Heartbreak spoken here

By MARTY DUDA in New York.

Oh my God! Oh God, that's really stupid." Lucinda Williams is glancing over a feature in a well-known British music magazine. She is not impressed.

"He was just diggin' for stuff. Whatever. I don't read it anymore."

The article in question paints Williams as a hard-drinking rocker, who at age 50, could become the female version of Keith Richards.

So, is there any truth to the story?

"Maybe, partly," she replies after a few seconds of thought. "I think it's really stereotyped and I think if I weren't a female that there probably wouldn't be so much attention placed on that. So that, to me, is just another example of the male-dominated music industry stereotyping female musicians. If you have a few drinks, all of a sudden you're wild and wanton, you know, a crazy female rock'n'roller."

Williams is on a roll: "I'm not like that all the time. What difference does it make anyway? It's my personal life, it doesn't have anything to do with the music I make. I don't know why so much attention is being placed on that."

It could be because Williams is so good at writing emotive songs that aim straight for the heart. Almost all of her compositions deal with heartbreak, death, lost love or disillusionment. It's only natural that people want to know what makes her tick.

It's sweltering hot in New York City. The previous night, Williams opened for Neil Young and Crazy Horse at Madison Square Garden. But when Williams took the stage at 7:30, people were still finding their seats.

"New York, I hate to say it, but it's one of the worse places for that compared to some of the other cities we've been in. I've got a lot of my crowd coming out but I guess New York is a little bit tougher - they're a little more jaded, I guess.

"I got a little distracted actually when I was singing Still I Long For Your Kiss. It was getting a little noisy out there. And that's the difference, the majority of other shows we've been doing, people have been really polite and attentive.

"You can't really think about that, you just have to remember you're the opening act and you just have to kinda plough through and do as good a job as you can."

The reason Williams and her band are criss-crossing the US, playing to audiences not familiar with her blend of country, folk and rock, is to promote her new album, World Without Tears. It's a more eclectic mix than her previous releases. This time around William turns up the volume on a couple of rockers, as was in evidence at last night's show. She insists that rock'n'roll has always been part of what she's done.

"I've always been that, really. It's just that I hadn't developed it yet in my persona, or stage presence. I've always had that attitude, even when I was singing and playing acoustically in little coffeehouses and things. When I was developing my style and learning how to write my own songs, I was performing a lot of different kinds of songs, like Jimi Hendrix's Angel. I was always into the Doors and a lot of the 60s blues-based rock bands like Cream and the Allman Brothers and the Stones.

"And I've always done the blues thing, which is really connected in with the whole rock thing that I do. So to me it all just made sense. It's just a natural, normal transition. A lot of it to me was wanting to do this but just not having done it yet. I had to figure it out."

Williams had the benefit of being raised in the southern US by an open-minded father who was a professor of literature and a published poet. He exposed young Lucinda to some of the more esoteric music of the 1960s.

"I remember when I was about 14 or 15, we were living in New Orleans, and he brought home a Fugs' album. So yeah, I was influenced quite a bit by contemporary poets and a lot of the kinda crazy, hippie-type bands from that era. Captain Beefheart, you know, I got into his stuff and some of Frank Zappa's stuff back in the 70s. Also a lot of the jazz artists - my dad was really into John Coltrane and Chet Baker. So it's really no surprise if you go back and look at the roots of my music, when you look at what I'm doing now and you look at the roots, it's all connected.

"To me it's a natural transition, but I don't think that a lot of people have a lot of the knowledge of the history of the roots of music."

On World Without Tears Williams took the opportunity to revisit the blues as well as incorporating her interest in beat poetry.

"My music is really steeped quite a bit in the delta blues, you know, that whole realm of music. And there's so much of that whole talking blues as far as these new songs I did like Righteously and Sweet Side. Particularly with Sweet Side, that song has a lot of lyrics, it's almost like poetry set to music. It was kind of liberating for me to just not have to write a melody for the verses. That gave me the ability to just let the band set the stage and then go from there. That was really what I was trying to do, but it's been done in the blues idiom and Dylan did it with Subterranean Homesick Blues."

With the song American Dream, the story of a burned-out Vietnam vet who is bitter and disillusioned, Williams writes her first attempt at social commentary.

"That's another area that I wanted to explore, the whole topical-song thing. I was influenced, of course, a great deal by Bob Dylan with all his topical songs. I've always wanted to be able to write a song like The Times They Are A-Changin' or Masters Of War. Those incredible songs that were so beautiful and deep and topical at the same time. It's extremely hard to do for me."

It's a rare thing for an artist to still be exploring and experimenting the way Lucinda Williams is at age 50.

"I don't know why that is," Williams says. "People have used all kinds of excuses like somebody's too successful or they're making too much money and they're too comfortable. I think it is just a bunch of hogwash because that has nothing to do with inner happiness or personal satisfaction.

"I'm making more money now, I can pay my rent and bills and all that, which is great, but I still get the blues and I still suffer and I still deal with all those same things."

* World Without Tears is out now.