LUCINDA
LUCINDA
WILLIAMS
WILLIAMS
Don't Give Up
By Tom Lanham
photos by Danny Clinch
M
any artists — when looking back
on their catalogs — often wish
that they could have done better,
compositionally speaking. Hindsight, of
course, is 20/20. But when Grammy-win-
ning folk-rocker Lucinda Williams under-
took her comprehensive tour last year, cel-
ebrating the 20th anniversary of her land-
mark third Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
effort, she never once reflected on the work
with anything but fondness. Twangy
anthems like “Drunken Angel,” “Right in
Time,” “Concrete and Barbed Wire,” and
the loping title track, she assays, “Are still
really good songs. So I was probably think-
ing the opposite — looking back on some
of ‘em and thinking, ‘Damn! I need to write
something like that again!’” Mission
accomplished.
The
Louisiana-born
singer’s latest disc, Good Souls Better
Angels — co-produced by Ray Kennedy
and her husband/manager of eleven
years, Tom Overby — is a venomous, feral-
fanged scorcher, and a clear-eyed commen-
tary on our crumbling, climate-change-
denying society, which has quite possibly
doomed itself to extinction.
Inflamed by the callous, tone-deaf
Trump administration — whose every
stealthy boardroom move seems to have
been anti-humanity — a snarling, gravel-
drawled Williams tears flesh from corrupt-
ed bone in the bluesy indictments of
“Shadows and Doubts,” “Big Black Train,”
“Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” and the self-
explanatory lead single, “Man Without a
Soul,” which she co-wrote with her spouse.
On the chugging “Bone of Contention,”
she curses naysayers with “Evil bastards
— go back to your grave,” while “Man”
rhetorically inquires, “Evil villain without
dignity and grace/ How do you think this
story ends?” Only on the chipper country-
rocking “When the Way Gets Dark” does
she shine some lyrical light into the cloudy
sundown, and it resounds through “Souls”
22 illinoisentertainer.com may 2020
like a call to arms: “Don’t give up/ You
have a reason to carry on.” It’s a defiant,
resolutely focused achievement — written
pre-coronavirus pandemic — that’s just
what the doctor ordered for these turbu-
lent times. It will stand in her already-
impressive career with the same zeitgeist-
encompassing gravity as Springsteen’s
post-9/11 treatise “The Rising” did back in
2002. “Some of Car Wheels was more nar-
rative and personal and all,” notes
Williams, 67, who also was so inspired by
the script for Liz Garbus’ new missing-
children film Lost Girls that she penned the
song “Lost Girl” expressly for the project.
“But with this one? I was just in a certain
mood.”
ILLINOIS ENTERTAINER: Do you wish
that there was a Quinn Martin clause in
your contract so that you can add one of
their traditional “epilogs” (sic) as a dark
coronavirus postscript?
LUCINDA WILLIAMS: Ha. Yeah, it’s
almost Biblical, you know? Tom and I were
talking about it a little while ago while we
were making coffee, and he was joking —
and we joke and laugh, but it’s not funny
anymore —he was joking, “Well, we’ve got
a plague now….” We’re in Nashville right
now, so we’ve got the tornadoes. And I
said, “What’s next? The locusts? It’s just
surreal. And then you add in the whole
political climate, and it’s all just unprece-
dented.
IE: Green Day just released a tremendous
social-commentary album called Father of
All Motherfuckers. You can guess the ref-
erence.
LW: Ha! I know! You HAVE to. I’m just
relieved that I have this outlet, you know?
People have been asking me, “Well, what
made you decide to write these kinds of
songs right now?” And I’m like, ‘Come
on!” I grew up listening to Phil Ochs and
Bob Dylan, and I always wanted to write
those kinds of songs. And a lot of the rock
bands, too — everybody back then was
writing songs about what was going on,
and nobody said that then. I still can’t peo-
ple are saying that about it now. If we’re
doing this kind of music — folk-rock or
whatever you want to call it — to me, it’s
all about being pissed off. Everybody’s
mad. We’re all mad and frustrated. And
I’m an artist, first and foremost, so what is
art for if it’s not for self-expression? I
mean, maybe if it was a different style of
music, like Frank Sinatra in Vegas or some-
thing. Which is all fine and good — I love
Frank Sinatra. But that’s not what I’m
doing, you know? See, this is the problem
— people just get so complacent. That’s
why we’re in this mess right now. Get
pissed off! Express yourself!
IE: Was there one annoying incident that
first the match to this powderkeg?
LW: Maybe one of the first songs was
“You Can’t Rule Me.” I actually adapted
that from a Memphis Minnie song of the
same title, and she was writing about her
man, you can’t rule ME and all this. But I
took it and put different lyrics in and kind
of put a different spin on it, and added
some other stuff to fit. I’ve been trying to
write some songs like this over the last few
years. Back when I was writing the songs
for Blessed, that’s when it really first start-
ed, and it’s all tied together with meeting
Tom and finding my soulmate and getting
engaged. Now here’s another insane thing.
When all that was going down, when the
Little Honey album was coming out, I’m
doing press for that, and these are the
kinds of questions I was being asked —
‘Do you think that you’ll still be able to
write songs now that you’re in this rela-
tionship?’ And I’m dumbfounded and try-
ing to figure out a way to respond, and it’s
pissing me off. And I’m going, “What? I’m
an artist! I’m not gonna die. My arts not
gonna die because I’m in a relationship
with someone, I’m gonna be with him for
the rest of my life. But you’re actually ask-
ing me if I’ll still gonna be able to write?”
So that was happening, and I’m thinking,
“You know what? I’m gonna have to try
and write songs about something besides
unrequited love.” Which I’d wanted to do
anyway because I always wanted to do
what Bob Dylan used to do — just read an
article in a paper and write a song about it,
like “Hurricane.” I always wanted to be
able to do that, to get outside myself a little
bit. So all of this was happening at the
same time, and it really pissed me off. So I
was like, “I want to start writing about dif-
ferent things. So I AM gonna start writing
about different things.” So I was being
challenged, in a way, because people were
like, “Oh, is she sill gonna be able to write
good songs now that she’s in this commit-
ted relationship?” They were falling for
that myth, that a relationship is gonna kill
your art. And I have seen it happen with
other artists — they make two or three
great albums, and then they don’t do the
same anymore.
I don’t know why that happens with
other people, but it wasn’t going to happen
to me. So that’s where it started with me,
and when you go back to the Blessed
album, you can see that it was beginning to
happen with songs like “Soldier’s Song,”
which, to me, is an anti-war song. And it
kind of grew from there. And at the same
time, the political climate is getting worse
and worse, so I was getting more frustrat-
ed and angrier — as we all are — so it was
just a natural transition. Like I said, I’d
always been an admirer of great topical
songs. And they’re not easy to write — oth-
erwise, I would have been doing it before.
An unrequited love song is much easier to
write.
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