Interviews

Listen to a nearly 10-minute cover of JJ Cale’s “Magnolia” from Williams’ forthcoming double album, premiering on Billboard.com:



By Gary Graff September 12, 2014

Lucinda Williams has raised some eyebrows by coming up with her first-ever double album, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, due Sept. 30. The kicker? There’s more where that came from.

“We recorded enough stuff for three albums, actually,” Williams tells Billboard. “They weren’t all my songs. We cut a JJ Cale song, ‘Blond Hair and Blue Eyes.’ We recorded Bruce Springsteen’s’Factory.’ There’s a lot of tracks that were done with Bill Frisell. Then I had some older songs that hadn’t been put on anything yet. So it was a combination of things.”

Listen to a nearly 10-minute cover of JJ Cale’s “Magnolia” from Williams’ forthcoming double album, premiering on Billboard.com:

LISTEN TO THE COVER & READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

Lucinda Williams Discusses the Music That Inspired Her New Double Album


BY WILL HERMES | September 4, 2014

Lucinda Williams’ new LP, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, is a generous, old-fashioned double album. It covers a lot of stylistic territory – blues, folk, country soul, jam-rock – with a lot of musicians, including journeyman jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, Louisiana swamp groove master Tony Joe White and longtime Elvis Costello cohort Pete Thomas. After years of label drama, it marks the roots-music pioneer’s first release on her own Highway 20, and, surprisingly, it’s her first musical collaboration with her father, lauded Arkansas poet Miller Williams, who read at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration.

The title of the album comes from “Compassion,” a signature poem that Williams’ daughter adapted in the song of the same name. “That’s something that I’ve wanted to do for years: to take one of his poems and make a song out of it,” says Williams, 61, from her homebase in Los Angeles. “But it’s very challenging, you know? Because they’re two separate animals, poems and songs. I told my dad about it, and he goes, ‘You’re going to make me famous!’ He’s always teasing me about that. He goes, ‘You used to be known as my daughter. Now I’m known as Lucinda Williams’ father.'”

So, 20 songs: How’d you end up recording so much stuff?
I was on a writing binge, and we just kind of got on a roll. We actually ended up recording enough for three albums. So we decided, “What the hell, let’s break the rules and do a double album.” Now we have more creative control, because we have our own label. And when you’ve got a body of work that fits together, it’s nice to be able to put it all out there. We have a third group of songs finished that will come out on a separate album later.

That’s great. How do you account for the writing binge?
Just changes in life. Getting older and wiser as a songwriter, getting more proficient, I guess. The first big change in my life was when my mother died in 2004. And it kind of started then.

There are a lot of extended guitar passages on these recordings – some really gorgeous stuff.
I don’t like to fade at the end of things. The main thing was just to try to get the feel. There were a lot of discussions about, “Is this too long?” The consensus was kind of like, “Don’t worry about it.”

I like the cover of JJ Cale’s “Magnolia,” which really goes out there.
Yeah, that was with Bill Frisell. The whole other album that’s in the can is pretty much all Bill Frisell with my rhythm section guys, Butch Norton and David Sutton, who tour with me.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT ROLLINGSTONE.COM

Longreads Member Pick, shares a first-time-ever memoir by Lucinda Williams from Radio Silence, a San Francisco-based magazine of literature and rock & roll.

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.