No guilty pleasures interview –

http://barrington.suntimes.com/entertainment/8572576-421/lucinda-williams-bound-for-palatine.html

Lucinda Williams bound for Palatine
BY JEFF WISSER jwisser@pioneerlocal.com November 2, 2011 4:00PM

Country-rock singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams has recorded but a handful of albums since first appearing on the Smithsonian Folkways record label in 1979. But in the intervening years she has become a critical darling and the subject of almost cult-like affection from her fans. Her diverse musical approaches have netted her Grammy Awards for best country song (for Mary Chapin Carpenter’s recoding of “Passionate Kisses”), best contemporary folk album (for her career-making 1998 release “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”) and best female rock performance (“Get Right With God”).

What Williams’ body of work may lack in bulk, it more than makes up for with a level of passion, intensity and honesty in both her lyrics and her intimate, emotional vocal delivery.

The singer brings her band to Durty Nellie??s, 180 N. Smith St., Palatine for a show at 8 p.m. Tuesday night. Blake Mills shares the bill.

Diversions spoke to Williams about her latest album, “Blessed,” her surprising recent level of songwriting productivity and the perception in some corners that her recent marriage and newfound happiness may blunt her artistry. The conversation was informative, insightful and, at times, contentious.

Q: You went through an uncharacteristically fertile period of songwriting in advance of “Blessed.” How many songs were pared down to produce the 12 on the latest album?

A: I wrote about 25 songs. Some of them I’m still kind of tweaking a little bit. We had two or three that we recorded but they didn’t quite work. We’ve started doing one of them live now, it’s called “Stowaway in Your Heart.” That’s gonna be on the next album.

Q: Reading through some of the press materials, it’s almost as if there seems to be this fear that your finding a level of relative happiness might jeopardize your work. It’s almost as if happiness and art are mutually exclusive. What do you make of this? Should fans hope for your happiness because they appreciate your music or for your unhappiness so that you keep a perceived edge in your work?

A: I think it’s more that there’s this misconception that people think you can only write when you’re in crisis mode. And that’s just such a misconception. If I were truly unhappy, I wouldn’t be able to write. It’s really kind of the opposite. It’s really hard to explain. The truth is, when you’re really content, that’s when you’re able to write. Now, you might be writing about something that made you feel bad at one time. But when I’m in a bad mood, really unhappy, I’m not going to be able to write.

That’s one of the questions that people ask me that just drive me completely nuts. You can’t possibly think that yourself. Anyone with any modicum of intelligence can’t buy into this thing about “Oh, now Lucinda’s happy …”

First of all, I could write a book about this because I’ve been asked this so much. Whoever said that somebody is suddenly happy because you marry somebody? You’re gonna run around happy 24 hours a day, 24/7? Nobody makes anybody happy constantly, so that in and of itself is a fallacy. There is no such thing as 24-hours-a-day happiness. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

Different things affect you at different times, different times of the day. I mean, I get sad when I think about my mother’s death. I get sad because my brother never talks anymore. I get sad because I can’t talk to my sister. I get sad because there’s mental illness in my family. I get sad when I watch the news. I get sad when I see homeless people. Who has these ideas that I’m happy all the time? I don’t get it. It [ticks] me off, frankly. …

Q: Well, let’s get off this subject then. …

A: … that in and of itself [ticks] me off and makes me unhappy. I’m unhappy now. It’s a stupid question.

Q: Then our work is done here. You grew up with a father, Miller Williams, who taught literature in college and is himself is an accomplished poet. How does growing up in that household influence the decisions you make that lead you to the career path you’re on.

A: I don’t know, I guess I just got interested in writing and reading at a really young age. My mother played piano so I grew up listening to a lot of music, and records. Who knows how much of that is … I guess part of it is genetic and part is conditioning and the environment I was around when I was growing up.

Q: Does your father have any favorites among your songs?

A: I remember when I wrote that song, “Still I Long for Your Kiss,” he really liked that one. He likes a lot of the more country ones, ’cause he is a big country music fan. He likes country and blues, so he likes that kind of stuff that I do.

Q: Elvis Costello guests on this record. How did the two of you meet?

A: I’m a fan of his, and he became a fan of mine and he would be in a town where I was and he would come to a show and sit in. It was around the time of “Car Wheels.”

Q: You’re playing with Costello here, you’ve spent time with Bob Dylan. Have you had a lot of “you-may-ask-yourself-how-did-I-get-here” moments?

A: As you look back over a considerable and very impressive body of work, do you see it as a straight line that runs through your work? Do you look at “Essence” as “this is how I felt at this time”? Do you see “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” as your “Abbey Road” moment? How do you process this body of work?

I just think of them all as, like you said, I was a certain age when I wrote those songs and certain things were going on in my life. I see it as just kind of a building. When I look back, I see my youth and I see myself as I grow, through my albums. Each one is sort of a stepping stone to the next one. I’m very aware of the fact that a lot of people really hold onto the “Car Wheel” album. And that’s become my, you know, my main one, my turning-point album. But I look at it more as that was me then, this is me now. But I still do songs from all my albums, but my perception was different when I was writing those. It’s like looking at a photograph, kind of. You go back and look at old photographs and [you see who you used to be].

Q: Your work, it seems very personal. There’s a very intimate feel not simply to your subject matter but the way you sing. You have this distinctive voice that ranges from joy to rage to lust to, almost, madness. When fans talk to you about your work, do you get a little nervous that they think they know you through your work?

A: No, because they don’t really know me. There’s still a lot of stuff they don’t know about me, my childhood and all of that. I talk very openly about a lot of subjects. But when I’m talking, like in an interview, I don’t go too far into things as far as my personal life and this and that. I’ve finally started opening up about mental illness, which my mother suffered from. There’s still this stigma; people don’t want to talk about it. People talk about cancer. They talk about other illnesses. But there’s this stigma. And that was only after my mother died, because you feel protective of family members.

But people don’t know who I wrote the song about. I don’t stand up there on stage and go, “OK, I wrote this song about this specific person — by name — who I was involved with at the time. So there’s still some things that are private.

But I’ve always liked pushing people’s buttons. I like to get people to move and think and respond and react. I think any good artist wants to do that, wants to get some reaction, whether it’s a painting or a song or a story.

Q: You’ve said publicly that the song “Seeing Black” is a reaction to singer-songwriter Vic Chestnutt taking his own life.

A: Well, it was him. … The news of his death was so sudden and shocking, because I didn’t know a lot about him. I had met him a few times and we were fans of each other’s music and all that. But I hadn’t been aware that he had suffered from years of depression and apparently was having financial problems covering medical expenses and this and that. But I had another friend, a longtime musician friend who isn’t know like Vic Chestnutt. He was a drummer who used to work with me a long, long time ago when I first moved out to Los Angeles in 1985. We’d stayed in touch over the years. He had moved away to Arizona and moved back to L.A. and was trying to get back into the swing of things. But once you leave, it’s kind of hard to get back. He moved back to L.A. and I was trying to help him. He said, “Oh, I want to get back and start playing again.” So I contacted all these people and said, “Michael’s back and he’s a great guy, a great drummer and I’m trying to get him back in the swing of things.” Anyway, long story short, I saw him at a party at a mutual friends’ in September a couple years ago. The next month, I get this e-mail that he’d taken his own life. And it really pissed me off. I said, “Damn, Michael, why did you do that?” You know, he’d left a son behind. Then I hear about Vic Chestnutt. … It made say, I want to get this out of my system. The song is basically just me asking questions, like everybody does when someone does that. We’ll never completely understand it because it takes a certain mindset to be able to go to that place. The people left behind are the ones who most suffer, of course.

But I dealt with suicide in my song “Pineola,” that was another one. And “Sweet Old World.” But just in a little different way this time. It’s kind of like, now I’ve had so many people I’ve known commit suicide … “Sweet Old World” is kind of this sweet thing, “see what you lost when you left this world.” And “Seeing Black” is kind of the anger thing that most of us feel, or at least I do. I felt sad, but I also think anger, healthy anger, not anger, or whatever you want to call it, I think that’s a very natural reaction. You’ve got all these people battling these diseases and then you have people just giving up and saying, OK, I’m going to take the shortcut out. On the other hand, I can understand it because life is tough, moreso for some people than other people. But that’s what the song is about is, there’s always something to hand around for.

Q: The process of songwriting for you, is it a fairly uniform affair or does every song hatch differently?

I guess every song is kind of hatched differently. The way I go about it is, I’m always thinking of things and coming up with lines or I’ll hear somebody say something and I’ll go, Wow, that’s a cool line. Or I’ll think of a line. I might be in a bar or restaurant, whatever. I’m always jotting ideas down. And I keep everything. I put it in a folder. Sometimes I might wake up in the morning, or, in my case, in the afternoon. I’ll be lying in bed thinking of something and I’ll get up and write, just stream-of-consciousness writing. Later, I’ll get into writing mode and that’s when I’ll sit down with this stuff and try to make it into a song. And sometimes they’re farther along, sometimes just a line or two, sometimes more than that. But I tend to work on what’s been referred to as a J-curve. I’ll just go along, go along, go along, and then I’ll have a burst where I’ll finish all these songs. That’s what I was doing when I was writing the songs for “Blessed.” Once I get in that mode, I’m sort of in a cave where I just get up every day and that’s what I do every day for two weeks.

Q: What would people be astonished to find out about you? Do you have a guilty-pleasure TV show?

A: I don’t have any guilty pleasures! I’m not one of those people … Someone might say, the Carpenters, and I do [like them]. But it’s not a guilty pleasure. I’m actually, basically a pretty simple person.

Q: A couple quick ones, then I want to get you off the phone. How did you feel about Tom Petty’s cover of “Changed the Locks”?

A: I thought it was really cool. I only wish more people had heard it. It was on a soundtrack album [for “She’s the One”], so it didn’t sell as well as his other albums, so a lot of people didn’t know about it. It was great when he did it. I mention that a lot when I do that song, when I play it.

Q: How about Mary Chapin Carpenter’s version of “Passionate Kisses”?

A: Awesome. She, Rosanne Cash and I went on tour in Australia together in 1991 right before she recorded that song. We went out as an acoustic songwriters-in-the-round thing. That’s when she asked me if she could have my blessing to record that song. She had been playing it live a lot. It was really her decision. She had to put her foot down because she wanted it to be the first single off the album and the record label said no. They said it’s not country enough. She said the hell with that, I want to put it out for a single. Because it’s really going over live great and my fans love it. So she stood her ground, bless her heart, and it was released and that’s how I won the Grammy for country song of the year. Which blew my mind and I’m sure that of everybody else in Nashville at the time. ’Cause I was a newcomer to Nashville. I’d just moved up there. She really opened the doors for me. That song coming out, the Grammy.

Q: Anyway, thank you. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

A: Sorry I got upset, I overreacted to the happiness question. …