Lucinda Williams's new, autobiographical album is her finest, writesNigel Williamson.
'I've never understood people who make one or two great records when they start their careers and then that's the end of it," says Lucinda Williams. "Poets don't even get to be respected until they're into their 50s and they've honed their craft. It's odd that pop music goes the other way. But it never occurred to me that I wasn't going to go on getting better."
And Williams should know, for, at 50, she has just made what most critics agree is the record of her life. World Without Tears is only the seventh album from the US singer-songwriter in 25 years. And this week, after several previous visits were cancelled because of her fear of flying, she is bringing it across the Atlantic in her first headlining concerts over here.
We're sitting in Austin, Texas, where she is sharing a bill with Willie Nelson at the South by South-West festival. Despite reaching her half-century, she still looks rock 'n' roll in black leather pants, a low-cut vest revealing a two-headed snake tattooed on her left arm, and dyed blond hair. A white cowboy hat rests on the table alongside empty beer bottles.
It's easy to see why she was recently dubbed the female Keith Richards, and her music reflects a potent mix of influences, from Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix via Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn to the Rolling Stones and The Doors. And yet Williams also boasts a phalanx of heavyweight intellectual admirers among the US literary elite.
It is the delicious paradox of the earthy and the literary that lies at the heart of Williams's appeal. Her lyrics are among the most poetic in contemporary music. And yet many of her best songs drip with a raw sexuality. Right In Time, the opening track from her breakthrough 1998 Grammy-winning album, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, found her lying on her back and "moaning at the ceiling". They were going to make a video, but her record company dropped the notion when she insisted on acting out the lyric.
Several of the songs on World Without Tears are even more graphic. "When you run your hand all up and run it back down my leg, get me all worked up like that," she sings on Righteously. Williams is acutely aware of the juxtaposition of the literary and the overtly sexual. "I feel brave about that stuff. I'm an older woman now and, hopefully, as you get older you become less self-conscious as an artist," she says.
One of the key influences on her youthful songwriting was hearing Leonard Cohen's Chelsea Hotel No 2, in which he memorably described a woman, allegedly Janis Joplin, "giving me head on the unmade bed". "I thought that line was so amazing and beautiful. Poets don't censor themselves, and all my favourite writers are like that. I was influenced by the beat poets and the Southern writers like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. And they all had those two sides to them. It's graphic rather than pornographic. But it's beautiful, you know? Everyone's always asking me about it, like it's something shocking."
Williams's literary credentials are as impeccable as her rock 'n' roll image. Her father is the poet and lecturer Miller Williams. When she was growing up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, he sat down every night after dinner and wrote a poem. From the earliest age she was used to the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski visiting the family home, and her godfather is George Haley, brother of the author Alex Haley.
By six, she was writing poems and short stories. Before she was into her teens, she had discovered folk music and was listening to Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and playing her first tentative chords on the guitar. Then, in 1965, she heard Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. "That was a revelation, because suddenly those two worlds that I was interested in came together: the folk-music world and the literary world. He fused them, and it blew my mind for ever."
In 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, she was thrown out of school for refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag. "To me that was just normal. I had to do it. How could you not? I was very involved in all the anti-Vietnam War and civil-rights activity. It was in my family."
Her father's response to this interruption in her education was to give his daughter a reading list of 100 books, ranging from The Iliad to One Hundred Years Of Solitude. She devoured them all before she left home a year later, at 17, for the bars of New Orleans and a life as an itinerant musician. Yet there was almost three decades of struggle before she tasted success. After putting out a couple of unspectacular albums, she spent much of the 1980s waitressing and working in a record store. It took 20 years for her first four albums to be released.
She once claimed she could not write songs when she was in a steady relationship and that she had to wait for bad love to turn rotten. "The songs are all true stories, and they're pretty autobiographical. I have to have been there in order to be able to write about it," she says. Most of her boyfriends, if her songs are to be believed, have been handsome, freewheeling rogues. She admits there has been an element of dysfunction in all her relationships. Otherwise, she says, she would still be in them. "I'm either in some kind of chaotic, confusing relationship or I've allowed someone to move into my life and lost myself in that. And then I don't write, and I'm fighting like a wild animal to get out of this cage I feel I'm in. Because if I don't write, I might as well be dead."
Unsurprisingly, there are very few happy songs in her repertoire. "Because it's hard to be happy. Especially the way society has gone. The world doesn't support happiness at the moment," she says, referring to the war in Iraq. Yet she remains oddly optimistic about the prospect of change in both the political landscape and in her tempestuous personal life. "You have to keep the faith. That's the role of the artist. And I'm trying to find a happy medium where I can be in a really great relationship and still be creative. I've yet to find a way of doing it. But I haven't given up."
Lucinda Williams plays the Olympia, Dublin, on Thursday. World Without Tears is on Lost Highway
