Lucinda Williams: Memoir and Album On the Way

Here's new single with Springsteen, excerpts from her book and some of her classic songs from the past.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books and now writer/director of award-winning films, including this one coming to PBS stations in May. He was also a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy.

Have been a major Lucinda Williams fan boy going back well over 30 years so it’s exciting to anticipate her new memoir (pre-ordered for next week) and album (Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart) coming June 30, see first track “New York Comeback” above, featuring Bruce Springsteen on the choruses. The memoir should be exceedingly rich, not just considering her long rocky road to “instant stardom” with Car Wheels but her slightly gothic family history with troubled Mom and well-respected poet and activist Dad. The New York Times had a lengthy profile on Sunday. A few highlights from that below, and then half a dozen earlier Lu videos. Enjoy, then please subscribe, it’s still free—and now with added Twitter-like “Notes” at Substack!

From Sunday’s NY Times:

She writes of the Hollywood director hired to make a video for “Right in Time,” the languid ballad about a woman’s desire from the “Car Wheels” album. As she recounts, he arrived for dinner at a restaurant thoroughly drunk before propositioning her, sloppily, while her boyfriend was in the bathroom. When she found his idea for the video corny, she sent him packing. She goes on to tell the story of the six-year odyssey to get the album made — the setbacks caused by vacillating record company executives and her dogged commitment to her own high standards. For her troubles, Ms. Williams was labeled a perfectionist, which, for a woman in a male-dominated industry, was not a compliment.

And:

In 1994, when she won a Grammy thanks to Mary Chapin Carpenter’s hit version of her song “Passionate Kisses,” she was too nervous to attend the ceremony. Rosanne Cash had sent her to a Nashville boutique for an outfit, but she bailed at the last minute. “The truth is I was not just self-conscious, but also scared,” she writes in the memoir. “I feared that I didn’t belong. It’s a feeling I’ve been trying to shake my entire life. It’s a riddle I believe many artists have been trying to solve for centuries. It takes enormous fortitude to create the work in the first place, but then once it’s time to put it out in the world, the confidence required to go public is unrelated to the audacity that created the work.”

She managed to make it to the Grammy ceremony in 1999, when “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” was honored as the year’s best folk album. But when her name was called, she found herself walking away from the stage. Mr. Earle, who was up for the same award, yelled out to her, as she told it: “‘Lulu! You’re going the wrong way!’ I was horrified. God. Thanks, Steve!”

And finally:

As Ms. Williams’s fame grew, so did the dedication of her fans. She writes of the woman who began masturbating at a show in New Orleans and kept at it even as she was removed by security. When Ms. Williams and her band heard the story after their set, they were fascinated, as she recalled: “Was she wearing pants? How did it work?”

Now some music:

Loved her first appearance on Austin City Limits 1989, with “I Just Wanted to See You So Bad,” about the time I became a fanboy.

After Car Wheels became album of the year she was back on ACL with “Right on Time.”

In her book she reveals that her father read or heard the lyrics to the sex-drenched “Essence” and told it was real poetry. She asked him if that meant she had “graduated.”

A real treasure: Obscure, early demos with some songs that became well-known later.

Her classic “Sweet Old World,” with Emmylou and Neil Young

An alternate, perhaps superior, version of “Still I Long for Your Kiss”

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