I'll start this column with an e-mail I got on Sept. 26 from a fan in San Francisco:

WOW! WOW! WOW!

What a show and what a night! My wife and I flew from San Francisco to New Orleans just to see Lucinda on her home turf at the House of Blues. She was in a great mood and sung her heart out for almost 2 and a half hours. Her original 18 song playlist grew considerably during the show as the good-vibe between her and the highly-charged crowd grew stonger and stronger. Some of the songs she added incluuded Lake Charles, Crescent City, and Bus to Baton Rouge. 

Before the show, we met Lucinda's aunt and uncle while eating at the HOB. We told them how we came all the way from San Francisco just to see their niece. I guess that made an impression. After the show, we bumped into them and they invited us backstage to meet Lucinda! I thought we were in heaven!  Here are a few pics from the show and backstage.

Lucinda Forever! 

John & Nancy Griffin -- San Francisco
P.S. We plan to see her again at The Fillmore in San Francisco on November 20 & 21!
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PBS is currently airing a series called "The Blues" -- a series of seven films.  The second movie "The Soul of a Man" by Wim Wenders includes Lucinda & her Essence tour band performing the Skip James number "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues."

Lucinda appeared on PBS in July & August in a revival of the Sound Stage series.  The hour was divided between Lucinda & Kasey Chambers:

SOUNDSTAGE featuring Lucinda Williams & Kasey Chambers (PBS – Program #1005 – 31July2003)

Lucinda Williams is widely considered to be one of America’s best singer/songwriters working today. An artist who completely defies categorization, her honest lyrics are often compared to fine poetry as she sings her narrative tales of Southern Gothic and heart-wrenching songs of love, heartbreak and desire. On this episode of Soundstage, Lucinda and her band perform favorites from her catalogue, as well as tunes from her newest album “World Without Tears.” Lucinda’s show will be shared by very special guest Kasey Chambers. This Australian born singer/songwriter has been described as a member of the country-rock crossover artists. Her albums “The Captain” and “Barricades and Brickwalls” have gone multi-platinum in Australia. Kasey will perform songs from both of her albums.

Here are the set lists of the hour-long broadcast:

KASEY CHAMBERS

Barricades And Brick Walls
If I Were You
Captain
Changed The Locks

LUCINDA WILLIAMS

Ventura
World Without Tears
Essence
Bleeding Fingers 
Joy
Overtime
Righteously

The complete tapings included additional songs that were not included in the aired version. The songs not included by Kasey Chambers were Fishing / Nullabour / On A Bad Day / Not Pretty Enough / A Little Bit Lonesome / All Gonna Die. Lucinda’s songs that were not used were Those Three Days / American Dream / People Talkin’ / Sweet Side / Atonement / Come To Me.

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Lucinda was interviewed after the Bowery Ballroom gig in NYC for a PBS program called "Profile of a Songwriter" & the following chat room postings referred to that interview:

June 4, 2003

What a surreal day it was..

First off, you have to get the album, it is awesome. The crew also went to her concert at the Bowery Ballroom to get some footage, said the audience stood up for four straight hours.

She was two hours late for the interview (gave no reason)...came with her petite entourage (Personal Assistant and her boyfriend and make up artist)...the record company sent one person from Marketing (to make sure she mentioned the album during the interview) and one from A & R (to make sure she showed up for the interview)..guess who was less stressed..yup the guy who has nothing to do with handling talent (Marketing Man).

It was so "hollywood"...everyone dressed in designer "folk/country" duds...either on their cell phones or Blackberrys ...we have all kinds of drinks out for her and she asks for bottled water at room temperature..

Anyways, get the album...it is great.

> Thanks. I will pick up the disk soon.

>That she was two hours late is no surprise. What is surprising is that the record company gave her an AR guy, a marketing guy >AND a make-up artist! When did Lucinda become so "star material"? A cult artist usually doesn't get so much backup.

 >What were you interviewing her for? 

I wasn't interviewing her...NJCT's own Jim Boyd (Circle's Dancing at Lughnasa) was doing the charmin'...he produces a show for PBS called "Profiles of a Performing Artist"...her profile should begin airing in mid July. I was just there to find two bottles of Evian at room temperature...

As far as I know, the "Profile" has not yet aired on PBS.
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Lucinda's touring continued into August.  Here are reviews of the shows in Salt Lake City & Dallas:

Williams gets Red Butte crowd on feet 

By Josh Loftin
Deseret Morning News, Salt Lake City, Utah
Saturday, August 02, 2003 

LUCINDA WILLIAMS, Red Butte Garden, July 31. 

For Lucinda Williams, it's a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

She's mad at the president, mad at wimpy rock stars, mad at SUV drivers, and very, very mad at ex-lovers. For Williams, who played Red Butte Garden Thursday, that anger makes her music and her lyricism very, very good.

Just before she launched into "American Dream," the anger reached a boiling point for both Williams and a few unhappy audience members during her scorching critique of President George Bush and life in the U.S.A. — a critique that made the Dixie Chicks look like his biggest supporters.

Although her profanity-laced tirade chased away about two dozen people, the remaining 2,000-plus seemed to endorse her opinions with a tide of cheers. Ironically, those who left early missed not only an incredible performance, but also her confession that she "loves this country, which people don't seem to understand."

While the fiery speech was the talk of the concert, the real highlights happened during the 20 songs of her two-hour set. From the grinding blues of "Still I Long For Your Kiss" to the crunching rock of "Joy," her songs carried the night. She even admitted as much, telling the crowd she had to write songs "because I can't explain anything."

Throughout the evening, she paid homage to the Delta blues, including a brilliantly spare cover of Skip James' "Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues" and the dirtiest blues song of the night, "Atonement."

Just because it's the blues does not mean it cannot get the crowd moving. Despite a first encore filled with ballads, the second, one-song encore brought everyone to their feet for the tumbling "Get Right With God," from Williams' Grammy-winning 1998 album, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road."

No matter how great the music is, Williams has made her reputation with a writing style that places her in a lyrical realm far above most musicians, and in line with many poets. It is also not a reputation she takes lightly, crafting many of her songs on her new album, "World Without Tears," as spoken-word compositions. Her delivery, especially during the verses for "Sweet Side" and the bitter, scorned-lover tale "Those Three Days," were vicious sneers laced with fire and venom.
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Lucinda's summer tour opening for Neil Young resulted in many reviews which were mainly about Neil.  Here is a representative example, followed by excerpts of others with just the Lucinda comments:

Review: Neil Young wanders with 'novel' but packs a punch with his hits

By THOR CHRISTENSEN / The Dallas Morning News  -  August 6, 2003

'Tis the season for '60s rock legends to follow their muses into strange and difficult places. On the heels of Bob Dylan's cryptic vanity film Masked & Anonymous comes Neil Young's meandering theatrical rock show Greendale, which he unveiled Tuesday night at Smirnoff Music Centre.

Because "rock opera" equals pretension in a lot of people's minds, Mr. Young is calling Greendale a "musical novel." Whatever it is, it's not likely to make anyone forget Tommy, or even Hair.

The plot, such as it is, centers on an extended family's life in a fictional small town in Northern California. There's a murder, a drug bust and various hippie protests (for the ecology, against corporate greed), but it's even less exciting than it sounds. For 90 minutes, a dozen or so actors (including Mr. Young's wife, Pegi) lip-synced and danced around on a set that was so flimsy it made the average high school production look like a whiz-bang Broadway musical.

Yet if you ignored the over-acting and the convoluted storyline and just listened to the music, Greendale worked. From the lovely folk of "Bandit" to the elegant grunge blues of "Grandpa's Interview" and "Leave the Driving," the piece was packed with soaring melodies and guitar solos.

The audience responded to Greendale politely, but applauded the loudest when Mr. Young began by saying, "I still know my old songs – I'll prove that to you later."

True to his word, he and Crazy Horse came back after the Greendale set had been dismantled and treated fans to 70 minutes of old classics, starting with his rip-snortin' homage to Rust-Oleum and fast living, "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)," and ending with "Rockin' in the Free World." In between, he rolled out cascading solos in "Powderfinger," barbed-wire riffs in "... [Expletive] Up" and his trademark majestic hooks in "Cinnamon Girl."

You couldn't pick a more fitting opening act for Neil Young than Lucinda Williams. Like her Canadian counterpart, Ms. Williams writes gorgeous odes to melancholia and delivers them in a voice you'd describe as wobbly if it weren't so charming.

Ms. Williams even gave props to the headliner in "Ventura," a new country-trance ballad in which she sings about cruising along the Pacific Coast with ol' Neil blaring on the radio.

Like Mr. Young, she refuses to stick to one genre for more than five minutes. Although she's pegged as the queen of alt-country, she spent her hourlong set roaming from swaggering-blues rock ("Changed the Locks," "Joy") to fuzz-tone hip-hop ("Righteously") to a Memphis soul ballad she said was inspired by hanging out at Antone's in Austin ("Still I Long for Your Kiss").

Perhaps the only thing the 50-year-old singer didn't share with Mr. Young was her audacious fashion sense: her see-through jeans (or were they merely trompe l'oeil?) were the most bum-baring pair of stage pants since Prince's heyday.

************************************************************************************************************* St. Louis Post-Dispatch - August 12, 2003

Opening act Lucinda Williams has not achieved Young's legendary status yet, but she's well on her way. Her songs of obsessive love and longing so palpable that they hurt make her one of the best songwriters working today. Her hour-long set was made up of tunes from her most recent album, "World Without Tears" and a handful of older numbers including "Drunken Angel" and
the achingly gorgeous "Blue."
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San Francisco Chronicle - July 21, 2003

Country maverick Lucinda Williams opened with a mesmerizing set that touched on earlier albums while focusing on her latest release, "World Without Tears." Backed by a three-piece band that included guitarist Doug Pettibone, Williams infused her emotional repertoire with equal parts spirituality, sensuality and desolation, from the sorrowful twang of "Ventura" and "Fruits of My Labor" to the distorted beauty of "Bleeding Fingers" and "Joy."
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Los Angeles Times - July 24, 2003

To add even more class to a memorable evening, Lucinda Williams opened the program with her own brilliantly absorbing tales of romantic obsession and searching. They are portraits so universal and penetrating that they, too, could be set in Greendale — or any other city of your choice.
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Mercury News - July 21, 2003

Opener Lucinda Williams did a rock-solid hour that proved once again she is not only one of rock's best songwriters, but one of its most uncompromising and toughest performers.
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Starting on Sept. 9 in San Diego, Lucinda toured as a headliner.  Here is a nice pre-show article:
For once, a road trip without 'Tears' for Williams
By Tiffany Lee-Youngren STAFF WRITER - San Diego Union Tribune

September 7, 2003
It's 9:30 on a Sunday night, two weeks before the launch of another tour and Lucinda Williams is in the mood for a little blood feast. 

It turns out that Williams – winner of three Grammys and "America's Best Songwriter," in the words of Time magazine – is a horror-movie fiend. Though her songwriting has tended more toward the melancholy than the macabre, Williams' seven-disc discography has often alluded to a fascination with phantasmagoria.

A Southerner and one-time resident of Mexico City and Santiago, Chile, she collects Santeria art as well as Pentacostal "hellfire and brimstone" artifacts, some of which have turned up in the liner notes for albums like "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," her acclaimed amalgam of rock, folk, country and blues hailed as one of the best albums of the '90s.

But enough biographical geeking-out. Lucinda's gotta pick out a movie.

"I've already seen that one, honey," she whispers to her boyfriend during one hushed deliberation midway through her phone interview from Los Angeles The video in question? " 'Candyman,' " she laughs, her Louisiana drawl lazy as molasses.

It seems a trivial, throwaway moment, this search for diversion, but its significance isn't lost on Williams. Fresh off a spot opening for Neil Young (which included a stop at this year's Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tenn., that drew a crowd of 80,000), the 51-year-old Williams is about to embark on a second tour (kicking off Tuesday at Humphrey's) in support of her new album, "World Without Tears," released in April on Lost Highway Records.

"We never get to do this," Williams says, relishing the simple pleasure of walking through the aisles of the video store with her man. "This is a real treat."

And surely somewhat of a relief. Williams, famously her own worst critic, doesn't sound entirely enthused about the past weeks she spent touring with Young, which she called "a challenge."

"It's such a big, huge production. There are a lot of people in his crew, and it's really different compared to when I go out to midsized clubs. . . . We played in these huge places, 'outdoor sheds' they call them, so we had to contend with that. And it's hard to expect people to get to a show by 7 p.m. But considering all that, we had a pretty good response."

Three decades of playing before live audiences have taught Williams a few things about working the crowd.

"We start out kinda mellow. The set builds as we go along," she said. "People wanna rock, but we've got to play other songs. They (request) 'Changed the Locks' (a number off Williams' self-titled second album). Sometimes, I've got to tell people to calm down.

"But the times they're like that are so rare. I feel it out when I get up there."

Williams' newest effort has the requisite teary-eyed ballads, including the gorgeous, Patsy Cline-inspired "Overtime" (which Willie Nelson has already recorded) and "Those Three Days," a song that boasts some of the most poignant lyrics Williams has ever written:

You built a nest inside my soul

You rest your head on leaves of gold

You managed to crawl inside my brain

You found a hole and in you came

You sleep like a baby breathing

Comfortably between truth and pain

But the truth is nothing's been the same

Since those three days

But a few dittys from "World Without Tears" – particularly "Real Life Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings" – rock hard enough to please all her crossover fans from the Tom Petty/Rolling Stones camp.

"There were standing ovations every night after a certain point," Williams said of her tour with Young. "I think we accomplished what we set out to do."

On the move
Accomplishing what she sets out to do has always been Lucinda's bag, and she's uprooted herself countless times to pursue her music. In her 30-year career, she's lived in Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, California and New York City's Greenwich Village, where she eked out a living in the '70s during the burgeoning punk era. 

"When I was living in New York City, I was entrenched in the singer-songwriter scene. I didn't go to (the punk club) CBGBs or any place like that. For me, the '70s were more about people like Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and Robert Johnson. In the early '80s, I was influenced by Talking Heads and the Pretenders. But really, in the '70s I was out of touch with what was going on. I had a bumper sticker that said, 'Disco sucks.' I was aware of the scene, (but) 'the pocket' was lost on me.

"I've rediscovered a little bit of it. I'm always going back and trying to listen to other kinds of music with an open mind. Some things pop out when I'm flipping around the channels."

These days, Williams is big on everyone from Nick Drake to Bruce Cockburn, Chuck Prophet, Paul Westerberg, Mark Ford and R&B singer Jill Scott, who might have been the influence behind the two hip-hop-inspired tracks, "Atonement" and "Sweet Side" from "World Without Tears," which find Williams rapping in a style Bob Dylan called "talking blues."

"And I consider AC-DC to be rootsy music," Williams said. "I hear a metal band and they seem more grounded to me, unlike some of that wispy stuff out there."

Wispy stuff?

"Like Lilith Fair."

Williams likes talking tough, but her background reveals a sensitive, literary childhood peopled by the colleagues, friends and students of her father, poet Miller Williams, who read at President Clinton's 1997 inauguration. One of those friends was author Flannery O'Connor, whom Williams remembers meeting as a 4-year-old.

"We chased peacocks on her lawn," Williams said. "She had a writing schedule she was very strict about. She wouldn't greet company if you came when she was still writing. The housekeeper would draw the blinds and you'd have to wait."

Southern Gothic writers Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers and cultures south of the border have also played their part in Williams' music. One of Williams' earliest influences was Chilean folksinger Violeta Parra, who sang with Buena Vista Social Club alum Omara Portuondo on the 2002 release "La Gran Omara Portuondo."

"I think (Mexico and Chile) influenced my music a little bit. It probably doesn't show up quite yet, although 'Are You Down?' (from "Essence") has a Tex-Mex vibe. Everything kind of seeps in, in a way."

No matter how much sway other artists have over Williams, it's clear from her catalog that the most defining force has been her often-rocky love life. Williams admitted that several of her relationships (which skew heavily in favor of bass players, including her former bandmate, Richard Price) have been far better for her songwriting than they've been for her heart.

"That's happened quite a bit. Hopefully this one I'm in now will turn out a bit different. But there's always things to write about. You don't have to torture yourself."

Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.

Here is an interview with Lucinda prior to her show in Atlanta:
Seeking 'a spiritual train' on the bus

By SONIA MURRAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September  24, 2003

You would think all you would have to do is say "Hello" and Lucinda Williams' usual eloquence about all things heartbreaking would just flood the fiber optics. Especially when the day we talk is just after the second anniversary of 9/11 and the death of Johnny Cash.

Williams picks up the phone not even knowing Cash had passed. And a day earlier the satellite was broken on the tour bus, though she had decided she didn't want to see any Sept. 11 images of towers falling down anyway. She does however, take part in a round of questions.

Q: Which word or phrase do you most overuse?

A: Am I supposed to answer quickly?

Q: Knowing the time you take to put out albums, "quick" may not be comfortable . . .

A: [Laughs] Ummm. Ummm. Yeah, I'd guess I'd have to say [messed] up.

Q: That's weird because before we started this, when we were talking about Cash and Sept. 11, you didn't say that once.

A: Yeah, but if you were with me on a daily basis you'd hear: "This is [messed] up." "I [messed] up." "I'm [messed] up." All day long. It's something I definitely need to eliminate from my vocabulary.

Q: What don't you say often enough?

A: That I love myself.

Q: Hence, all the "I'm [messed] up . . ."

A: [Laughs again]. Right. Yeah. That's what I mean. I tend to beat myself up quite a bit. But I know it. And I'm working on it.

Q: What is your greatest regret?

A: I didn't learn to live in the moment.

Q: OK, now you're sounding like you're talking from the grave.

A: That did, didn't it? I mean, I'm desperately trying to get on a spiritual train, but I keep looking back at all the things I didn't appreciate. Or when I'm looking ahead I'm thinking, "If I only had this I'd be happy."

Q: What's your most treasured possession?

A: Probably my letters. I've saved every letter I've ever received in my entire life. I keep them in those trunk-size plastic tubs you get from Home Depot. They fill like three or four.

Q: What do you have to have in your refrigerator?

A: I've been in transit lately so I have to think of what's in the bus refrigerator: Bohemia, a Mexican beer. Negra Modelo. Boca Burgers in the freezer and fresh salsa.

Q: What is the quality you most like in a woman?

A: Ohhh, um, I guess just being open and being fearless. Strong, but not being competitive with other women.

Q: What is the quality you most like in a man?

A: Not being threatened, particularly by powerful women.
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