Lucinda Williams, with Benjamin Hedin | Radio Silence | March 2014 | 11 minutes (2,690 words)
Lucinda Williams recently turned sixty-one, and on the whole she feels pretty good about it. “I was so young, so sweet and tender,” she says when shown a photograph of herself at thirty-five. “I wish I still looked like that. But as an artist I’m better. My voice is better than it’s ever been; my range is better than it’s ever been.” This is quite a statement, considering that for the past twenty years Williams has been regarded as one of America’s finest living songwriters. Of her eleven studio and live albums there are a handful—Sweet Old World (1992), Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998), Little Honey (2008)—that offer little if any room for improvement. We don’t normally think of the seventh decade as being kind to popular musicians, but Williams is convinced she is in the middle of a sustained period of creativity and achievement. Lucinda Williams (1988), her third record, long out of print and sought after by collectors, was reissued in January, and she recently founded her own label. Later this year she plans to release a double album of new material.