Lucinda Williams

The singer-songwriter on post-stroke recovery, losing the ability to play guitar, and the thrill of a Bruce Springsteen cameo.

- Paul Rees

The covid pandemic made 2020 a tortuous year for everybody, and Lucinda Williams had it rougher than most. That January, a tornado tore through her adopted home town of Nashville, ransacking the alt.country trailblazer’s house. Lockdown was next. Then in November, Williams suffered a stroke. She spent a week in intensive care, the left side of her body frozen. Her recovery is ongoing, including her having had to learn to walk all over again. But she’s still unable to play the guitar, the instrument on which she wrote such stellar records as 1998’s Grammy-winning Car Wheels On A Gravel Road and 2007’s West.

Now comes her excellent new album, her fifteenth, Stories From A Rock N Roll Heart. Williams, who turned 70 in January, pieced together its 10 songs with the help of collaborators including her husband/manager Tom Overby and New York rocker Jesse Malin; Bruce Springsteen and Patty Scialfa sing backing vocals on New York Comeback and Rock N Roll Heart. Overall it’s a record stalked by melancholy and a sense of mortality (Stolen Heart and Hum’s Liquor, pay tribute to, respectively, the late Tom Petty and The Replacements’ self-doomed guitarist Bob Stinson), but also one with an indomitable spirit, and fully befitting of the epithet Time magazine once bestowed upon Williams: “America’s best songwriter”.

What’s your immediate recollection of Tuesday, November 17, 2020?