*This episode originally ran in 2016.
When Lucinda Williams was in elementary school, all the other kids brought rock collections and other standard fare to show-and-tell. But she brought a folder. "I put this notebook together of seven poems and a short story by Cindy Williams," she remembers. Decades later, she's still documenting her impressions of the world, now in raw, often mournful songs that explore death, heartbreak, abandonment, and love. Many of her them are based in the American south, where Lucinda grew up—including those on the album The Ghosts of Highway 20. "I know these roads like the back of my hand," she sings on the title track.
Lucinda was close to her father, poet Miller Willams, throughout her life. He encouraged her interest in words and writing, even taking her to visit Flannery O'Connor when she was a little girl. So it was especially hard for her to see him go through Alzheimer's disease. He died a year before our conversation, less than six months after the summer day when he told Lucinda he couldn't write poetry anymore. "I just sat there and just cried," she remembers. "That was when I lost him."
In her sixties, Lucinda says she's more successful than ever, selling out shows on the road and happily in love with her manager Tom Overby, whom she married on stage during an encore in 2009. But, she told me, getting older can still feel like a drag. "I don't like the aging process. I don't like getting older because of all the loss. It just gets harder and harder."
See the video on Lucinda's Facebook page of her performance of "Compassion" at her father's home before he died. Miller Williams reads his poem, and Lucinda follows by singing her musical interpretation.
How to Say Goodbye to Your Pets
Your One Night Stand Stories, Revisited
Gabrielle Union Completes Herself
Margo Price After Cheating and Drinking
Your Estrangement Calls Answered Live
From Fan to Friend: The Unlikely Friendship Between Pico Iyer and Leonard Cohen
Why the Creators of "Everything Everywhere All At Once" Treat Their Partnership Like a Marriage
Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp Talk About Their Divorce, Anxiety, and Slowing Down
Trevor Noah Talks Depression, Radical Honesty, and Braiding Hair
Radiolab’s Lulu Miller Steals All Her Best Ideas From Her Kids
Estrangement’s Alternate Endings
Then I Blocked Them: How Estrangement Became Official
Estrangement Purgatory
Fran Lebowitz’s Guide to Life (And Parties)
Estrangement: We Were Close, Now I Don’t Know You
Race and Friendship After 2020: An Update
Between Friends: Stories About Race and Friendship
An Update from the Sex Worker Next Door
Sandra Cisneros on Sex, Aging, and the Paranormal
Singing in the Pain: Hrishikesh Hirway on his Mother, Grief and Creativity
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The Modern West
Stuff You Should Know
On Being with Krista Tippett
TED Radio Hour
Planet Money
The Dinner Party Download