Lucinda Williams has been sleep-talking more than usual. One night last week, she dreamed that Mormons invaded her house, converted her friends and stole her possessions. That wasn’t the issue: “They were all sitting next to each other, and I said: ‘Don’t you understand, you’re supposed to be quarantined!’” Williams laughs, her laconic outlaw baritone spilling into a surprising giggle. Her husband and manager, Tom Overby, told her she had grown agitated in her sleep. She thinks it came from the nightly TV marathons that have become their new lockdown routine, staying up until 5am watching the Jewish drama Unorthodox, “only in my dream they came out as Mormons”.
Wiggy dreams are a quarantine staple, but Williams has had a lot to process lately. She and Overby only recently moved to Nashville and don’t yet have any furniture. No sooner had they arrived than a tornado hit the city, taking part of their roof with it. Then coronavirus killed two old friends: Hal Willner, who produced Williams’s 2007 album, West, and the country musician John Prine. She last saw Prine in November when she played his festival in the Dominican Republic. “It’s been insane,” she says in disbelief, calling from her home.
Now aged 67, Williams has written often about death in her 40-year career: songs such as Pineola, Sweet Old World, Lake Charles and Drunken Angel have become alt-country classics, often depicting complex men who might otherwise easily be reduced to caricature. That familiarity doesn’t soften the losses. “I think that’s why I write about death,” she says, her gorgeous accent kneading every vowel, “because it’s so hard to deal with.” The subject features less on her new album, Good Souls Better Angels, although you could say it deals with worse fates: shame, depression, the uncanny horror of watching despots crush the values you hold dear.
Williams’s career renaissance started with 2014’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, yet Good Souls is yet another cut above: flinty garage blues that foregrounds the punk spirit Rough Trade recognised when the British label elevated her from relative obscurity with her 1988 self-titled third album. Now releasing her first collection of what she calls “topical” songs, she has been baffled by critics asking why she wrote them (“Because I’m frustrated and angry”), or remarking on how “prophetic” Bad News Blues and Man Without a Soul (namely Trump) feel, mid-pandemic. Williams isn’t psychic, just attuned to injustice: she keeps suitcases of unused lyrics dating back to the 1970s and weaves them through her writing. “There’s always been something going on in this country to rebel against and be pissed off about,” she says.
Still, Williams says Trump is “different than anything I’ve ever experienced in my entire lifetime”. She knew “all the racism and the intolerance and the bigotry” that he represents was part of the American psyche, “but I thought it had been suppressed to some degree, or that we had some control over it”. Trump gave people of that mindset “permission in a subliminal way to come on out of the closet,” she says. “‘You can hate, you can get your guns and your anger.’” She’s reeling from discovering, via a fractious Facebook thread about Man Without a Soul, that she has fans who are Trump supporters. “That’s just incongruous,” she says. “How can those things go together?” Their comments kept her awake one night, although she ultimately found them validating. “It feels good to rebel. To tell you the honest truth, I don’t mind pushing people’s buttons, y’know? I like to get a reaction out of people.”
Williams is no cheap rabble-rouser: it is her insistence on compassion and complexity that is provocative. There is pity even in Man Without a Soul. On the new song Wakin’ Up, she reflects on an abusive relationship she was in around 2003. “Pulled the kitchen chair out from under me / He pulled my hair and then he kicks me / Next thing I swear, he wants to kiss on me,” she rasps over choppy guitar. “I used to judge women who were in these abusive, horrible relationships,” she admits. “And now here I was in the same situation. You just kinda numb yourself. It’s easy when you love the person.” Drunk on whiskey, that boyfriend would fly into violent rages that he forgot the next day. Then he started shooting heroin and cocaine. “It just got worse and worse until one night, he actually said: ‘You need to get out.’ He snapped-to long enough to realise what he was doing. So I totally understand the whole battered-woman syndrome; it’s not black and white.”
That perspective fuels Shadows & Doubts, a song billed in publicity as confronting “our quick-to-judge, social-media-led society”. I ask Williams if she had a specific situation in mind. For the first time, she is hesitant, outlining a situation whereby a male celebrity that she knows was accused of sexual harassment, but insisting the song should be “more universal or open to interpretation”. I am surprised that she’s surprised when I guess correctly that it’s Ryan Adams: he played on her 2001 album Essence and she wrote about his troubles – well documented before last year’s accusations of sexual harassment (which he denies) – on Little Rock Star, from 2008’s Little Honey.
“Look, I know Ryan, and I know he’s fucked up a lot of things,” she says plainly. “He’s one of those people who you can love but he can also piss you off. God knows he’s made enough mistakes.” She says the song is not about the sexual allegations. “This is looking at somebody who basically fucked things up and trying to deal with seeing that person in that place but still being concerned about them. I still love Ryan. Do I agree with what he did? No. I’m not trying to say: ‘Oh, poor Ryan, he was all misunderstood.’ I’m just taking the situation and turning it into a song, but I think you can apply it to different things. I don’t want this to seem like I’m completely defending his actions.”
She is aghast that I might name him when she didn’t, but I explain that I don’t think her position is unreasonable: justice requires rehabilitation, even for the likes of Harvey Weinstein. “Well, I agree,” she says. “And the other thing is, it’s an illness. It’s very taboo but it’s another form of mental illness, and they need help.” We talk about how the social urge to shame can be rooted in fear of our own worst instincts, prompting Williams to raise her love of Freud. “We all have the ability to go over the edge,” she says. “My father used to describe it, like when a real close friend of the family committed suicide, as: we’re all standing around the edge of this deep, dark well and some people jump or fall and others don’t. We’re all faced with the same temptations.”
Williams attributes her compassion to her childhood. Her mother, Lucille, experienced manic depression with paranoid schizophrenic tendencies. She was medicated with lithium in Williams’s early years, leaving the three children mostly in the care of their father, the noted poet Miller Williams (he read at Bill Clinton’s 1997 inauguration). “From the time I was very young, my father would take me aside and say: ‘It’s not your mother’s fault, she’s not well,’” she says. “I learned at an early age not to expect her to be a mother in the way that a traditional mother was supposed to be. But, thank God, I had my father to bond with. I think that’s what saved me from an early age.”
Miller introduced his daughter to a world of writers; as a child, she chased Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks around her garden. That was what attracted her mother to him when they met at Louisiana State University. Miller’s cultured background was the antithesis to her repressive, religious household (“Probably somewhat abusive, too,” says Williams). Lucille studied music, specifically piano, but largely dropped it when she married and had children. “To this day, I still don’t know what my mother’s dreams were,” says Williams. “If she saw herself as a professional musician or not.”
After her parents split when she was 12, it was at Lucille’s apartment in New Orleans that Williams heard Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen for the first time. She started gigging age 18, moving frequently between southern cities (plus a stint in New York). There was sometimes a piano in the apartment when she visited her mother. “When she would get into these states where she didn’t feel good about herself – maybe she wasn’t on her medication – she would get rid of her piano,” says Williams. “She would say something like: ‘I just couldn’t be around it any more’, almost as if the piano came to represent something that either caused great joy or complete anxiety. But then she would inevitably get another piano and then she would get happy again.” Williams saw the cycle play out several times. “But she never really talked about it more than that. Did it remind her of what she didn’t accomplish? What was it?”
When Lucille was well, she would get dressed up to see her daughter play live, “and she was just overjoyed”. After her mother’s death in 2004, Williams wasn’t left with much: just her psychology paperbacks (“She could talk to you about that all day”) and notebooks. “I ran across something she had written in one of her darker moments,” she recalls. “She would shift into this place where she would be angry and almost kinda paranoid. And I saw something she’d written down. It said: ‘I’m tired of living in Miller and Cindy’s shadow.’ See, I was called Cindy when I was growing up. Imagine seeing that written by your mother.”
How did it make her feel? “Sad,” she says plainly, “just sad.” Her voice cracks, then she says, warmly: “I feel like I’m gonna cry!” I apologise, but she says: “No, it’s good!” Williams takes antidepressants for depression and anxiety, although she has never felt alienated from her music. The opposite: she recalls a boy asking her, after a gig in the 90s, how she wrote songs. “I said: you have to go down into this deep, dark well and bring it back up and write about it.” He looked at her, dismayed. “He goes: ‘I can’t do that!’ It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard. He was aware enough to know that he wasn’t able to deal with the demons. It occurred to me: I guess that’s how the majority of people live, which is part of the problem with humankind and society. They’re all living on the surface.”
Even for someone inclined to self-excavation, Williams has been involved in an intense dig recently: she made Good Souls, spent two years touring her classic 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, and is writing a memoir. “Gaahd!” she laughs. “It’s exhausting!” It’s important to her to tell a true, vanishing southern gothic story – especially since watching her father succumb to Alzheimer’s in 2015 – and to bear witness when, as she sings on the new album track Big Rotator, today we so often see “stories fabricated, history manipulated”. Her optimism abides in spite of that. She always remembers something her father told her as a child: “Never lose your sense of wonder,” she says. “I feel very grateful to have inherited that. I feel like I’m still the same person. I haven’t gotten jaded or cynical. I feel bad for people who get that way – it’s a horrible way to live.”
Although she was in for Bernie Sanders, she believes that Joe Biden can beat Trump in November (“Vote blue no matter who”). And she is moved by a new generation of songwriters naming her as an influence, among them Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, whose sublime new album bears Williams’s imprint. “I have to remind myself that I’m at that age now,” she says. “I kind of forget sometimes cos I’m out there playing on the road still, just chugging along like I always have been, right alongside them.”
Good Souls Better Angels is out on 24 April
