"I know! I can't believe it!" she laughs down the line, in her delightfully deep, drawling, smoky voice, from her home in Nashville. "I just didn't know what to say when Tom [Overby, her husband and manager] came downstairs and told me. All because it was in that TV show. Amazing."
Clearly the song has stood the test of time, and still resonates in a compelling way.
"Yeah, we still play that song almost every night on tour, and the response to it has always been amazing. It's interesting because it often brings up really hard stories of abuse and so on, because it seems to be a song that women somehow find comforting, or cathartic. And that feels like a privilege."
That's been the trick of Williams' long career, that her songs have a timeless quality and continue to ring true, no matter what age you might be.
She did often feel misunderstood earlier in her career though, with people confused by how "dark" her songs were. "Now I've gotten past all that, but when I first started writing those songs I definitely took it a bit more to heart. I felt like, sure I was writing about real stuff, but so was Leonard Cohen and so was Bob Dylan. I don't know if being a woman had something to do with it, but it did seem to confuse people that all my songs weren't all about roses and valentines," she laughs.
These days she feels free to write whatever she likes, to try different things, and she thinks that could be contributing to her prolific output at present.
"I remember I was much more nervous about how people would respond earlier in my career, specially after Car Wheels when I brought out Essence, and also when I brought out World Without Tears, and I remember they had mixed responses. But now, having gone through that, I'm just much less worried about it because I know people do understand eventually.
"And I think now people accept that they don't know what might come next from me. I never really sat down and said, 'I'm just going to be a country singer', or 'I just want to fit in this one box'."
Williams certainly doesn't fit into a single genre box. With covers from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, Robert Johnson and Hank Williams appearing in her setlist, you can tell her tastes are wide. And her upcoming album is no different.
While there is something of a theme running through The Ghosts of Highway 20, musically speaking there's a variety of influences, from the old gospel blues track A Little More Faith and Grace, which features two Jamaican musicians on percussion, to a cover of Bruce Springsteen's Factory.
"It's a combination of blues and country and gospel and that kind of thing. The album has quite a lot of traditional sounds to it too, pedal steel and so on. It's cool, it's a little different.
"I guess it's quite insightful, quite personal, a lot about memories, and looking back, and reflecting. It wasn't a theme I sat down and came up with, but there is something in common with each of the songs, even though they've been written at different times."
The memory of both her parents looms large, as well as the role of specific towns or places in her life story.
"There's a song called Louisiana that I wrote about my mother, and some of her childhood, and my childhood. And then I wrote a song called If My Love Could Kill, which is about the Alzheimer's disease that took my dad.
"The title song is about a highway that runs through a lot of the towns I grew up in, because I was born in Louisiana, but we moved around a lot -- Georgia, Vicksburg Mississippi, Jackson Mississippi. My mother's family was from Monroe, Louisiana, and that's where she's buried now, and so Highway 20 runs through all these places and contains a lot of memories and childhood images and all of that.
"And then I wrote a song called When You Go Will You Let Me Know If There's A Heaven, and I wrote that kind of thinking about my dad, and that feeling of sadness and bittersweetness. It sounds a bit like an old southern hymn or something."
She's determined that it's by no means a downer of an album though -- she was conscious of making a record that still felt vital and present, and full of life, as much as it was full of ghosts.
"There's some uplifting songs too, because songs about loss can still be positive. I think like all my songs, though they might deal with that subject matter, it's not like I'm wallowing or whatever. I'm just trying to deal with and describe it -- the songs are like a way to help lift yourself out of the sorrow. I'm not writing songs to bring you down, I hope it actually helps people."
Lucinda Williams is performing at Vector Arena (in theatre mode) on Friday December 4
