In her slim, detailed and courageously candid memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, 70-year-old Lucinda Williams emerges as the product of cross-currents: the child of an alcoholic, damaged but musical mother, her father a teacher-cum-poet.
The family lived in 12 towns before she was 18, her father’s young lover moving in with them and becoming part of the family.
“Yes, my family was dysfunctional … but that’s not what matters to me,” she writes. “What matters is that I inherited my musical ability from my mother and my writing ability from my father.”
Her memoir – mentioning numerous lovers and infatuations – gets beneath the skin of many of her songs to reveal their deep and dark autobiographical text, not flinching from the pain and hurts.
Among her heroes and role models were Tom Petty, Hank Williams, Muddy Waters and other truth-telling writers.
“This is it, this is what I want to do,” she said of hearing Chrissie Hynde with the Pretenders in 1980.
Williams “wanted to rock before I was able to”, she says of picking up a guitar as a teenager.
She didn’t finish high school, was still working day jobs in her 30s and freely admits preferring life on the road and hotel rooms to being settled.
Drawn to dangerous but intelligent men (“the poet on the motorcycle”) and a songwriter frequently dismissed as too country for rock’n’roll and too rock’n’roll for country, Williams describes herself as “a complete anomaly in the music world, a late bloomer”.
She was a resilient outsider and, to her loyal audience, remains there despite 17 Grammy nominations (three wins in separate folk, rock and country categories) and numerous accolades.
It is a remarkable book for her unapologetic honesty, so it’s disappointing her new album, Stories from a Rock’n’Roll Heart, is so musically conventional and lyrically familiar, living down to its title with its orthodox rock’n’roll.
It is full of obvious lyrical and musical gestures: guitar solos, swirling organ, stadium-shaped rock’n’roll styles (from Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Iggy Pop), stories of dead-end towns, last-chance bars, jukeboxes, blue-collar boys …
A stroke in 2020 means Williams is unable to play guitar but she has an impressive gathering of guests: among them Springsteen and Patti Scialfa on the fist-pumping title track (sounding like an out-take from his 1980 album The River), Nashville country singer Margo Price, legendary songwriter-guitarist Buddy Miller and New York rocker Jesse Malin (who co-wrote three songs and suffered a paralysing stroke last month).
Fortunately, Williams remains central, so the album doesn’t become a tribute, and although many songs are generic, her delivery is more assertive and unwavering than on recent albums.
Let’s Get the Band Back Together is a rowdy bar-room rocker with a nod to Let’s Stick Together, which will doubtless be popular live. The low-end throb of This is Not My Town is pure Doors-like menace.
But too often, the ballads are swamped by arrangements for organ, guitars or strings, notably Where the Song Will Find Me, an autobiographical piece buried by orchestration and a crowd-pleasing stadium-rock guitar solo.
There are moving songs here – Jukebox with Angel Olsen reflects on her heartbreaking post-stroke situation: “These days my world seems so small, I’m a prisoner inside these four walls, going crazy with the sound of my own voice.”
Hum’s Liquor is a tribute to the Replacements’ Bob Stinson (“dragging demons around with you”) featuring his brother Tommy.
The spirit of Tom Petty is evident, too (she opened for the final Petty concert in 2017): Stolen Moments is a new recording of her song that appeared on her 2021 tribute to him, the first in her Lu’s Jukebox series.
Cast as nostalgic, classic stadium rock – some might say overly familiar or even clichéd Middle American power-rock – Stories is an uneven but celebratory album attesting to her belief in rock’n’roll as a redemptive force. Which is very Springsteen.
The final song is the self-confident ballad Never Gonna Fade Away, with swirling organ and another searing guitar solo.
Lucinda Williams’ memoir Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You is available now (Simon and Schuster, $55); Stories from a Rock’n’Roll Heart is out now.
