Reading Lucinda Williams’ memoir.
Someone said to me the other day, the problem with some modern pop songs is that they just sound like extracts from someone’s diary.
The thing about Lucinda Williams’ songs is that they sound like extracts from your own diary. Listening to Passionate Kisses or Sweet Old World, it feels like someone’s been there before you.
As her friend Steve Earle puts it: “People don’t give a fuck what happened to you, they care about what happened to you that also happened to them.”
The Steve Earle quote comes from a long article, shared on Lucinda’s Facebook page, from the disturbingly titled Garden & Gun magazine. I looked it up. “Celebrates the modern South,” it says, reassuringly. Well, Lucinda is the modern South. It permeates her songs.
And she takes pains in her memoir to challenge the redneck stereotypes. Being a southerner, she points out, doesn't necessarily mean you're a racist. In fact, Lucinda got thrown out of school for not being a racist. Twice.
Her background was liberal and literary, but that doesn’t mean she had an easy life. She uses the phrase “dysfunctional families”. And she recalls in the book one listener asking her after a show if she had a rough childhood: “I nodded my head.”
As she told a TV interviewer a few years ago: “I have plenty to write about. I’m carrying around a lot of baggage.”
The book mentions therapy. It mentions a rift with a sibling. It mentions, in more details, poor choices of men. Lots of poor choices, because she’s a serial monogamist and because lots of them didn’t work out. (There’s a happy ending, though.)
It all feeds into the songs, of course, but not necessarily directly. Lucinda carries a case full of notes and quotes around with her, and pieces them together when they are ready. As she tells it, she doesn’t always realise she is writing autobiography: it took her father to recognise that Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was about her childhood.
So the songs aren’t confessional, but they are emotionally honest. There’s art in them, but they feel raw. You can tell the book is by the same person – it has the same emotional honesty – but it feels different. It’s got facts in it. It’s got no-holds-barred memories of some of those bad choices of men (and I don’t think the names have been changed). It fills in the gaps of what you’ve learnt from the songs over the years. Best of all, it tells you about some of the songs, and where the images come from.
Another thing I loved about the story was that it gives hope to anyone who thinks they are too old, or it’s too late. Lucinda started playing guitar aged 12 but she was 35 when she had her breakthrough album. That’s a lot of years doing dead-end jobs to pay the bills. She was 41 when she got her first Grammy. She’s 70 now and still recording and gigging, despite a stroke a few years ago.
It wasn’t easy. Careers (musical or otherwise) are not easy for women, especially women who don’t conform. The people who make the business decisions couldn’t put Lucinda’s music into a box (“Americana” hadn’t been invented at the time; she remains scathing about genre). Until they found a box called “difficult woman” because of the studio struggles to make Car Wheels on a Gravel Road the way she wanted it.
It was easy to put her in that box. But it didn’t matter, because the album was hugely successful anyway, which proved she was right. She’s had plenty of acclaim since.
As a fan, I loved the book but ended up wanting more. It’s a long story but not a long book, and I wanted to stay immersed in that story. But after all those years of hearing Lucinda sing the story of my life, it was good to read the story of her own. Now, back to the music.
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