sing a little on this?” And Jesse—who knows everybody in the entire universe—said, “Well, I think I can get ahold of Bruce for y’all.” And sure enough, he went back to New York—where he’s known as the unofficial mayor of at least the lower East side—and did it. He worked his magic and reached out and got a hold of some of Bruce’s people, and they asked Bruce, and he said yes.

They weren’t able to come into the studio with us in Nashville, but they went into their studio where they live and put down some vocals, him and Patti. And I couldn’t believe it when I got the track back and listened to it—every time Bruce’s vocal pops out, it’s just that quintessential sound. Nobody has a voice like his. And I’d met him before that—Tom and I had both met him, and he was a fan of my music and was always really supportive of me and what I was doing and everything. But Tom and I went to see one of his shows on the Devils and Dust tour, the acoustic one, in L.A., and it was mind-blowing, it was so good. And then we were able to go backstage and say hello and hang out and everything, and then he invited us to have dinner with him and his band and crew, so we all went to this restaurant and everybody had dinner together. And he is so sweet—I just love him.

Paste: And Margo Price and Buddy Miller helped out, too. But they were there in town?

Williams: Uh-huh. They were both in Nashville. And that was the big advantage—a lot of those people live here. And that’s the thing about Nashville—the logistics of everything? It makes it easier to get things done, because it’s a smaller city and people live close by. So yeah, everybody jumped in and wanted to take part and really get involved in this record.

Paste: That must have been a very nice feeling.

Williams: Yeah. It was great. And Angel Olsen—she was just visiting, but she was in town, too. I think she lives in Asheville, North Carolina. But she was in town and she just came over, and I love what she did—it was a very small vocal part, but she just nailed it. On the song “Jukebox,” that’s her voice there at the end—she just improvised and did this cool vocal thing. And it just makes the song.

Paste: “Jukebox” also has some of the album’s starkest lyrics: “These days my world seems so small/ I feel like a prisoner inside these four walls.”

Williams: I know! It’s heartbreaking. And a lot of that was that feeling that people had during the pandemic, of being shut in and closed in and all that. But I have a tendency to get kind of withdrawn and melancholy anyway, so that’s where some of that comes from.

Paste: Was there a point where you began to see your home as a refuge again?

Williams: A little, I guess. But I guess I’m just a born hobo, ya know? Whenever we go out when we’re traveling, everybody says, “Oh, I can’t wait to get home and sleep in my own bed.” But I don’t ever feel like that. I always feel like I just wanna stay in the hotel. That’s where I feel the most at home—I love being in hotels, I love the feeling of being in a hotel. Somebody to come clean up the room, a nice, big comfortable bed.

Paste: Someone recently told me that ‘hobo’ is actually an acronym for homeward bound.

Williams: Really? Oh, I love that! God, that’s great! That’s awesome. But I don’t feel the same way about home, I guess. I mean, of course I love to come home and everything, but a lot of times when I’m home, I just end up worrying about more stuff. All the things that you have to do, all of the responsibilities that come from owning a house. I dunno. I’m weird—never mind.

Paste: But you lived to tell the tale. Literally and figuratively. Are you planning ahead or taking it one careful day at a time?

Williams: Yup. I did. And we’re already planning ahead because Tom likes to plan ahead, so we’re already thinking about the next album, because we had a few too many songs to put all of ’em on one. So we’ve got to finish some new songs and get back in the studio, and we’ve got some upcoming shows already, and we’re going back to Europe and the U.K. But mainly what I’ve been doing on my off days and in all this down time is, I watch a lot of movies.

Listen to Lucinda Williams play songs off her seminal Car Wheels on a Gravel Road in 1998 from the Paste archives.