Both critics and fans alike revere Lucinda Williams for her songwriting; she regularly appears on lists of the best songwriters, be it currently living Americans or in the history of (recorded) popular music. The grit that characterizes her music, drawing widely from the Southern traditions of blues, country, folk, and rock & roll, is a reflection of the musician.
Now in her 70s, Williams released new music as frequently as she has in her long career, even after recovering from a series of strokes. In her recent performance at the 9:30 Club, Lucinda held the crowd in the palm of her hand with a raw, politically charged set that drew from across her catalog, accompanied by great stories and her eloquent, dry wit.
Earlier this year, Williams released World’s Gone Wrong, her most explicitly political album to date. The title clearly borrows from World Gone Wrong by Bob Dylan, her principal influence as a songwriter and musician. But tackling politics isn’t new for her: On Sept. 30, her set included an older song, “West Memphis.” She wrote it after watching the documentary West of Memphis, about the West Memphis Three, three teenagers in West Memphis, Arkansas, who were convicted in 1994 of murdering three eight-year-old boys the previous year, and who were eventually exonerated in 2011.
Before she dug into her new material, Williams started her set with a couple of fan favorites: “Can’t Let Go,” written by Randy Weeks, and the title track of her 1998 Grammy Award-winning album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. I can relate to her memory of her father (the noted poet Miller Williams) saying, “When I get home this room better be picked up.” My father was very much the same; he didn’t understand that small children’s minds can’t really conceive of the future that way. When he came and I hadn’t picked up, he would explode at me (I was his designated target) like Mt. St. Helens. The man never laid a finger on me, but it took years of living away from home before I stopped imagining I was hearing him yelling at me.
Watch Lucinda Williams perform “Can’t Let Go” live for Later with Jools Holland on YouTube:
After playing “Bad News Blues,” she introduced “World’s Gone Wrong” by saying “music does help lift us up.” She added, “I had to write these songs with all the insanity around us.”Williams set the scene for “Lowlife,” describing “a little bar in New Orleans, probably in the quarter, with a good jukebox, where the bartender makes hurricanes.” She clarified that “hurricanes” in the song refers “to the drink, not the storm,” then quipped, “but they kind of overlap,” which was rather funny in a dry way.
The set rolled on with the classic, oft-covered (by Waxahachee, Margaret Glaspy, and others) “Fruits of My Labor” and the reggae-inflected “So Much Trouble in the World.” Williams dedicated the double-shot of “Man Without a Soul” and a cover of pioneering country-blueswoman Memphis Minnie’s “You Can’t Rule Me” to “the man in the White House.” Fittingly, the next song was “Pray the Devil Back to Hell.”
After “Out of Touch,” Williams introduced her band, and then they covered George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Between “Essence” and “Honeybee,” she apologized that the adorable small child in front of the stage would be hearing profanity. The band started to play “Joy,” but Lucinda stopped them to tell a charming story about another little kid who sang mangled versions of her songs.
When she came out for her encore, Williams told the audience that, with “some of the songs, you can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” then sang “We’ve Come Too Far to Turn Back Now.” She ended the show with “How Much Did You Get For Your Soul?”
While she hasn’t been able to play guitar since her strokes, Williams’s voice sounds as good as it has in some time. Her band was spectacular, too, and the songs, as always were fantastic. This was the second of two nights in DC — she played the Lincoln Theatre on Sept. 29 — but she was as invigorated, energetic, and passionate as ever, delivering songs full of honesty and heart with the grace of a poet.
