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There is something for everyone in Lucinda Williams’s catalog. Her poetic lyrics and Southern Gothic influence please literary minds while never coming across as pretentious. She’s released albums on Folkways, Rough Trade, and Universal. Her songs have been covered by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Emmylou Harris, John Mellencamp, Angel Olsen, and Waxahatchee. Over the years, she’s shared stages with Bob Dylan, the Germs, X, and Big Thief. Punks love her, folkies love her, classic-rock dads love her, country-music fans love her, and even people who don’t care about music can get down to “Passionate Kisses.” There is so much about Williams to love. Her music is honest and down-to-earth, and details everyday beauty and everyday pain. The daughter of prolific poet Miller Williams, every aspect of her boundless sound comes straight from her experiences as a teenage activist, and later, the subject of sexist music critics, all of which is detailed in her memoir, Don’t Tell Anyone the Secrets I Told You. I caught up with Williams on the phone ahead of her Seattle tour stop—her show will be promoting her memoir with an evening of stories, songs, and visuals.
Where are you now in your travels?
I’m in San Francisco. There’s a music festival here called Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and I’m playing a set for it on Sunday. There’s also a tribute concert to Emmylou Harris while we’re here, and I’m doing a song for that. I don’t know if Emmylou is gonna sing or anything, but everybody’s supposed to play one of her songs, and I’m doing my song “Sweet Old World” because she recorded it.
When I first moved to Nashville, Emmylou Harris lived right down the street from me in the same neighborhood. We move in the same circles. When I first met her, I felt kind of shy around her, because, you know, it’s a big deal.
As you’re touring and staying in buses and hotel rooms, how do you make it feel like home?
We were actually just talking about that. This morning, they were testing the fire alarm system at our hotel. It just went on and on and on and on. It was kind of funny because my tour manager stepped outside and saw Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, and Steve Earle all standing out there. I wished that I’d been out there with them. I was thinking I should go outside because it was so loud, like, bad-for-your-ears kind of loud.
Anyway, I’m pretty good at nesting in little places like hotel rooms. This hotel is really cool. I’m sitting here by this old window with a great view of San Francisco, and there’s a plant on the table. That makes a difference. It has a lot to do with where you decide to stay. Nowadays, they have these boutique hotels all over the place, you know, those older hotels that they refurbish. A lot of times those feel warmer and cozier inside. Just you being in it, your human vibration fills the room. So, yeah, that’s about all I do. I used to bring little travel candles, tin things, but those are kind of frowned upon because people always worry about something catching on fire.
I’ve lit some candles in hotel rooms too, in secret.
Some people have them on their tour buses and everything, candles and crystals. But you get to where you don’t want to lug so much stuff around all the time, so you have to make choices like that.
For these upcoming West Coast shows, are the set lists varying from night to night? What should fans expect in Seattle?
When I play with the band, we change the setlist night to night. We try not to duplicate too many songs. I mean, there are certain songs that we do every time, usually—at the end of the show we usually end with a rousing rendition of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
[Long pause with mumbling in the background]
Okay, my husband, I mean, my husband/manager, just told me I’m doing the book show in Seattle.
I usually switch one or two songs around at the book shows because that involves mostly me acoustically with one of my guitar players, and then my bass player will come out and join us. Then there’s one or two songs that I do with the whole band.
[More background mumbling]
Okay, he’s correcting me again. Tom said I’ll do most of the set with the band, and the rest is acoustic. Maybe I should just hand him the phone! [Laughs]
Anyway, when my book came out, we talked about doing shows that feature the stories behind the songs. I go into detail a little bit more on the stories than I would in a regular show.
Do you remember the first song you ever learned on the guitar?
Yes, and it’s one that I play for my book shows. It’s actually a good way to describe what the book shows are like because they go in chronological order. First, I’ll talk about when I learned how to play guitar and the first songs that I learned, and then I’ll play “Freight Train” by Elizabeth Cotten. The interesting thing is, I discovered that she was a housekeeper for the Pete Seeger family. Apparently, the story goes that she found a guitar laying around the house and picked it up, and taught herself how to play. Then, she wrote that song and recorded it. That song got to be really big among the folk musicians.
When I very first started playing guitar, I wanted nothing more than to be like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, and to, you know, have long hair. In my memory, that song was kind of required to play as a folk singer. Everybody knew it. Everybody played it and sang it. It was a good first song to learn because it has a great melody, and it’s not too complicated. It was something you could play even if you were younger, like I was. I was about 12 years old when I first started learning how to play. That song was a good teacher.
What was your process for writing your memoir? Did you keep journals through the years?
I used to keep a journal when I was a teenager, but I didn’t keep it up as an adult. I wish I had, though, it would have been very helpful! I just kind of consulted with my sister and different people about things if I couldn’t remember. Writing that book was a real challenge. I had never taken on anything like that before. I didn’t know how to start, or what to do, or anything. I didn’t know if there were certain rules to follow. And then I decided there weren’t. I ended up reading some other memoirs by different artists, and I realized that everybody was doing their own thing with it, so I just quit worrying about that, and eventually I sort of got into a flow with it.
The problem for me was the tight deadlines. I kept wanting to go back and rewrite something because I would start thinking about how I wanted to say something better, and I wanted to go back and correct it, just make it flow better. They would say, “We don’t have time, the book has to be done, it’s coming out next week!” or whatever. That really upset me. I have to compromise the integrity of my writing to meet a deadline? It just really bummed me out.
In your book, you write about going to Flannery O’Connor’s house with your father. What do you remember about being there?
My memory is fairly vague about that day because I was so young, but my father would retell the story to me a lot. Over the years, Flannery had become my father’s mentor, and they became pretty close friends. At the time, we were living in Macon, Georgia, and she was in Milledgeville, which wasn’t very far. He would pay her visits, and they would just sit and talk about writing. One day, he took me with him. We drove over there, and she lived in this big old white house—really old, probably from the Civil War era—with this big front porch and front steps. We walked up the steps to the front door, and her housekeeper came to the door and said, “Miss Flannery is working right now.” Apparently, Flannery had set hours during which she would write, and she couldn’t be disturbed during those times. So we got there, she was writing, and my dad said he looked up and saw the blinds close. The housekeeper said, “You can wait out here.” So we sat on the front porch or the front steps and waited until she was ready to receive her guests.
She had peacocks running all around the yard, and according to my dad, I took great joy in them and started running around, chasing them, and playing with them. Eventually, the housekeeper said, “You can come in now—Miss Flannery will see you.” It was very old-fashioned and Southern. I guess I stayed outside and played with the peacocks. I don’t remember if I went in with him or not. As I got older, when I was in my teen years, I gravitated towards her writing. I read one of her short stories and fell in love with it, with her writing and her stories, and proceeded to read everything she’d written.
My dad would talk about her a lot—about how much he loved her writing and what she meant to him. He said that Flannery was his greatest teacher.
Who was your greatest teacher?
Probably my dad. I mean, Flannery was, too, in a spiritual sense. Her, and Eudora Welty, my other favorite Southern writer. Because my dad was so close to Flannery, and he would talk about her so much, I felt like I’d been around her more than I was. But, you know, I felt connected to her through that one experience.
It’s really interesting and kind of funny because recently I’ve been meeting other musicians—punk-rock guys and stuff like that—who are fans of Flannery O’Connor’s writing. They find my connection to her, and then they want to talk about it. They’re not people you would think would normally be reading Flannery O’Connor. It has really blown my mind how widespread her influence is.
You talk about getting involved in activism and protest while in New Orleans in the ’60s. Do you see parallels between then and now?
Yes, absolutely. I’ve been talking a lot about this lately, because it’s on everybody’s minds, and it should be. When we were playing the Troubadour last week, we played songs from my new album that’ll be out in January. It’s called World’s Gone Wrong, and it’s got some new songs on it that deal with life as we know it now. I mean, it doesn’t specifically mention the T-word, but there is the title track on the record, and “Something’s Got to Give,” “We’ve Come Too Far to Turn Around,” and a handful of other ones. We built the album around that idea. I know Bob Dylan has an album called World Gone Wrong, but this is World’s Gone Wrong. I hope he’s okay with that [laughs].
How do you think teenage Lucinda would have responded to the current political climate?
Good question, nobody has ever asked me that before. I would respond the same way I’m responding now, which is with complete shock, awe, and anger. The thing that makes me angriest is the ICE issue. It’s just unacceptable that in this country and in this day and age that they’re going around breaking up families.
When I was at the Troubadour singing those new songs that I mentioned, I talked a bit about the state of the world and how everybody needs to not give up the fight. Don’t just lie down and take it. I was saying all this at the risk of someone running on stage and grabbing me and pulling me off, but instead, I got a really good, rousing round of applause. You don’t always get that now, because some people have an attitude that musicians should just shut up and play. I’m trying to undo that image.
Have you ever experienced hostility or backlash from an audience?
I haven’t. I’ve been really lucky that way, because there’s always a chance of Trump supporters in the audience, and that I’ll piss them off, and then they never come back and see me play. But I’m willing, first of all, to take that chance, and to tell you the honest truth, I don’t really care if they come back to see me. As an artist, you have to make choices. You have to be willing to take chances like that.
I read an interview with Tom Morello recently, and it was so good because he talked about this very same thing, and he’s very eloquent in the way he talked about it. He said that as an artist, he has a responsibility to speak out about things, and I feel that way too. That goes back to when I was a teenager listening to the artists like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs, and all these people who were writing protest songs and singing at marches and demonstrations. Back then, nobody said, “Oh, we might upset some people who don’t agree with us,” because that was the objective: to upset people a little and to push back. People need to wake up, basically. I don’t like it when I’m talking about something to someone and they say, “It’s not that bad.” Because guess what? Yes, it is that bad.
What has been inspiring you lately?
I’ve been inspired by Tom Morello as a person. We actually met not too long ago at a tribute concert for Joan Baez, and so there was a lot of protest music going on because she is the queen of that. We just said hi real quickly backstage, and I referred to the audience and lineup as like “old leftists.” He said, “Yeah, it makes me feel safe.” And I said, “Me too.” I didn’t know that much about him, so I looked him up online afterwards and saw that amazing interview I mentioned. I thought, Wow, there’s somebody out there who thinks like I do.
I look to him because you don’t always get positive responses from people when you’re trying to change the world. There’s a lot of apathy and cynicism out there. You get a lot of this “Oh, what good does it do?” kind of thing, or “You should just be playing music and not worrying about it, blah, blah, blah,” which I hate. Finally, I found out about someone who’s an artist who also believes strongly in social justice and trying to make a change and standing up for what’s right. So yeah, I was really impressed by him and inspired.
Let’s end with a fun question. Are you a collector of anything?
I used to be more so than I am now. When I started having to travel more and more, it got to be a little too challenging trying to collect things and drag them around with me on the road until I got home. I used to be a collector of things because I spent a lot of time in thrift shops and flea markets and that sort of thing. I used to collect salt and pepper shakers, and those snowball things that you shake.
Oh, snow globes?
Yeah! I used to collect those. I still have a few. Part of it, too, was that when I was finally living in a house, I had all these little knickknack-y things all over the place, but I didn’t really have a proper way to display them. And so that got to be kind of a chore, you know?
Lucinda Williams and Her Band play the 5th Avenue Theatre, on Thurs, Oct 9, 7:30 pm, all ages.
