Preamble interview Vogue Theatre Vancouver, BC June 28, 2011

Songwriting well clearly hasn’t run dry for Lucinda Williams
By Mike Usinger, June 23, 2011
Full coverage
TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival
Lucinda Williams covers a lot of territory over the course of a 45-minute interview with the Georgia Straight, even if she starts things off by suggesting she’s not completely in top form.
“I just got up a while ago—I’m pouring myself a coffee as I speak,” she says from her Los Angeles home, sounding more than a little groggy, which does nothing to diminish the charm of her lazy southern drawl.
In no time, however, the 58-year-old icon is off and running, delving into everything from her much-respected place in music history to the oil-motivated war in Iraq to her elated reaction to the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed. In the middle of all this, she finds time to talk about Blessed, the stripped-raw, sometimes angry, often beautiful Americana record that’s been called Williams’s best since her 1998 landmark Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.
“I don’t know why other people get older and quit writing, because there’s just so much stuff to write about the older you get, especially when you start losing people,” she says. “You can write about your past, your childhood, or whatever. But I guess people don’t want to go there.”
The easygoing singer, who released her debut, Ramblin’, back in 1979, says there’s a reason the well hasn’t run dry: as happy as her recent marriage to her manager Tom Overby has made her, there’s still no shortage of drama in her world. Elaborating on this, she reveals, with no hesitation, that Blessed’s mesmerizingly unvarnished, laconic country number “I Don’t Know How You’re Livin’ ” is about her brother. Built around lyrics like “I’ve talked you down/Driven you around/All but followed you underground,” the song is, like much of the album, devastating.
“He’s just taken to sort of disappearing over the years,” Williams says with a pained laugh. “Like he didn’t call my dad on Father’s Day yesterday—that’s the kind of shit that bums me out. But I still love him so much, the little fucker. He has a mental illness. It runs in my family—my mother had it. The family stuff is the stuff that I struggle with a lot.”
But while there is plenty of pain in Blessed, there is also that unshakable sense of empathy that’s always informed Williams’s best work. She admits she’s no stranger to down days, but in some ways even that’s a blessing.
“God—if I didn’t write songs I don’t know where I would end up,” Williams says. “It’s very therapeutic, and very cathartic. I’m writing for myself first.”
Lucinda Williams plays the Vogue Theatre on Tuesday (June 28).

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