Lucinda Williams is a survivor. What else do you call someone who bounced back from a debilitating physical trauma at the age of 67 to reclaim her crown as queen of American roots music?
More than three years since a stroke forced the legendary artist to relearn basic motor skills like walking, Williams is out touring behind her latest album Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart. The Americana mainstay is also promoting her warts-and-all memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, published last year via Penguin Random House.
“A lot of people told me I should write a book,” Williams, 71, says. “I was always a storyteller when I would perform and that sort of morphed itself into writing the [memoir]. … It is an extension of what I never had enough time to do on stage, to go into detail about things. Or maybe I didn’t want to go into detail at that time or in that position, being on stage in front of an audience.”
Throughout the more than five-year writing process, the celebrated singer-songwriter carried the self-imposed pressure of living up to the writing of her late father, renowned poet Miller Williams, to whom the book is dedicated.
“I wanted it to be well written, with my dad having been a writer. I thought it would have to be like my great American novel or something,” she says. “I always pictured that I was going to go away and get a cabin in the woods or something and write this book. But it didn’t really work out that way. I was at my house like I always was.”
Writing down the bones
Williams says her perfectionist tendencies also dogged her, particularly given the different creative muscles required for writing a book.
“I wasn’t used to the looming deadlines that kept rearing their ugly head,” she says. “I kept wanting to fix and change things. I couldn’t stop editing. [My husband] Tom [Overby] is saying, ‘The book is done, Lu. You can’t keep changing things. It’s coming out. It’s done.’”
Like her songs, Don’t Tell Anybody is poignant, straightforward and honest. Williams chronicles her journey from a childhood spent in 12 cities and two foreign countries (Chile and Mexico) to the recording of her 1979 debut Ramblin’ on My Mind for storied imprint Folkways Records, and the commercial success achieved as a late bloomer “well into her 40s.”
Williams writes unflinchingly about topics like grappling with her mother’s mental illness. Throughout the book, the reader gets a taste of her family lore and the stops and starts of her career in the famously fickle music industry. Williams says the process proved to be healing.
“It was all sort of therapeutic,” she says. “Writing the book made me miss my mother and my father a lot. As I was going through it, I realized they were really great people. I guess it made me understand them more in a way in terms of what they went through — like in the beginning, when we didn’t have much money and my dad was bouncing from job to job.”
‘A good batch of stuff’
Amid Lucinda Williams’ intensive and emotional writing process, she stopped long enough to cut her latest album, Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart. The tight 10-song collection features cameos from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Patti Scialfa, Margo Price and Tommy Stinson.
While the stroke left Williams without the ability to play guitar, she figured out a work-around with the help of Overby, guitar-playing road manager Travis Stephens and early punk pioneer Jesse Malin.
“I opened myself up to collaborating on the songs with other people, which I’d never really been open to before,” she says. “It came mostly out of necessity. Since I couldn’t play guitar, Travis, who is a singer-songwriter, jumped in and said he could be me on the guitar and just tell him what I had on my mind. I could think of melodies in my head and I could still write lyrics. I had always written songs by myself — just my guitar and me. It was pretty straight ahead. This was a lot more challenging. Tom and Jesse Malin proved to be a huge help.”
With Williams and Overby having co-produced Malin’s 2019 album Sunset Kids, the Queens native proved to be an unexpected, but enduring creative partner.
“Jesse is a really good songwriter whose talents I came to appreciate. I just hadn’t been aware of it as much before,” Williams says. “We’d get together at our house and sit around the kitchen table. I think we came up with a good batch of stuff.”
ON THE BILL: An Evening with Lucinda Williams and Her Band. 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 14, Macky Auditorium, 1595 Pleasant St., Boulder. $60+
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