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Lucinda Williams is a little distracted. She keeps popping up from her seat, perched between the four overstuffed pillows that are arranged artfully on her azure blue sofa in a family room bordered on one side by a massive television, a white brick fireplace and a bank of bay windows that don't overlook any body of water, despite the claim that this small tranquil suburb is named Toluca Lake. Located just 12 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, its light years away from the superficiality and brittle glitter of the entertainment hub that lies just beyond the small bumpy foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains that surround the town.
"I live here because I don't feel that whole sort of plastic persona thing that people connect with L.A. I don't even go over there. I'm in the Valley, and it's much more comfortable over here. It's like a small town. It's like working class, regular people," says Lucinda, tugging on one of the small braids that jut out Pippi Longstocking-style from her otherwise perfectly sculpted blonde hair. But that's part of the anomaly and the charm of Williams. Tough but tremulous, a biker chick with an exquisitely refined aesthetic, she's a study in contradictions, but somehow it all comes together in both her art and her demeanor. A demeanor that is so accessible and warm that fans come up to her all the time like she's an actress on a soap and tell her about their own romantic conflagrations, explaining how songs like "Metal Firecracker" and "Change the Locks" saved their lives and gave them courage to get rid of bad men and extricate themselves from abusive relationships.
In person she's more diminutive than onstage, where she's equally likely to crow that her new song "Come On," is female cock rock (it is!) or confess to the audience that she's damn proud of being 53! ("I do that just to hear the gasp and people saying ‘she can't be,' just to feed my ego") like she did the week before in Chico, California. Standing only 5'5" in her cowboy boots, she takes up a lot of psychic space, but very little terrestrial space, looking at least 15 years younger than her birth age. She's wearing tight, dark-blue jeans from a recent shopping trip to the Levis store in San Francisco. Skinny and boot-cut like something Brian Jones might have worn on his off hours, draped fastidiously over black cowboy boots, the leather an expensive patina unmarred, with toes unscuffed. Despite the chilly night, she's wearing a short-sleeved black T-shirt, emblazoned with a grinning skull, hugging her slight boyish curves.
As girly and conversational as Lucinda Williams is and as fan-friendly as she seems, there is something that is not like the rest of us. Despite the talk about haircuts and face creams and bass players, there's toughness, a no-nonsense quality and a fierce intelligence that is never at rest. It's at the core of what makes her a three-time winning Grammy winner, and according to an American think tank, one of the most admired celebrities. But strip away the protective layers and she's Iggy Pop with demon energy, Neil Young with better poetry, Lou Reed with more defined arms and, according to Elvis Costello, Keith Richards in a feminine form.
"You know, people think I'm bitter and hate men, but I'm still really good friends with all my exes," she says. Even the last one, who inspired many of the songs on her eighth studio album, West.
"I wrote this when I was going through this really tumultuous relationship with someone who's an alcoholic and a drug addict, who was sober when we met and then fell off the wagon, and ended up using again, using heroin again," she says, sitting a little forward. "I've never been around, I've never lived with anyone who did this, but this was towards the end of the relationship. Needless to say, that's what ended the relationship. He's moody and would get real violent and just go crazy when he would drink, and then eventually started using again. He went into rehab, and he's okay now. We're friends and all, but you know, I had to come to terms with a lot of stuff with all that. Like, ‘Why did I stay in that relationship as long as I did? What drew me to that?
"And at the same time, my mother passed away. So I lost my mother, I'm going through the most abusive relationship I'd ever been in. I say this in all honesty--I'm not saying it in a judgmental, critical way with him. Because I love him dearly, and if he were sitting here with us, he would say, ‘Yes, that's true, that's what happened.' So it's not like I'm saying anything about him behind his back. I want to speak out about it because I learned what it meant, I know what the term battered woman syndrome means. You know, so I'm just going to come out and say it. And there are so many taboos about this. To me, this album deals with a lot of issues that I've struggled and dealt with maybe before, but didn't really quite know, wasn't ready to start talking about it. This is a more confessional album, and more revealing than anything I've ever done."
She doesn't say anything for a minute, as if to let the enormity of her admission sink in, or perhaps hoping that the listener won't try to deconstruct the lyrics looking for the real people who inspired them. Because for Lucinda Williams, all the songs are autobiographical.
"Yup, they're all based on real people. Usually the people I write about figure it out, or if they don't I tell them," she says impishly before leaving her seat, ostensibly to adjust the music, leaving me to ponder the roman à clef aspects of her musical canon, the significance of the folk art skeleton that is perched atop my chair or a painting that proclaims "As It Turns Out, Right Now Is The Moment You've Been Waiting For," which seems to sum up the place where Lucinda Williams finds herself right now. For in a Williamsian universe, a cigar is never just a cigar, nor a skeleton just a skeleton.
Diffused light from the tasteful lamps that veer just this side of avant-garde and that side of psychedelic stream through the windows, unfettered by shutters or curtains, throwing a cheery glow on the bougainvillea and shade trees that encircle the broad sweep of the porch, allowing the world to look in on the very famous occupant. If anyone was watching now, they'd see this slender waif of a woman gliding along the long hallway, a vision in black and blue, but hardly bruised. Disappearing for an almost uncomfortable period of time into the bowels of her rambling suburban ranch house that is tucked under one of Los Angeles' great freeways--so close to the road, that you can hear the constant whoosh of cars exceeding the speed limit, creating their own white noise and contributing to this sanctuary of deep calm--the only thing keeping me company is the spectral appearance of John Coltrane's atonal sax slithering out from one of the many Bose speakers that are strategically placed around her house. The effect is rather surreal, in a life-imitating-art kind of way, recalling one of Williams' more famous songs, "Righteously," which pleads: "Be my lover, don't play no game, just play me John Coltrane."
It appears that her musical incantation has brought her someone who isn't interested in playing any games, or worse, her celebrity. And as a result, she is no longer the doyenne of the brokenhearted. Instead, she is sharing this suburban hideaway with a man she calls "my own true love." If that weren't proof enough, she's the featured star on the celebrity engagement website lovetrippper.com, where they announced her engagement to Tom Overby, an executive who works for Fontana Distribution, who she met when she did an in-store appearance in Minneapolis at Best Buy, where he then worked, during her 1991 promo tour. She didn't see him again for 15 years, but bumped into the tall Midwestern--who looks like a more benign and less angular Eric Clapton--at a Hollywood hair salon two years ago, when she was accompanying a friend who was getting hair extensions. Perhaps the oddest part of this whole thing is that her astrologer predicted his arrival more than three years ago.
"I hate to be so cliché as to say that there was a meant quality about meeting Tom again, but there was," she says shyly. "What were the chances that I'd be in that salon at that exact time? And it wasn't even for my own appointment! My astrologer said I was supposed to have met someone around Christmas of 2005 but I was going to meet someone first who was going to try to sweep me off my feet, but that I wasn't supposed to go with him because there was supposed to be someone else after that." That was Overby.
While he is off on a business trip in Toronto, his presence is felt, if only from the goofy pictures of the couple in matching sombreros that bedeck the refrigerator celebrating his last birthday or during a tour of his home office in the front of the house, which is a mini Mecca to rock stars of the late ‘70s, with framed autographed photographs from the likes of Iggy Pop, Morrissey and Patti Smith, who inscribed the photo with a rather flowery and personal message, addressing it to "my friend Tom."
"Everything right now in my life is before Tom, after Tom, so I look at it like this is sort of the last batch of all of that kind of heartbreak, hurting sort of songs," she says. "There's still some more that didn't end up on this record. I mean, I had 24 songs, and then I had some other new songs. I wrote a love song about Tom called "Tears of Joy," which is a really cool R&B kind of Percy Sledge type. You know, like, ‘I'm crying tears of joy.'"
A considerate hostess, or perhaps a consummate performer even when she's offstage, she creates a mood like a canny set designer, rooms studded with unobtrusive yet lush scented candles, a bowl of roasted nuts, healthy crackers and unpretentious red wine are offered to the guest-cum-reporter. But like Waldo, where's Lucinda?
"I'm sorry," she apologizes, after returning an almost awkward amount of time again. "I dropped some pink eye shadow on my bathroom floor before you got here, and I couldn't rest until I could get it all up. I think I need to buy a Dustbuster."
Hardly. As messy and shambolic as her love life has been portrayed in her songs, her house is as spotless as a surgery suite. Wooden parquet floors are buffed to a high gleam, tables are placed with military precision perpendicular to the settees, while book shelves are dust free, their contents lined up by subject, ranging from Don Delio's Libra to Blues for Dummies to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, alongside tomes by her poet father, Miller Williams, perhaps her most persistent muse, besides Bob Dylan, who has an entire shelf devoted to books about him.
This sense of order isn't restricted to her den and living room. The kitchen is a revelation of a more domestic side, with her collection of salt and pepper shakers lined like a small colorful colony of animal whimsy behind a gleaming glass case, a riot of cookbooks ("I'm actually a good cook"), a careful grocery list (she was out of margarine and jerky) and a folk art pot holder in the shape of a ripe watermelon with "Lu" embroidered across the front. But there's a sense of creating order out of emotional chaos that shows up in her songs--tunes that are meticulously written, with an austerity and spaciousness, if only to create space for the listener to insert their own version of heartbreak in between the always heart-piercing lines.
So where do these songs come from?
"Sometimes I dream my songs, but if I don't get up and write them down right away, I lose them. More, I write them here on the kitchen table--which probably has a lot to do with being a waitress when I was younger. It really helps if it's a really pretty day and the sun's shining. I open the window and make coffee, and I'm just real open and clear. I keep a folder of songs that are works in progress, and they go back as far as 1975 or ‘76. Really old songs that I wrote that I decided weren't good enough but I've still kept. Everything I write, I keep unless I've used it already. Once it turns into a song, then I don't keep it, but everything in the folder is comprised of either old songs that I decided weren't good enough yet but I didn't want to throw away because there might be something there. Or I'm going to try to rewrite them, or whatever. Or else just bits and pieces, like lines and ideas that I write down. Even when I'm out, I might jot something down on a napkin, sitting in a bar or whatever...." she trails off.
One gets the feeling that Williams is just enduring life between songs, channeling the latest missive from her unconscious, and furiously trying to get it all down. Maybe that's where she goes when she disappears during the interview. But despite that need to create, the musician hasn't flooded the market with never-ending albums. Over the arc of her career, she's only released eight albums, something that confounds critics.
"That really pisses me off when people say I'm not prolific or I'm a perfectionist," she says without realizing how laughable it is that she is sitting in the middle of what is perhaps the cleanest house this side of Martha Stewart's (and Stewart has a team of anxious, trained professionals while Lucinda does it all herself).
"The perfectionism thing, I've never quite figured that one out. I don't really see myself as that. I think I am to a certain degree but I don't feel that it's detrimental, I guess maybe that's the difference. And when I read about myself being a perfectionist, that sounds like a negative thing. You know, like I'm so picky. I'm sure it always comes back to how long it took Car Wheels to come out. They don't realize, though, that there were a lot of music industry politics involved in that. It annoys me. I'll never live that down. It's not my fault I couldn't get a record deal for however long. People ask me, ‘What were you doing in between those records?' Well, I was singing and writing and being an artist and living my life, you know? It's not like I was sitting around being miserable because I didn't have a record out."
No matter what people think, perhaps the greatest misconception about Williams is that she's been crushed by all her relationships and is perpetually sad--a necessity for her to write songs.
"That just so not true," she says with a sound that's caught halfway between a cough and a laugh. "When I'm real miserable, I don't want to do a damn thing except sit in front of the TV and channel surf. Or go shopping. And they're both drugs, so when people are miserable they want to do something that's a drug. Eat, watch TV, shop, you know, whatever," she says, waving her hand. I think she's attempting to banish the memory of any past woes. But no, she's just revving up, taking this opportunity to clear the air about the stuff that irritates her. Taking a sip of the Cabernet Sauvignon, she continues. "Now that you brought it up, I hate when people think I'm dark. I'm actually a really positive person. I'm not a negative person, and my songs have always ended on a note of hopefulness."
"I just hate it when people think that I'm melancholy all the time. But that's just not true," says Williams with a tug on her hair. "On a song on West called ‘Rescue,' the man is not going to save you, but you can still enjoy being with him and love him, and he can love you, and you know, but just be real. It's a very realistic album."
"And," she says, picking up steam, "Is it so bad if I want to live in a nice, big comfortable house, with a swimming pool and be able to buy nice clothes? I'm still going to be able to write dark, self-explorative songs about death and life and whatever. I mean, what does that have to do with real life?" she asks, not expecting an answer.
Unlike some of her earlier albums, there is very little raging done on West and much less overt sexuality. Instead, there's a quiet acceptance of love going necessarily awry, if only to allow other, better things to come into one's life, beginning with the tender "Are You Alright," which rather sweetly inquires of a former inamorato: "Are you sleeping through the night/ Do you have someone to hold you tight/Do you have someone to hang out with/Do you have someone to hug and kiss you."
Even "Rescue" is well-balanced, eschewing the idea that love can save you, while "Learning to Live Without You," is regretful, without being bitter. While there is a longing, there is an understanding of the human psyche that wasn't present in some of Williams' earlier work.
"I couldn't have made this album at any other time in my life," she says. "I just think it has to do with me, the age I am now and just where I am in my life. I went through the heaviest thing I could have gone through, which is the loss of my mother. So when you talk about acceptance, I mean that's major, having to accept that. I guess there are two things: the emotional acceptance and just growth in general. Personal growth, just coming into this time in my life, and all these major changes I went through. I mean, losing my mother was just--that's enough right there."
Two songs on the album were written for her mother, who died in March of 2004: "Fancy Funeral" and "Mama You Sweet."
"‘Mama You Sweet' is about my mother and the pain that she left behind. I say, ‘I love you mama, you sweet, I love you, mama, but you left me. I love you, mama, but you left me with chains around my ankles and rocks beneath my feet,' and all this stuff. And then I go through, ‘You left me with a notion in my spirit,' and ‘a burden on my hips.' And then I go through this whole thing where everything becomes sort of unraveled. It's pretty intense. It's pretty major because a lot of people are going to probably be bothered by it, because basically it's saying ‘Thanks a lot, you left me with all this crap that now I have to deal with.' And I'm kind of breaking down the sacrament of the mother's death or whatever. I'm looking at it from a very realist point of view, and I'm saying, ‘Okay, yeah. It is sacrosanct, of course, I'm recognizing that, but now I have to deal with me. It's all about me now,'" she says without irony.
The other song is equally weighty, having to do with paying for her mother's funeral--something that she couldn't even bring herself to attend.
"I called the other one ‘Fancy Funeral' and wrote it because I got sucked into planning and paying for this elaborate funeral service, which I chose not to attend. I just freaked out at the last minute and I couldn't. But we had a separate memorial service for her, which is really all she wanted and I knew that's all she wanted. But there were some other members of the family who felt that she should have a proper funeral, and I found out at the last minute that there was an actual family plot that was reserved for her, which she'd never told me about. Because I don't think that's really what she wanted--she just wanted to be cremated, but at the end all the initial plans ended up changing. It was a nightmare. I never want to go through anything like that again," she says, her voice becoming quieter and quieter as she tells the story.
But when she talks about "Come On," she can't suppress her mirth. All ballsy innuendo and righteous anger, it strips an ex-lover of any of his masculine pride by finally telling him that he was bad in bed. The version on the album finds her doing a chest-pounding imitation of David Coverdale or even Bret Michaels at their most vituperrious, spitting out the words with a vengeance born of betrayal. Even Courtney Love couldn't have equaled the scorn in Williams' raspy voice when she sings: "Dude, I'm so over you/ You don't even have a clue/All you did was make me blue/You didn't even make me... come... on!"
"So the sex was really bad with that guy?" I ask, not so innocently.
"Which guy?" she answers, feigning innocence.
"The one that you wrote ‘Come On' about," I persist.
"Well, no, it's not just about one guy," Williams says, not convincing me. "It's a statement about a lot of men. I mean, how many women have been with men and they don't get off? It's all about slam-bam, thank you ma'am. It's a humorous look at the male rock god guy who--well, just look at the story about Jim Morrison. Apparently he had some sexual dysfunction problems. Lot of times it just has to do with too many drugs, Whatever the reason is, is beside the point, isn't it?" she says, just on this side of testy.
"That's one of the most important things my dad taught me," says Williams, referring to her award-winning poet father Miller Williams, who delivered a poem during President Clinton's second inauguration. "He's very much into economy, very clean lines and not getting bogged down with too many words. Every word has to be important in a poem. Over the years I've showed him my stuff and occasionally he would suggest that I use a different word. Might just be one word in the whole song. Like in 'He Never Got Enough Love' from the Sweet Old World album--I was going to put 'faded blue dress' and he suggested I use 'sad blue dress.' And on that song 'Drunken Angel,' he suggested I change "a hole in his heart," to 'the hole in his heart.' It was just that one word."
Perhaps one of the unexpected benefits of being brought up by a famous poet is that Williams often speaks like a character in a Jane Austin or a Carson McCullers novel, referring to Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary fame as "a stoic beauty" or how this album finds her "at repose." Nobody talks that way except in books but when Lucinda Williams does it comes out as unaffected and natural. Perhaps that's why Ryan Adams famously wrote "Sylvia Plath" about her.
Despite that honor, Adams is not her most famous fan. She has a long and warm relationship with Emmylou Harris, who used to live two doors down from her when Lucinda resided in Nashville. Another Nashville pal is Steve Earle, although their relationship is often as tempestuous as it is close, and Willie Nelson covered her song "Over Time." Neil Young and Tom Petty have brought her out on tour with them and recently her hero Dylan asked to do a project with her. But perhaps last November she had the greatest thrill of all when Bruce Springsteen, brandishing a screaming orange Gibson guitar, leaped onstage to play the final two songs of her set at Shepherd's Bush in London, trading licks with her guitarist Doug Pettibone on the old blues standard "Disgusted" and then on an extended version of her cheeky post-relationship anthem "Joy." Never taking the mic, he ended the performance by making a huge sweeping bow towards Williams before exiting backstage. But not before Williams declared that, "This is one of those things you remember all your life."
There's something about what she said that recalls Janis Joplin's infamous lament: "Every night I make love to 25,000, but I go home alone." Until she met Overby, she felt rather love torn herself, explaining to me last year how she attended her own birthday party alone.
"On my birthday I had a big, huge party, and I really had a good time, I was twirling around like the little social butterfly, center of attention, but I went by myself that night. And there were like 75 people there. I was out last night and I was getting all this attention, but it wasn't really the attention I wanted to get. It was all around my artistry."
For being in such a narcissistic profession, unlike other rock icons, there are very few images of Williams on her walls, save a Mark Seliger picture of her as a brunette, sitting in the corner of a white room filled with watermelons. A riot of pink, green, and brown, the photograph is more an art statement than a declaration of self-love. The only other images of the singer are three portraits painted by outsider folk artist Lamar Sorrento, more feral caricatures than true rendering, and therefore allowed a place on her walls.
Before moving to this haven, Williams spent three years living in a hotel, but now she's getting restless again, looking to buy something in another unpretentious part of town. "It's too small for all our stuff," she complains. "But that's always the way. The minute I feel settled, I've got a foot out the door." Perhaps a holdover from a tumultuous childhood that saw her following her poet father from university to university where he taught writing in distant places like Chile and Mexico City, you realize that "Change the Locks" isn't just a romantic metaphor but a conditioned response to a nomadic life that's finally coming to an end. Lucinda is finally home.
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