LUCINDA WILLIAMS COUNTSHERBLESSINGS BY JEWLY HIGHT PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANNY CLINCH At the time of this writing, Lucinda Williams is up for another Grammy, only she’s nominated in a category she’s never won before. This one has nothing to do with musical genre – Americana, folk, country or otherwise – and every- thing to do with where the songs in it have been used; that is, on the big screen or, in her case, on the small one. 48 AMERICAN SONGWRITER MARCH | APRIL 2011 MARCH | APRIL 2011 AMERICAN SONGWRITER 49 Her sensual, bewitched bal- show’s hosts and stood up for her lad “Kiss Like Your Kiss” is the song during the on-air interview. twelfth and final track on her “I said, ‘Everybody says it’s new album, Blessed. But it had such a dark song, but my music its recorded debut a year ago – in was influenced by all those old a version shaded with Elvis Child ballads that were so dark. Costello’s harmonies – during What about Johnny Cash’s ver- season three, episode eight of sion of “Long Black Veil”? Or the blockbuster southern gothic [the murder ballad] “Barbara vampire drama True Blood. Allen”? Especially the ones Williams may have passed where he [the almost always the thirty-year mark in her male murderer] takes her [the recording career, but this is new more often than not female vic- territory for her. Valuing artistic tim] out to the middle of the control the way she does, she woods and stabs her and blood hasn’t been one to give use of runs down her breasts.’ They her songs before she’s presented couldn’t really argue.” them to the world in the con- As for Williams’ True Blood text of her albums, though songs experience years later, there from her albums have been were no ruffled tail feathers on licensed for dozens of films and either side. The show’s music T.V. shows. Plus, sticking to her supervisor had used her song guns the way she has for authen- “Lake Charles” – from her 1998 ticity’s sake hasn’t always made breakthrough Car Wheels on a for such a comfortable fit on tel- Gravel Road – in an earlier sea- evision. son, and he wanted something There was the time, in the brand new from her pen. early ‘90s, when she went on the “He picked that one, ‘Kiss perky country music chat show Like Your Kiss,’ for obvious rea- Crook & Chase prepared to per- sons – the vampire kisses,” she form a song from her then-new explains. “It kind of had this album Sweet Old World. “I was moody, smoky-sounding thing. gonna do ‘Pineola,’” she remem- We said, ‘Great.’” bers, her gripping country rock It wasn’t a scripted vampire narrative about people mourn- love scene that’d inspired the ing a suicide. “That was the song song, Williams reveals with evi- I chose to do. They didn’t want dent satisfaction, but real-life me to do it because it was too romantic feelings for her hus- dark: ‘Please pick another song.’ band and manager Tom Overby; Well, that just got my tail feath- she decided it’d be okay to lend ers all up in a ruffle, you know. a fresh work of personal expres- And I complained. The produc- sion – meant, potentially, for her er of the show was real sweet. He next album – to a primetime said, ‘You know what? Go soundtrack. ahead. Do it.’” True Blood wasn’t the most So, she went ahead and did unexpected song request to it. Then she sat down with the come her way of late; Faith Hill’s 50 AMERICAN SONGWRITER MARCH | APRIL 2011 “THEYWERELOOKINGFORKINDOF EDGIER STUFF. SO EDGY EQUALS LUCINDAWILLIAMS , I G U E S S .” people also asked if she might be able to come up with a tune or two for the pop country diva. Says Williams, “They were looking for kind of edgier stuff. So edgy equals Lucinda Williams, I guess. I said, ‘Well, you know I’ve never really known how to write for someone. But I’d like to learn.’” “What I realized was,” she adds, amused by how this line of thinking must sound com- ing from her, “I don’t really have to worry about if I’m writing this for a particular person. I can just write a song like I would write a song nor- mally, but just not record it yet. [Laughs.] That’s really the way to go. Because they don’t want a song once I’ve recorded it usually. They want to think that it’s for them. Which is fine with me. At first I was kind of like, ‘No, that’s weird. I don’t know her. How do I write a song for someone I don’t know?’” It’s not that Williams has never had suc- cess with somebody else cutting her emotional- ly potent songs. In fact, that’s exactly how she won her first Grammy in 1993 – for Best Coun- try Song of the Year. Mary Chapin Carpenter had covered an arresting declaration of desire from Lucinda Williams called “Passionate Kiss- es.” “God bless her,” says Williams. “She had to go to bat for that song. Her label didn’t think it was country.” After that, Williams moved to Nashville for a time, in part to see if she might get lucky again. She had a few more songs covered – including two by Emmylou Harris – but a main- stream country songwriting career just didn’t seem to be in the cards. Recalls Williams, “My manager at the time, Frank Callari, said, ‘Well, your songs are too personal. People just don’t know what to do with them.’ …And then the only other ones I had, the only other brave person was Patty Loveless when she did ‘The Night’s Too Long.’ That just didn’t go anywhere, partly because of the label, her people. They were so conserva- tive.” A lot’s changed in the past couple of decades about how Williams views songwriting and the business, and how the business views MARCH | APRIL 2011 AMERICAN SONGWRITER 51 her and her songwriting. She’s for critics who preferred she stick come to occupy such an impor- to the sort of writing she’d been tant place in the world of con- doing. With its narratives temporary American roots music grounded in the southern towns – she’s the first one that many ris- of her childhood and its full-bod- ing and aspiring Americana song- ied alt-country sound, Car Wheels writers compare themselves to, won a Grammy for Best Contem- and deservedly so – that any porary Folk Album (there wasn’t spooky, South-conjuring T.V. yet an Americana category) and series worth its salt could hardly brought a heap of new listeners ignore her catalog. her way; even so, after that she Her songwriting process is pointedly reshaped her songwrit- still personal and from the gut, ing with a lyrically lean, groove- but it seems she’s holding the fin- driven and decidedly different ished products more loosely, approach. entertaining different possibilities “It was taking me a long for where her songs might belong time to come up with a bunch of and saying things about all of it new songs,” Williams says, that you might not have caught “because it was like that sopho- her saying in earlier eras of her more jinx thing, it was the album career. following Car Wheels and I was Things like this: terrified. I thought, ‘I’ve got to “To me, who you write the write a bunch of new songs like song for is really neither here nor “Car Wheels On A Gravel Road” there anyway. By the time the and “Lake Charles” and all these song gets out and I’m done with really narrative songs. I’m not it, it kind of goes off into the uni- necessarily just going to come up verse. Whoever wants to do with those songs again, or songs whatever with it is fine with me.” like that.’ I just kind of went She laughs, acknowledging through this thing where I started this isn’t entirely true. “Well, I writing and kind of allowed wouldn’t want to have it in cer- myself to open up.” tain commercials.” And a decade later, she It’s easier to be laidback seems anything but closed. about these things once you’ve Blessed, Williams’ tenth stu- established certain facts: that dio album, is both a sure-handed there is, unmistakably, such a distillation of some of her most thing as a Lucinda Williams song salient songwriting impulses and and that a good many people are something of an expansion of her drawn to them. It could be argued range. It’s not especially dark or that she’s at the height of both happy (2008’s Little Honey was her career and her satisfaction pegged as her “happy” album by with it; she’s also got her war sto- many, in part because it opened ries about how she reached this with a rocking love song), though point, how she’s kept at this it does contain three songs that singer-songwriter thing long deal with death – one of those enough to see a lot of her artistic about a suicide – and a pair of instincts proven right. what she describes as “sweet love There’s a particular war songs,” the one that made it onto story she’s circled back to fairly True Blood and a poetic ballad often these past several years.