The big news in this column is that Lucinda was voted Best Songwriter in America by Time Magazine & CNN in their "America's Best" issue & "CNN Presents" TV program.  The TV show devoted 10 minutes to Lucinda with interview & concert clips, as well as a segment with Miller Williams in his home.  Some wonderful early photos of Lucinda were included.  Here is what was shown:

 
'Essence' of the South

Sparse songs of longing and wanderlust infused with mystery

(CNN) -- For almost 30 years, Lucinda Williams -- a Southern girl if ever there was one -- has been writing and singing her unique brand of music, a mixture of folk, rock and country that is nearly impossible to categorize.
Williams uses a sparse writing style to create her own language of song. Despite its simplicity, her music carries intense emotion and tantalizing mystery.

She has just released a new collection of songs called "Essence," her first recording since the critically acclaimed "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road." That recording propelled Williams into the spotlight in 1998, winning a Grammy for best contemporary folk album and selling 500,000 copies.

"Essence" is only her sixth recording, and it was a long time brewing. She said she had not written a song in five years, the longest dry spell she had ever endured.

"And then, I came out of -- I went through a breakup -- and came out of a five- or almost a six-year relationship," she said. "And so, I think it was a combination of -- having come out of the relationship, I was by myself -- not only physically, but emotionally, alone -- which is where ... I have to be in order to write.

"The songs just came out in a torrent of -- flood of songwriting," she said. "I wrote 14 new songs in about a six- or eight-week period of time."

Success didn't come easily

Three years after winning a Grammy, Williams is still getting used to the notion of success.

"I don't think of myself, in terms of being a star, and other people have to remind me, you know? And they say, you know, 'Well, you're a star now,'" she said.

In a music business somewhat anesthetized by the likes of boys bands and a slick overproduced Nashville sound, Williams has always followed her own rules, like never doing a music video.

"I don't really like them much to tell you the truth. I'm not really a big video person," she said. "I just miss the old days of music and rock 'n' roll before they had videos and people used to just imagine more and I don't know. It just seems to commercialize things a bit more."

For Williams, the old days of music were when she was living in Austin, Texas, in the early 1970s. She was a 17-year-old college professor's daughter who dropped out of college to play on the street for quarters.

Her first record, "Ramblin' on My Mind," a collection of folk and blues covers, was released in 1979. She followed this debut in 1980 with "Happy Woman Blues," which included her own songs. In 1988, she released "Lucinda Williams," gaining even more attention. It included "Passionate Kisses," which won her a songwriting Grammy in 1993 when it was a hit for Mary Chapin Carpenter.

The long time between recordings stemmed mainly from Williams' desire to maintain creative control, which led to battles with record labels and producers. Courted by one major label, she declined, preferring the independence of a smaller label for her 1992 release, "Sweet Old World."

She is now signed to Lost Highway, an imprint of Mercury Records that focuses on artists collectively known as "alternative country." Williams' audience and record sales have been growing along with the critical acclaim. On a recent night in New Jersey, fans in the audience included fellow songwriter Elvis Costello, who joined Williams onstage.

Worlds of music and literature

Her love of words and the arrangement of them so as to convey powerful emotions appear to be something of a family tradition. Williams' father is poet Miller Williams, who read a poem at President Bill Clinton's second inauguration.

"Over the years, I would just show him my songs," she said. "And he would critique them and make suggestions. And that's how I learned."

Miller Williams is not only a poet but an editor and a professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. A music fan as well as a literary scholar, he said he likes to surround himself with the worlds of jazz, country and literature when he writes in his study.

His friends have included musicians like jazz artist Dave Brubeck and country singer George Jones, and he has counted among his writing colleagues people like Robert Frost, Flannery O'Connor and James Dickey. His daughter was immersed in this world of music and literature growing up.

"Lucinda played around the feet of some of these people," Miller Williams said, "and as she grew older through her teens and preteens sat around and listened to our conversation."

She said she was aware of the brilliant minds around her in her youth.

"I soaked it up, yeah," she said. "I just think being around it and hearing them talk and hearing their poetry."

While her father provided her with a legacy of words, her mother, Lucy Morgan, a onetime concert pianist, passed along the gift of music.

So Williams was raised amidst lovers of language, surrounded by the South's country and folk music. Those two worlds suddenly jelled into one when a teen-age Williams heard Bob Dylan's classic 1965 album "Highway 61 Revisited," featuring "Like a Rolling Stone."

"And I remembered listening to it and just being, just blown away, because here was someone who had taken both of the worlds that I was from -- the traditional folk music world that I had come out of -- and the writing world, the literary world -- and brought the two things together for the first time," she said. "And I decided right then and there that I -- that's what I wanted to do -- even at the age of 12."

'Bumpy life' fuels songwriting

Now 48 and unmarried, Williams sings of love lost and of love desired. In "Envy the Wind," she describes a longing so intense, it could never be satisfied.

"I deal with that, that subject matter, I guess, that sense of longing. And its sheer frustration, desperation you know," she said.

Williams said all her songs are autobiographical, but she declined to share the subject of "Envy the Wind."

"You have to sort of read between the lines, yeah. I don't like to give away all my secrets you know," she said.

When she's not singing about the woes of love, she sings about a childhood marked by the divorce of her parents and a family always on the move, including time spent in Louisiana, Chile, Mexico City and Arkansas.

Williams was raised by an 18-year-old nanny who eventually married her father and whom she credits with saving the family. When he first heard the song, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," her father apologized to her.

"That song describes a pretty bumpy life," Miller Williams said. "And although even the bumpiness of the life contributed to the success of the singer-songwriter, I still felt a little guilty for having given her the life that song describes."

For Lucinda Williams, however, that "bumpy life" has led to the creation of a remarkable songwriting collection, which is likely to continue growing.

"I have a wealth of material that I can draw from, you know? I have enough to last me the rest of my life. I don't have to suffer anymore, you know?" she said, laughing.

Emmylou Harris wrote this tribute for the Time Magazine issue connected with the above CNN program:

Songwriter: Lucinda Williams

Wasting few words and sparing no pain, she has composed an extraordinary songbook about the rituals of loving, losing and keeping the faith

By Emmylou Harris

TIME) -- Lucinda Williams is a righteous singer. The sound of her voice is so overwhelming and so moving that she could sing the phone book and probably give it meaning. But she comes up with extraordinary words for that voice to sing &3151; deceptively simple words like back steps or hairdo. How do you use the word hairdo in a song and make it so poignant that it almost breaks your heart?

As a person, Lucinda, who's now 48, doesn't censor herself. She's without guile, and she suffers from that sometimes because people don't know what to make of someone so forthright. They feel as if they want to protect her.

But she is a real survivor, and the key to her success as an artist is that she has managed to survive without putting the armor on.

Lucinda writes from a very personal standpoint, and that can be difficult. When you go that close to the bone, you are always risking bathos — or being corny or cloying. She plays in dangerous territory, and sometimes you're not sure she's gonna pull it out. I am always amazed by her song "Sweet Old World" because it could so easily have been sentimental. Instead it is just haunting. It goes right to the heart of a kind of desperation that everyone has felt. And her words take you to another place and make you look at loneliness in a way that you never would have looked at it before.

Songwriting can be a very frightening thing. For me, the fear is about failing to follow the scent of a lyrical idea, failing to come up with the truth of something that you know is there. You've caught a glimpse of it in one line, one phrase, or the emotional idea that's come to you. The fear for me is always, "Am I going to be able to capture that? Can I build a fence around that horse?" A Lucinda Williams song always does.

Singer-songwriter Emmylou Harris has recorded since 1967. Her latest album, "Red Dirt Girl," earned her a 10th Grammy Award

Lucinda's summer tour continued in the Midwest.  Here is a review of the new CD by a Cleveland paper:

Lucinda Williams knows: no suffering = no art

DAVID BAUDER, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 06/22/01

Memo to any man who loves Lucinda Williams' music and may be interested in loving Lucinda Williams: You can't have one with the other.

Williams, 48, has never been able to write songs while in a happy relationship, a pattern that continued with her new disc, "Essence."

The singer-songwriter feeds off romantic turmoil.

"That's not a real easy thing to admit," she said. "I think the angst, or whatever, helps to provide fodder or grist for the mill. A little bit of drama never hurts, you know?"

But she adamantly denies the insinuation, in a lengthy New Yorker magazine profile, that she ended a five-year relationship because she hadn't written a song in, well, five years. Soon after, the songs for "Essence" tumbled out with unusual speed.

Maybe when she's with someone she gets lost in the relationship and has trouble doing things for herself, she theorized.

"I've had a hard time finding a balance between the two and I'm still working on that," said Williams. "I don't know why that is and it isn't anybody's fault. It's just one of those things.

"I'm not endorsing this," she said.

Perhaps her experiences added a twinge of regret to the forlorn song "Lonely Girls" that opens her new disc, or escalated the sexual longing of the title cut to a primal need.

"Essence" is a showcase release for Lost Highway, a new alternative country record label. Williams' music, a gumbo of folk, blues, country and rock, can fit into that category as well as any.

It's her first new music since "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," the 1998 disc that introduced her to a wider audience and was one of the year's best.

Three years between discs is fairly typical for most artists these days, but is lightning-quick by her standards. Along with the aforementioned need to be single to write, she has a reputation as an obsessive perfectionist about her work.

So she was naturally suspicious about what happened when she started to write last summer.

"I thought, Wait a minute. This is too good to be true,'" she said. "I have 14 new songs that I've just written in a six-week period. This has never been done before. What's the catch? Can they be good enough?"

She kept asking everybody within earshot if the songs were any good.

Anyone who listens can hear the same attention to detail that's always marked her writing. There's the vivid image of the "company couch covered in plastic" in "Bus to Baton Rouge," a song about her grandmother's house. In "Out of Touch," she expertly captures the awkwardness of a faded friendship: "Making small talk standing face to face," she sings. "Hands in our pockets 'cause we feel so out of place."

The smoldering "Essence" compares sexual desire to a drug addict's need for a fix, culminating explosively in a line that can't be quoted here.

In "Steal Your Love," the lyrics are secondary to the music. That's a lesson Williams learned in writing "Joy" from the last album. She extended that song to lengthy jams that were a highlight of her live performances.
"It was kind of liberating to be able to say, I don't have to do any more with this. I can let it groove and let the music speak besides the words,'" she said.

Williams has never mastered the art of dispassionately making up stories for songs. She doesn't even try. "They're all autobiographical," she said. "Every single word."

One new song, "Broken Butterflies," is about her lost friendship with guitar player Gurf Morlix, a 10-year member of her band with whom she had a falling out while making "Car Wheels."

"I've been struggling with this and hoping that we can mend," she said. "It just hasn't happened yet. It's really talking about people who keep this anger inside of them and can't let it go. I don't know if it will do any good, but it felt good to write it and get it out of my system."

The album has the languid feel of an August day down South - even though it was recorded during the winter in Minneapolis. Williams used Bob Dylan's "Time Out of Mind" as an aural guide, even importing Dylan guitar player Charlie Sexton as a co-producer.

She's pleased to be on the Lost Highway label, which she hopes will help singer-songwriters who tend to get lost amid dance and rap acts at major labels these days.

"It's kind of like a shelter from the storm," she said.

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Here is an interesting interview with Lucinda from Borders.com:
 

Interview
Bus to Baton Rouge: A Conversation with Lucinda Williams
Conducted by Tim Pulice, Borders.com Editorial Coordinator

Growing up with a parent who happens to be a brilliant poet just might be an ideal background for a future singer-songwriter. That's exactly the experience of Lucinda Williams, whose father, Miller Williams (Some Jazz a While: Collected Poems), read one of his poems at President Clinton's second inauguration and once toted his young daughter along on extensive travels away from her childhood Arkansas home to such far-flung destinations as Mexico City and Santiago, Chile. The youngster's musical senses were forever altered upon hearing Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, inspiring her to strap on a guitar at age 12. No-nonsense lyrics, a spellbinding voice, and a passionate performance style quickly earned a 20-something Williams a loyal following and a suitcase full of glowing reviews on early efforts like Happy Woman Blues. But it wasn't until her fifth release, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, earned her the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 1999 that she came fully into the national spotlight.

Williams once again summons up powerful emotions on her latest recording, Essence. In this interview, Williams discusses the pressure that can result from following up one's own success, how her father's advice continues to shape her work, and the difficulties still faced by women in music.

Essence seems much quieter, gentler than Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Was that a conscious decision?

Lucinda Williams: I always approach everything organically and spontaneously, so nothing is ever a conscious decision. [Laughing.] It just ended up being like that. I demo-ed the songs with [guitarist-producer] Bo Ramsey, and it really set the tone for the whole recording. When we listened to them, it was just one of those magical moments, there was something that everybody responded to. When we went in to record the actual CD, we used that as a reference point. We knew we'd captured a certain feeling with all the songs. It was just real spontaneous and organic and we wanted the rest of the record to be like that.

After I did the songs, I was thinking about Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind record. That's one of the reasons that I picked the musicians that appear, like [drummer] Jim Keltner who's worked with Dylan and Neil Young. Charlie Sexton [guitarist-producer] also worked with Dylan. This is the first recording I've done where I had to put a whole new band together from scratch.

Did you feel any pressure to make Essence more successful than Car Wheels?

LW: I felt a lot of pressure, but not from other people. I just put that on myself because of the success of Car Wheels. It did feel intimidating, but I just had to try to battle that as much as I could, not let that get in the way. I was so involved in the last record. I was either in the studio recording it or on the road promoting it during that whole time, and I was also living with someone at the time.

There are two things that happened that created this catalyst for this creative spurt. One was getting off the road, finally, after touring behind Car Wheels for a long time. I could put it to bed and start thinking ahead. And then the breakup of my almost six-year relationship. So there I was, alone in the house, with all the solitude I needed. Any time there's a major life change, it provides a catalyst for creativity, whether it's leaving someone, meeting someone new and falling in love, a death in the family, moving to a new city.

It was exciting to see the songs grow because I had no idea where they were going to go. I didn't tell any of the musicians really what to play because I knew they all had good instincts. There are a lot of spontaneous moments on this record.

Do you have creative bursts or do you try to keep some sort of writing schedule?

LW: I write in what's been identified as a "J curve." You go along a straight line and then there's a little curve at the end. It used to concern me, but now I know if I go awhile and don't write anything, I know that I am going to write again. This had been the longest that I'd gone without writing. I didn't finish anything for five years. I'm always jotting down lines, observing, filing stuff away. It's just that I don't always sit down and apply myself because I have to be in a certain frame of mind. I have to be totally alone. I can't even have anybody in the same house, even if they're in another room.

"Get Right With God" is a very up-tempo, rock-meets-gospel track, and it really stands out on the album. What role does spirituality play in your life?

LW: It plays a real important part in my life. I've been on a spiritual path for as long as I can remember, I've explored different avenues. The man I lived with for five or six years was a Christian. I've become fascinated with this snake-handling Pentecostal religion because of the extreme to which they'll go to prove their faith, handling snakes and drinking strychnine and all the rest.

The song is complex, because, on the one hand, I'm making the statement about the lengths to which people will go to prove their faith. On the other hand, maybe I'm asking myself if I thought that would work, would I do that if I thought that would work. It's a reflection of the Southern gothic motif that I work in, that I explore. And I collect religious folk art from Mexico and Peru, South America, America, real primitive religious folk art. I'm fascinated with all of that. The song is a kind of lyrical folk art painting.

If you look at the lyrics, it's not a born-again Christian song. It's more about that dark side. I decided to start reading the Bible just to educate myself. Both my grandfathers were Methodist ministers but I was raised in an agnostic home. I was free to explore, so I never really read the Bible. I just read bits and pieces of it. I decided, "OK, I'm going to read the Bible." And I got as far as part of the Old Testament. [Laughing.] Jesus isn't in that song, but some people have assumed, "Oh, she's a born-again Christian." I wrote the song and I just wanted people to interpret it in their own way. I almost wish I hadn't put it on the record because people misunderstand it, and I have to explain it all the time.

There's a sense of regional romanticism that runs through your recordings, perhaps because you did a lot of traveling as a child. You mention cities in "Bus to Baton Rouge," "Lafayette," "Jackson," and "Memphis Pearl." What did you learn from that experience? What have you learned from your father?

LW: I grew up around Southern writers, and my father's influence had a lot to do with that. Just being aware of my roots and being aware of where I was from was really important when I was growing up. I think that's sort of a Southern thing maybe, place and family and roots.

I've shown my father all my work over the years. I'd take it to him and he would make suggestions. That's how I learned. It's like a built in creative-writing course, because I never took creative writing officially. I learned just from being around it and listening to him talk. I used to sit in sometimes on his creative-writing classes because he would hold them at the house. I was just in that environment for so long that I learned by trial and error.

What specifically was it about Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited that got you so hooked on music? What else were you listening to?

LW: That was a real pivotal record for me when it came out because it tied together the two worlds I was from, the folk music world and then the creative-writing world. And here was someone who brought the two worlds together.
I also listened to Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, a lot of the Delta blues people, a lot of really obscure stuff. Howlin' Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, everything I could get my hands on.

You make some candid assessments of life and love in your songs. As a songwriter, is every subject fair game?

LW: I like to use sensual things that you can reach out and touch. I like my songs to be very sensual and very organic as opposed to being too cerebral. I want people to actually feel them.

Are you able to have that same energy every night onstage?

LW: I get into these slumps from time to time, but everything I do during the day and night is geared towards the show. Everything I do is to make myself feel better so I can be in good shape and good voice. I just don't do anything else when I'm on the road. I try to get enough sleep, eat right, work out. I don't go out when I'm traveling.

What has your experience been as a female performer in the traditionally male-dominated music industry?

LW: I think it's the same as in any business or any time women assert themselves. I've noticed that a woman asserting herself takes on a different dimension than a man asserting himself. It's that double standard I've come up against. And I didn't notice it as much until my profile started increasing during the making of Car Wheels.

Suddenly, I was being labeled a perfectionist, hard to handle, and all this other stuff and I found myself with these battles, these stressful situations. I couldn't figure out where it was all coming from. Why am I having to deal with this?

And I realized it's because I'm dealing with all men and I'm a woman. It's just sort of the way men have been conditioned, the way women have been conditioned. I have a tendency to back down and let myself be intimidated instead of standing up and asserting myself. Most men have a tendency to be more controlling. It's just all of those elements coming together when you're all trying to work together and make a record.

It's not so much the logistics of not getting paid as much; it's just the personality conflicts. I was raised in a very open environment where I was encouraged to pursue a career. I wasn't necessarily encouraged to get married and have children unless I wanted to do that. I was encouraged to pick something and do something with it. So it never occurred to me that I couldn't do whatever I wanted. I didn't think there would be any stumbling blocks. And there really haven't been in terms of my ability to get ahead. It's just been more the interpersonal relationships between men and women that have created some problems. And that's the stuff that everybody deals with all the time.

There've been so many books written about this and it's probably never going to change.

Copyright © 2001 by Borders, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Steve from Canada sent in this report about the two shows he saw in Northampton & Montreal:

Northampton was a weird experience.  The Calvin is a nice theatre and absolutely my first show from this tour, live or recorded, so no idea what to expect   Lu came out and started with three 'Car Wheels' songs. What the hell, she has a new album.  Seemed to me that the new band was trying to recreate the sound and content of the previous tour.  Later, with the new songs and even on the older, they did put their own mark on the performances, esp. Bo and his slide.  But still, with the long jam on 'Joy', seemed too much like past history.  They coulda found another
track to open up.  And she played for only 90 minutes.  Could not believe she was done.  Show was nearly all 'Car Wheels' and 'Essence' songs; only one from another album and one misc.

Afterwards I joined about a dozen others to see Lucinda.  Soon was asked if I had a backstage pass and said no.  Was told to speak to Steve, the tour manger who duly appeared.  Told him my story: big fan, 12 shows last tour, she knows me a bit but not by name.  He would not let me in. Lu who was completely accessible last tour now has a gate-keeper; shit.

Montreal was a much better experience.  The Spectrum is a typical rock club, with a big open are in front of the stage today packed with standees. Her first words were something like 'wow, thanks for packing in like that'. Though the main set was nearly identical with Northampton, she played three more songs in the encore.  Did not attempt backstage access this time.  Seems she really prefers the clubs.  Spoke to a friend who was at the Toronto show in stately Massey Hall; back to 90 min set. Fellow posted today about Cincy shows with the same observation.

The tour shirts mark 2001-2002 as dates.  I fervently hope Lu returns to our area and soon!
Steve
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Lucinda's show in Columbus, Ohio was favorably reviewed the next day:

WILLIAMS MESMERIZES WITH SEDUCTIVE SHOW
Tuesday, June 26, 2001
By Curtis Schieber For The Dispatch, Columbus, Ohio

Lucinda Williams delights a sold-out crowd at the Southern Theatre.

The vivid images in Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels On A Gravel Road wafted out over an enthralled sold-out crowd in the Southern Theatre last night, reinforcing the critical raves that the album of the same title garnered the singer- songwriter in 1998.

Simple as a casual glance, they ache with memory and are anchored in the near-perfect poetry of the title.
Williams sent out many more such graceful snapshots during a slow-paced set that sometimes bubbled over with energy.

Several other selections displayed the sensuality that also marks much of her best work on Car Wheels and this summer's terrific follow-up: Essence.

Williams drew Right In Time from the previous recording, anteing-up to the song's smoldering sexuality and raising it by exploiting the raspiness of her "road voice,'' as she called it. The title track from the new collection achieved the same effect. The singer didn't avoid the profanity that has kept only an edited version of the single on many radio stations and emphasized the metaphor of sensual love and drug addiction.

Though she played it safe with her song selection and the band only extended a few arrangements, Williams electrified most of the songs from the inside. In fact, her ability to light her performance, which stuck to a very narrow range of tempos (slow and slower), was uncanny. It fired up the three chords of Changed the Locks and brought the dreamy Blue to poetic heights.

Only the dirgey-est material -- the lazy, jam band-like Are You Down, for example -- suffered significantly. Williams' delivery of an unmatched sense of tragedy and eroticism kept even the most lagging moments engaging. If country- rock figurehead Gram Parsons were alive today and were female, he might sound like Williams.

Kasey Chambers, who opened the concert with an impressive set of country, cowboy and neo-trad rock, fit the bill perfectly. The Australian's ease with American traditions illustrated how similar the effect her country's wide-open spaces is to our own heritage.

Chambers shined for an audience full of Williams' fanatics, performing songs such as Cry Like A Baby and the wonderful We're All Gonna Die Someday with abundant character.

With a sparkling delivery and the help of guitarist-father Bill, she left more than a few jaws hanging and won a standing ovation.

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 Rolling Stone had an interview with Lucinda in their issue dated July 19:
 
The Essence of Lucinda

Lucinda Williams talks about her new album and wonders just what got thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Lucinda Williams is lunching in downtown Austin, a quick drive and half a lifetime away from the spot, near the University of Texas campus, where she sang on the street in the 1970s. A good day's take was twenty bucks. "I wouldn't want to be starting out now," she says. "It's tougher. I see a jadedness in kids. It's not cool to have a sense of wonder, to be, like, 'Wow.' " Williams, 48, is especially aglow today, packing a fine new roots-pop album in Essence, written in a burst of candor last year after the end of a relationship. Williams took five years to make 1998's Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. But she cut the basic tracks for Essence in a week, with members of Bob Dylan's and Neil Young's bands. "Not a recommended way to work," she says of writing right after emotional rupture. "I haven't been successful at being in a relationship and being creative. I have to bring the two together."

How did Charlie Sexton and Tony Garnier manage to get time off from touring with Dylan to do Essence?

I had to get a band together. I was thinking, "Who's playing with Dylan and Neil Young?" Because those are the best bands.

Don't go for the unemployed, right?

I figured I could just borrow 'em. I'd worked with Charlie before. Jim Keltner's name came up - he was out with Neil. I knew Tony from living in New York City. All of them had one week available, this little window of opportunity. We cut fourteen tracks in six days.

Is it true that, while writing, you didn't leave the house for two weeks?

All I did was go out to eat at the end of the day - maybe call a friend: "Want to get some dinner?" You get up, make coffee, start writing. I enjoyed it. Then I started playing the demos for close friends, getting reactions. A couple of people said, "Why don't you just put the demos out?" People say that because they're always complaining that I take so long [between records]. I proved them wrong this time.

Where do you write?

My kitchen table, with a little tape recorder and all the notes that I've ever written and never throw away. When I write, I pull everything out and see if something happens. If it doesn't, I put it aside, get it out later and try again.
When do you know it's right?

I cry. It's very cathartic. Like "Bus to Baton Rouge." There's a darkness to it. I didn't put it all in there. You have to read between the lines: "There are other things I remember as well/But to tell them would just be too hard." Nobody's written the definitive Lucinda Williams story, because I'm very protective of my family.

You have a song on the album, "Get Right With God." As a native Southerner, did you grow up in the church?

Both of my grandfathers were Methodist ministers, but my parents got away from that. We went to the Unitarian church. But I grew up with an appreciation of the Bible as a wonderful piece of literature, tradition and ritual. And I didn't grow up with a traditional standard for women - getting married and having a family. I was allowed to explore.

The irony of country music today is that lyrically it ignores the very stories that define the Southern experience.
Country music is watered down, whitewashed. My favorite period of country music was the 1960s. It was about the gritty things: infidelity, car crashes. Like "Ode to Billie Joe" - what did she really throw off the Tallahatchie Bridge?

If you wrote with less darkness and more sugar, do you think you'd get that big country-radio hit?

There was one artist interested in covering "I Just Wanted to See You So Bad" [from 1988's Lucinda Williams]. She said that if I could magically add a chorus to the song, she would consider it. My response was, basically, you can kiss my Dixie white ass.

People won't cut my songs in Nashville, except the brave ones. Patty Loveless recorded "The Night's Too Long." Tony Brown, her producer, said "they" even had a problem with that one, whoever "they" is. That's the thing about Nashville. "They" is always someone else: "We're artist-oriented. It's 'they' who are the problem." No one cops to it.

I've heard that you don't like to fly. Do you have a fear of flying, or do you just not like airplanes?

Both [laughs]. I mean, who likes it, sitting there, closed up? I like the solitude of driving. The phone's not ringing off the hook. I've written songs while driving. I wrote "Joy" [from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road] driving to see my folks in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

We moved around a lot when I was growing up. My dad was teaching. We would be a year here, a year there, which is the way it is when you're a young college professor. I feel comfortable in a hotel or motel. I'm always writing letters and sending postcards.

That's very old-school.

I don't have e-mail. I already get so much mail I can't handle it. I called this guy the other night. I tried to leave a message, and there was no machine. I couldn't believe it. Later, I got him and said, "I tried to call you, but I couldn't leave a message." He said, "I figure if people want me, they can find me." There was something refreshing about that.

DAVID FRICKE
(RS 873 - July 19, 2001)