Across a career spanning over four decades, singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams has built a reputation as one of America’s most hallowed bards. She'll perform at the Mesa Arts Center on Wednesday, Sept. 25.
Her songs of hard drinking, hard living and hard-earned redemption have earned her numerous Grammy nominations and awards. Two of her records appear on Rolling Stone’s list of the "500 Best Albums of All Time" and Time magazine once called her America’s Best Songwriter.
So how does she do it? Well, as she told The Show’s Sam Dingman, it’s not a career path for the faint of heart.
Full conversation
LUCINDA WILLIAMS: I think I wrote my first song when I was about 14 maybe. And it was pretty innocent. It was called “The Wind Blows.” And it was just like this little folk song sounding thing, you know, the wind blows, and it blows through the town, and the people in the town hear it blow, the wind blows, and it blows through the town, and the people in the town hear it blow.
It sounds like something a 6-year-old would write, you know, but that was my, you know, first attempt at trying my hand at songwriting and obviously over the years it progressed.
SAM DINGMAN: Yes. Well, it's funny that you used the word innocent to describe it because that's, that's maybe not an adjective that I think a lot of people would use to describe a Lucinda Williams song. You've written songs about some very hard things over the years.
WILLIAMS: I don't know, it just appealed to me. I just thought, you know, I want to write about something besides unrequited love. And my father, who was a big influence on me that way, was writing poetry and he would write about all kinds of subjects from a wreck on the highway to a cat, sleeping in the window sill. Some of his stuff was pretty hard edged. I want to dig deeper, you know.
DINGMAN: Like he did, that must have been a really powerful experience to have him signal to you that it's all fair game. Like you're allowed to write about this stuff.
WILLIAMS: Exactly. Yes. That's exactly the word, allowed, you know, because for some people they, they kind of set rules for themselves, you know, like you can't really write about this because it might upset people too much. And, and I did have a lot of different kinds of feedback. People would say things like, your songs are, are too dark.
I remember this one woman came up to me one night after her show and said, I can't listen to that one particular song and, you know, she didn't say why. She just said, you know, it was too intense for some, you know, and I realized, OK, it pushes a button in her somewhere. But, you know, I can't help that. I mean, that's something she has to go through by herself. And I'm sorry, I'm the one to kind of push the button, but …
DINGMAN: Sometimes people need the button pushed.
WILLIAMS: Exactly. Yeah. They don't know, they do though, usually. But anyway, yeah, sometimes I felt like I was a therapist and a songwriter.
DINGMAN: I think you have been for a lot of people.
WILLIAMS: You know, I mean, for me, that's a real compliment that, you know, my song can mean something to somebody else. I mean, it might not be the exact same way, thing that it means to me. But, you know, that's fine. As long as it moves someone. That's all I can ask.
DINGMAN: When you're writing a song, is there a standard you hold yourself to, in terms of whether it has to move you in order to want to record it and, and put it out there? Like, how do you know it's, how do you know it's worth writing about?
WILLIAMS: It's hard to describe in words, the emotion is so strong I feel like I'm gonna cry. And that's when I know I've really reached a part of myself, like it needs to reach in a deep place in me. So it's very therapeutic, songwriting.
DINGMAN: Yeah. In order to, to provide that therapy for other people, you have to provide it for yourself first.
WILLIAMS: Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I was performing with some other musicians one night in Nashville on, at this little venue. And this guy came up to me, who he said, I'm a, I'm just starting to learn how to write songs, and I want to ask you some questions about it. And I said, OK. So I set down with him and he said, how do I do it? You know, what do you do? What do you do, something like that? You know, what's, what's your secret?
And the best I could think of was I said, you have to be willing and able to go dig down into the darkest recesses of your soul. And he looked at me after I said that and he said, I don't think I could do that. I don't know if I can do that, you know? And it was, I felt so sad, you know, I just wanted to hug him. But he was, he, he was being real when he said that. He said, I just don't know if I can do that. And I think, I don't know if I said anything, but I think I was thinking, well, I don't know what to tell you. Then you're not gonna, you're gonna have a hard time being a songwriter if you're not able to do that.
DINGMAN: That's such an interesting moment because I mean, it strikes me that in that moment you're both being incredibly honest with each other.
WILLIAMS: Yeah, and the thing is I didn't want to let him down or disappoint him, you know. He wanted to get there, but he knew himself well enough to know he was going to have a hard time, you know, digging into the deep fathoms of his subconscious or, you know, whatever it is to be able to bring a song up to the surface.
DINGMAN: Well, let me ask you, you know, when you sit down to write a song and I've heard you say that you, you tend to start with lyrics. What do you, what do you find comes to you first? Do you, because I think of your songwriting as very scenic, to make the most obvious Lucinda Williams reference ever, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.”
Do you find that you go to those scenic details first or do you sit down to try to capture a feeling and the specifics of the, the scenes that go with that feeling come to you later?
WILLIAMS: I think I start with certain phrases maybe that come to mind. Like I remember when I was working on “Car Wheels,” it was really weird because I would go to sleep. And right as I was waking up, I would have this phrase in my head, in my mind: “sittin' in the kitchen, a house in Macon, Loretta's singing on the radio, smell of coffee, eggs and bacon, car wheels on a gravel road.” And I would wake up and write it down and, you know, this kind of process went on for a while.
DINGMAN: So, it's like that, that phrase or those lines you can tell that they're attached to something you just kind of don't know what it is yet?
WILLIAMS: You don't know what it is yet and you just have to have faith that it's in there. You just have to, you've got to pull it out somehow. So there's a lot of trial and error involved.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Absolutely.
WILLIAMS: And frustration.
DINGMAN: Is it the melody sometimes that helps you find the emotion that is attached to the phrase you've come up with? Like, because I could imagine if you have a phrase that feels meaningful to you, but you don't know why. I could imagine singing it a couple different ways and that the melody would sort of help unlock whatever's behind it.
WILLIAMS: That’s it.
DINGMAN: How do you experience it when you know the melody that you've found is right? Is it, is it that sense you're talking about of it almost makes you cry?
WILLIAMS: That's when I know, you know, I go OK, I've found, I've got some, I'm, I'm on to something here. Kind of a crazy process. It doesn't make any sense.
You know, my father, one of my favorite poems of his was called “Compassion.” And the strongest line in it towards the end of the poem is: “have compassion for everyone you meet, who knows what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.” That's the deep recesses of, you know, that I'm talking about where the spirit meets the bone. It doesn't get any deeper than that.
