“It felt like the universe said, ‘We don’t think you’ve had quite enough stress yet, so here’s your stroke after you’ve had a tornado and a pandemic,’” country-rock legend Lucinda Williams says with a soft laugh, speaking of the series of events that dominated the Nashville resident’s 2020. In March of that year, Williams was among those impacted as a deadly tornado ripped through Nashville (“It took part of our roof over our front porch, but we were lucky compared to some other people,” she says), which was followed swiftly by the COVID-19 shutdown. In November of that year, Williams suffered a stroke.
“I feel great. I mean, recovery is a bitch, as they say,” says Williams, 70, offering an update. “It takes a long time. I have to be patient, and I get impatient sometimes, but I feel good physically. [My stroke] happened on the right side of my brain, so that means everything on my left side is affected. It even goes so far as when I’m looking at the time on a clock or watch, I’ll misread it because I’m not looking all the way to the left. Like today, it was 12:30 but I thought it was 2:30, because I missed the ‘1.’”
Given what she’s recently overcome, it’s not surprising that an air of determination and grit run through Williams’ new album, Stories From a Rock N’ Roll Heart, out today (June 30).
That theme dominates songs such as “Last Call for the Truth,” “Never Gonna Fade Away,” and the joyous album opener, “Let’s Get the Band Back Together,” which features Margo Price, Jeremy Ivey, Siobhan Maher Kennedy, Buddy Miller and Sophie Gault. Price also lends her voice to the protest anthem “This Is Not My Town.” The album was crafted at Nashville’s Room and Board studio, the same studio where part of Williams’ now classic Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was created.
“Margo and I are both over here in the same neighborhood,” Williams says. “That’s one of the reasons I moved here — in a town like Nashville, you can be more spontaneous and just call somebody up and say ‘Hey, can you meet me here?’”
25 years after issuing the Grammy-winning Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Williams is still threading plainspoken, unflinching stories — the kinds that beckoned friends and musical bedfellows such as Miller and Price, but also Bruce Springsteen, Patti Scialfa, Angel Olsen and The Replacements’ Tommy Stinson to join her on the new album.
Elsewhere, on “Stolen Moments,” she pays further tribute to the late Tom Petty: In 2021, Williams paid homage to Petty’s music with the album Runnin’ Down a Dream, a collection of Petty hits.
“His death really affected me,” she says of Petty’s passing in 2017. “He had invited me to open his very last shows at the Hollywood Bowl in L.A., and that was a huge honor. He was in great shape. We did those shows with him, and then he was gone. It was just bizarre and a Twilight Zone sort of thing. I felt connected to him on a lot of levels. We’re both southerners and I loved the way he approached the subject of being a southerner. I thought he handled that really well, probably better than anybody,” she says, quoting the opening lines of Petty’s “Southern Accents”: “‘There’s a Southern accent where I come from/ The young’uns call it country/the Yankees call it dumb.’ It’s just so on point. That song says everything you need to know about being a southerner.”
Elsewhere, the gorgeous “Where the Song Will Find Me” sees Williams exploring musically by adding a string arrangement, something the singer-songwriter hadn’t previously done. “I didn’t want to do the same thing over and over again. I wanted to break new ground and try something different,” she says.
Williams, whose 2023 memoir Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You debuted at No. 5 on the New York Times bestsellers’ list, launched her career with 1979’s Ramblin on My Mind, followed by 1980’s Happy Woman Blues. But it wasn’t until her third, eponymously titled release in 1988 that she earned critical acclaim. The 1990s proved a turning point when Patty Loveless recorded Williams’ “The Night’s Too Long” on her On Down the Line album and Emmylou Harris recorded Williams’ “Crescent City” and “Sweet Old World.” In 1994, Mary Chapin Carpenter’s recording of Williams’ “Passionate Kisses” (originally featured on Williams’ 1988 set) earned Chapin Carpenter a crossover hit and Williams a Grammy for best country song, becoming the first of Williams’ three Grammy wins.
Five years later, she earned her first Grammy win as an artist, taking home the trophy for best contemporary folk album for Car Wheels on a Gravel Road followed by a 2002 win for best female rock vocal performance, for “Get Right With God.” Overall, Williams has earned 17 nominations, spanning five musical genres. Her poetic and unflinchingly keen songs have also been recorded by artists including John Mellencamp and Rodney Crowell (with Harris).
The majority of those songs were compositions Williams crafted solo, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. But her stroke in 2020 impacted her ability to play, leading Williams to expand her circle of collaborators. As with her 2020 album Good Souls Better Angels, this new project finds Williams crafting songs with her husband and manager Tom Overby. She also counts New York rock mainstay Jesse Malin (who is recovering from a spinal stroke) and her longtime road manager Travis Stephens among her co-creators.
“I was always leery about co-writing, mainly because I had not had a lot of positive experiences with it,” Williams says. “But it was kind of liberating to fondly work with some other people. It happened organically; my husband was the first one I started working with and he had some really good ideas, as it turns out. I would be sitting there, working on something and he would come up and say, ‘Well, I’ve got these lines I came up with. You don’t have to use it if you don’t want to, but I just thought I’d show you and see what you think.’ I’d either start a new song with what he’d given me or use it in what I was working on at the time. ‘Stolen Moments’ was his idea, and songs like ‘Last Call for the Truth’ [and] ‘Jukebox.’”
Appropriately for an album that is all heart and rock n’ roll, Springsteen and his wife/fellow musician Scialfa appear on album tracks “New York Comeback” and “Rock and Roll Heart.” “It’s still a thrill to know that he’s on my album,” Williams says of Springsteen, crediting Malin for bringing him and Scialfa onto the project.
“Tom mentioned, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to get Bruce on this song?’ and Jesse piped up — because he knows everyone in New York City — and he said, ‘I think I can get ahold of him for you.’ Jesse’s like the unofficial mayor of the Lower East Side. And sure enough, he went back to New York, worked some of his magic and Bruce said yes. We sent the tracks to him — he wasn’t able to come to the studio in Nashville.”
The pair improvised their parts. “Nobody told them what to sing or anything,” Williams says. “Apparently Patti laid down 16 vocal tracks or something. She just jumped in and sang her ass off. And then, Patti wrote this sweet email to Tom and me and everyone, saying how happy they were to be able to do this project. So that was really nice of them.”
While Williams’ ability to play guitar was impacted by her stroke, her truth-searing, raw vocals were not. In 2021, she joined Jason Isbell on tour, and has since returned to the road in full force, performing a slate of headlining shows in Europe and stateside.
It’s been difficult, but she has adjusted to her current reality. “It was a little hard to get used to at first, because some of the songs I would start out on guitar, and this time I wasn’t able to do that. Sometimes the band would start it off and I wasn’t sure if the tempo was right and I felt a little out of control because I wasn’t able to lead on guitar,” she says. “But we kept going and the band is wonderful and really backed me. And people have told me they feel like my voice is even stronger. It’s almost like my voice got stronger to overcome the other weakness, maybe.”
Looking ahead, Williams is working again with Copperhead Road and Guitar Town maestro Steve Earle; the two previously collaborated on albums including Williams’ Car Wheels and Earle’s 1996 album I Feel Alright.
“I had an idea for a song the other day. I was watching the news and they were showing a story on the immigrants at the border, how there were thousands trying to come across, and so many children,” she says. “It made me sad and I wanted write something kind of like Woody Guthrie’s [1948] song ‘Deportee,’ a similar theme. I texted Steve my idea and I immediately got these lyrics from him that were incredible. I’m hoping something’s gonna come out of that.”
And though she has adjusted to performing without her trusty guitar, Williams remains hopeful that she will regain the ability to play one day. “You have to think that,” she says. “You have to be positive, because the reason I feel that way is I had to learn to walk all over again. In the very beginning, I had a cane, and sometimes I had a walker. But I did it.”
