Lucinda Williams still carries “troublesome weights” from her childhood, but her newfound happiness is bringing forth an even more prolific and talented artist.
Lucinda Williams: Born to be Loved
Time magazine once called Lucinda Williams “America’s best songwriter,” and while she won her first Grammy back in 1994, we think that now, at age 58, with the heralded recent album Blessed, she’s still just hitting her stride. Though her trademark sound—a poetic amalgam of roots rock, folk, and bygone honky-tonk—remains intact, her comfortable two-year marriage to Tom Overby, her manager/producer, has allowed her to go outside herself and stretch a bit, just as she does in this interview.
“This is cool!” Williams says about talking to Penthouse. “When I was growing up, my dad [celebrated poet Miller Williams] subscribed to the magazine.” She was in a Marietta, Georgia, hotel room before a show, after dodging heavy, golf-ball-size hail running in from her tour bus. Which isn’t to say she doesn’t like things stormy occasionally. But Williams seems to have finally embraced the silver lining in life’s dark clouds.
How’s married life?
Williams: It’s great! I’m really blessed and fortunate, because I’m able to be out here [on the road] and have Tom with me.
This is your second marriage, right?
Williams: Yeah, but the first one was so short-lived and it’s just so far back in my past. I was married to Greg Sowders, who at the time was the drummer in the Long Ryders. This was in 1986. He was this skinny, cute guy in a cowboy hat, real sweet, very romantic, and real committed. Then my career started to take off. The Long Ryders broke up at the same time I was offered a record deal, and Greg was ready to hang up his drums and start a family. I said, “No, I don’t want to do that.” So it didn’t work out, but he’s now my [music] publisher. And he came to our wedding. So did Lorne Rall. He was the bass player in the Lonesome Strangers, and one of my longtime boyfriends. The running joke was that most of my boyfriends were bass players. I guess I was what they call a serial monogamist, but I did have three different relationships with bass players. Lorne and I had a real bad breakup, but now we’re really good friends. I like to stay friends with all my ex-boyfriends if I can.
Even though you write some really blistering songs about them?
Williams: If they choose not to stay connected, that’s their decision, but I don’t like all that bitterness and hostility. I like to think that we can grow and things can mellow out.
How do you think Tom balances you?
Williams: Well, he’s not in a band. It’s very unusual for me to get involved with someone who is not a musician. Tom had a career that was totally different from mine.
How did you meet him?
Williams: We were introduced to each other in the early nineties. I was touring behind my Sweet Old World album, and Tom was one of the guys at the label. It was more like, “Hi, how are you doing?” He was engaged at the time. Then flash forward about 15 years later. We’re both out in L.A. I’d moved away and moved back, and he’d just moved out there. Now he was out of his relationship, and I was single. I was at a hair salon in Hollywood, and Tom came in to get a quick haircut. I was immediately attracted. Tall, slim, beautiful smile, blue eyes, and this little bling tooth. He knocked his tooth out as a kid in Minnesota, and for some reason, the dentist put a silver tooth in there. Which I love, you know? Anyway, he walks in and says, “I know you. I worked for Best Buy Music in Minneapolis.” So we started going out. It was a little bumpy in the beginning. I was really drawn in, but I wasn’t sure if we were compatible. I didn’t think he was enough of a bad boy. And he was too nice. But I learned you’ve gotta get over first impressions.
So he’s really a bad boy underneath?
Williams: Oh, yeah! Trust me, God! [Laughs] Now it’s the perfect blend, because he knows how to get around in a corporate world, and yet he’s got all the spunk and soul. Not to mention the fact that he’s highly intelligent. When it’s all said and done, a guy’s gotta be really, really smart. He’s brainy smart, and that’s a huge turn-on for me.
Has marriage changed you at all?
Williams: I’m more prolific than I’ve ever been. I don’t know what to attribute it to, but the big test for me with relationships has always been my level of creativity: “Am I still going to feel vital and inspired?” Because I’ve had the opposite happen, when I shut down and lose myself in relationships. That’s what I wrote “Side of the Road” about. But with Tom, I found there’s plenty to still write about. I’m a writer and I’m an artist, and a true artist doesn’t stop just because he or she gets married and finds the person they want to be with for the rest of their life. Maybe part of it is, I really look up to him and trust him. He’s got an incredible ear for music. He’s constantly listening to music, and he’s got excellent taste. He’s my best critic. He could listen to a new song I’ve written and tell me that it’s really good, but I also know he would tell me when it wasn’t really good. It’s just a totally different thing than I’ve ever had.
What does Blessed say about you that the other albums didn’t?
Williams: I think it reflects being older, seeing life through more mature eyes. It has more of a global perspective. The obvious difference is that it’s not filled with unrequited-love songs. “Buttercup” is the only bad-boy song on the album. And that was about a guy I was with before Tom. He was a drug addict and alcoholic. He was sober when I met him, but then he went off the cliff. He’s the one I wrote “Jailhouse Tears” about. I guess I still had a little bit of that that I had to get out of my system.
How do you think your music has evolved from the first album?
Williams: I just think I’m getting better as an artist. Tom was saying to me before we took off on this current tour, “I don’t want to stay out on the road too long this year. I want to get you back in the studio, because you’re on a roll. You’re singing better than ever.” And it’s true. My songwriting has evolved, too. I’ve given myself permission as a writer to go wherever I want to go. One of the first rules of creative writing that my dad taught me was, “Never censor yourself as a writer.”
You certainly don’t censor yourself in a song like “Come On,” which pulls no punches with language or in its sexual put-down.
Williams: Well, I enjoy pushing people’s buttons. I get a secret thrill out of that.
Did you get a lot of push back over that song?
Williams: Surprisingly, no. And it completely blew my mind when I was nominated for a Grammy for that song for Best Rock Vocal Performance. To me, it was just this silly song. It’s supposed to be a parody on heavy metal, what is often referred to as “cock rock.” You know, the guys who wear tight pants where you can see the shape of their cock. It’s the whole swagger thing, and everything is about sex. But at the end of the day when you get ’em one-on-one, they can’t even get it up because they’re too fucked up. It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek. I even wrote the music like that. There was actually an incident, but it was a blend of several different images in my head. All the women in the audience love it.
You don’t write many classic story songs like “Pineola” or “Crescent City” now, though the new “Soldier’s Song” is a return to that form.
Yes. I was almost afraid to put it on the album, because the depth of the darkness is beyond the pale. But I love the track.
Do you want to write topical songs?
Williams: I do, and that’s always been a big challenge for me. I can write an unrequited-love song in my sleep. I think almost any songwriter would tell you those are the easiest songs to write. Girl meets boy, boy leaves girl, girl has heartbreak. Those are a dime a dozen. But to be able to write songs like Bob Dylan wrote, like “Masters of War.” Well, Steve Earle is great at it.
Blessed is an intriguing album title. Several of your records have incorporated religious symbols or analogies, either in the music or the cover art, such as the use of crosses.
Williams: Well, I would say more like spiritual or biblical symbols. It’s really just the roots of things that I’m interested in. Both of my grandfathers were Methodist ministers. My father’s father was a Christian in the true sense of the word, in that he was a socialist Democrat, a feminist, and an anti-war intellectual. He was a [conscientious objector] in World War I, a very free thinker. So was his wife, my grandmother. I remember during the Vietnam moratorium in 1969, she went to the grocery store wearing a black armband and ran into someone who said, “Oh, my, did someone die?” And she said, “Oh, yes, thousands and thousands of people.” Now, my mother’s father was a Methodist minister, but he was the hellfire-and-brimstone type. So I have a palette of all this stuff to draw from.
There’s a devil on the back of your current tour T-shirt.
Williams: Yeah, I’ve always been drawn to that imagery. I love all the Day of the Dead stuff, the South American folk art, and the Santería stuff, the combination of the Catholicism mixed with voodoo. That imagery is just so powerful. And Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan have a lot of songs that draw from biblical stories. I was influenced by that music, and my dad’s poetry deals with it, even though he called himself agnostic when I was growing up. So I have that whole big jumble. I love anything that deals with God and Satan, like the movie The Omen, or a documentary on the History Channel on the lost scrolls, the lost teachings of Jesus. I’m really fascinated with that, and with Pentecostal Christians and that subculture, the snake handlers. It’s about the passion of it all. I mean, look at the devotion of these itinerant families who work with snakes and drink strychnine.
You have a lot of intellectual and creative energy. But before your marriage, a lot of people thought you weren’t a very happy person overall.
Williams: Well, happiness is relative. I think I’m kind of moody. Just the whole idea that you’re either happy or you’re sad — you know, it’s not absolute. Nobody runs around happy all the time. Maybe the Dalai Lama, but even he probably has his bad days [laughs]. I think I’m ultimately an optimist. I’m not jaded, and I’m not cynical, and I think that’s what comes through. But I certainly have my dark days, and my dark moments, so I have a wistfulness. I get very melancholy sometimes.
That’s part of being creative though.
Williams: Yeah, and I have a lot of stuff from my childhood, these little troublesome weights that will never leave. Like in “Bus to Baton Rouge”: “I’ll never be free from these chains inside.”
What is the biggest weight you carry from growing up?
Williams: Well, probably just everything falling into pieces. We all long for the kind of family where your sister or your brother is your best friend, and everybody goes home at Christmas. And it wasn’t like that. My mother suffered from severe mental illness.
She was a paranoid schizophrenic?
Williams: That’s what my dad [says]. The actual terminology was “manic depression with paranoid schizophrenic tendencies.”
You wrote a great song for your brother.
Williams: I haven’t seen my brother in over six years, but I wrote three great songs for him. The first one was “Little Angel, Little Brother,” the second one was “Are You Alright,” and now this new one, “I Don’t Know How You’re Livin’.” I tried to call him on his birthday, and he didn’t want to come to the phone.
He’s a musician as well, right? Drives a truck and is also a musician?
Williams: Well, he used to drive a truck. I don’t know what he’s doing right now. After we became teenagers, he would just disappear for months at a time. And my sister struggles with her own stuff. I hate to use the word “dysfunctional,” because it’s overused, but that’s putting it lightly with our family. My mother was a beautiful person, but she just had all this pain and anguish. When my parents split up, we stayed with my dad. I really bonded with him. That kept me from going downhill.
How old were you?
Williams: About 12.
You’re the oldest of the three kids?
Williams: Yeah. Then my mother died in 2004, and that’s when everything really fell apart. We just all went our separate ways. My sister sort of excommunicated herself from my dad and my stepmother. She’s working on things now. I need to write about it all. It’s like an albatross around my neck. There’s just all this unresolved stuff. That’s what I wrote “Mama You Sweet” about. She felt guilty because she wasn’t really there for me emotionally when I was little. At a certain point in my life, I had to realize that my mother was not going to be a mother in the sense of what we think of as a mother. Had it not been for my dad, I don’t know what would have happened.
“Sexiness is in the way you carry yourself. You can have that till the end.”
Your mother was also a musician?
Williams: Yeah, she studied piano. She loved jazz, and Judy Garland, which is interesting when you think about Judy Garland’s life. And Erroll Garner.
Did she perform?
Williams: No, she didn’t have the confidence. The piano sort of became her nemesis. When she was in her down periods, she wouldn’t play. She would get rid of the piano. It would just go away.
Her name was Lucy. Were you named for her?
Williams: No. The story that she told me was, she had a boyfriend, or there was a guy she really liked, before she met my dad, and he was Cuban or something. So I was named Lucinda, which is Spanish. A lot of people make the mistake of calling me Lucy, which makes me uncomfortable. But I was called Cindy when I was growing up.
You could have been on Happy Days.
Williams: Yeah! Actually at one point when that show was on, my grandmother in Baton Rouge called my mother and said, “Cindy’s on TV! Cindy’s on TV!”
Your sound owes a lot to the South, but not to modern country music. You lived in Nashville for a while, but didn’t especially like it.
Williams: Well, when I moved there in ’93, I found a group of people I loved, and for a while, there was kind of a cool little scene there, some cool clubs that popped up. But then everybody went downtown to lower Broad, and started putting all these fern bars in there. They tore down all of that kitschy stuff on Music Row, which was part of the history of Nashville. It was like they were embarrassed by it. And all this money started coming in, and they put the arena in downtown, and it just completely changed the face and the vibe of the city. That’s when I just went, Okay, I can’t take this anymore. And I got tired of sitting around with my friends commiserating about what sucked about Nashville. The town was just becoming too small, and it wasn’t fun anymore. It was too corporate. People would ask me things like, “Where do you write?” Because all the hit songwriters wrote on Music Row. I’d say, “Well, I write on the edge of my bed” [laughs]. And they didn’t like the fact that I didn’t cowrite. So I didn’t fit in. It was also that right-wing, Republican, Christian thing. I remember sitting behind a car and it had a vanity plate that just said CHRISTIAN. I was just like, “Okay, fine, you’re a Christian. What if I’m not?” I love Memphis and Knoxville, but I like a little bit more diversity and subtlety.
In “Awakening,” you say you will not mourn your youth.
Williams: Well, I still deal with aging just like any other woman.
How long will you work the road?
Williams: As long as I can and feel good about it. In other forms of music, it’s not the same as far as age.
Willie Nelson is in his late seventies, and he doesn’t want to quit the road.
Williams: Well, apparently neither does Wanda Jackson. I think we need to redefine beauty. I love older, confident women. I want to be somebody like Georgia O’Keeffe. She was just gorgeous. My father’s mother was like that. She died two weeks short of her 100th birthday. And she was very youthful. Sexiness is all in the way you carry yourself. It’s your attitude, a vibe. You can have that till the end.
True to her philosophy espoused here, Lucinda Williams remains active recording and touring now nearly 15 years after our first publication. Currently you can even take a listen to her most recent hit, “The World’s Gone Wrong” on various platforms. Fair warning, though, it may hit you a little close to home, because honetly, it’s a mess out there.
