Lucinda Williams: Chasing The Ghosts Of Highway 20 (Interview)

Over the course of her 35+year career Lucinda Williams has assembled a a songwriting catalog that ranks among the finest of any songwriters of her generation. That catalog is about to expand with the release of her latest album, The Ghost s Of Highway 20, due in February. New Zealand fans will get an opportunity to hear some of these new songs very soon as Lucinda and her band will be performing at the Vector Arena on Friday, December 4th for one show only. The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda spoke to Lucinda Williams recently to find out more about The Ghosts Of Highway 20.

Click here to listen to the interview with Lucinda Williams:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: You’re getting ready to head on down to Australia and New Zealand soon, I believe.

LW: Yes, we leave on November 24^th.

MD: You’re going to be down here for Thanksgiving.

LW: Yeah, yeah.

MD: There’s not a lot of Thanksgiving festivities down here I afraid so you’ll have to bring your own turkey.

LW: No, that’s OK. (laughing)

MD: I was just reading an article in the New York Times about Adele’s new album coming out and the debate about whether or not she was going to allow it to be streamed on Spotify and I was wondering, since you own your own label and run your own business along those lines, if that’s something you give any consideration to?

LW: Um, actually, yes. I mean, we don’t do Spotify. What I mean is, we think about those things and Tom doesn’t want to do Spotify, you know Tom, my husband/manager, he doesn’t support Spotify because the artists don’t get paid.

MD: Fair enough!

LW: Pretty basic…yeah. Exactly!

MD: I never saw the appeal of that, to the artists other than maybe get some exposure for a brief time.

LW: Yeah, I think that’s where it kinda just depends on where you are as an artist and everything and, you know, if you don’t need that kind of exposure necessarily then…I guess each artist has to decide about that. But there are other ways to get exposure that might be more beneficial to the artist.

MD: And one of them that’s recently played out for you is, one of your songs, Locks, was featured on a TV show, on The Affair.

LW: Yeah!

MD: In the past that wouldn’t be a viable outlet for music but it seems to be more and more the case these days.

LW: It’s really wild. I mean, we got so many responses on that and, in fact, it ended up I believe it was number 16 on digital Billboard chart. That just came out last…that news came out yesterday so that was pretty surprising, yeah. And all because of it being in that TV show.

MD: Are you concerned about where your songs show up? Do you licence them out to ads or films or TV shows? Do you have to think about how they’re being used?

LW: No…they just…we always know about it but whoever wants to can use…as long as they pay the publishing fee and all of that, go through the proper channels. I haven’t been fortunate enough to have one of my songs used in a car commercial.

MD: You wouldn’t have a problem with that?

LW: I wouldn’t have a problem with that, I’d probably have a problem if it was Coca-Cola or a cigarette commercial, you know. A lot of the car commercials are using pretty cool music now in their commercials. So…yeah, as long as they give ya a car!

MD: There you go!

LW: I just auditioned for a…I did a vocal track for a commercial for Jeep. It’s the hundredth anniversary for Jeep. We’re sitting on pins and needles wondering if I got it or not…for the commercial, I sing the song. It’s actually me singing Happy Birthday Jeep. Tom just now told me today, he said, “well, they’re gonna put it on the back burner because they don’t want to release it over the holidays.” So, we’ll see…you never know with those things.

MD: Right. The other thing that you got involved in, you were part of the Americana Fest in Nashville in September, I believe. You won Album Of The Year and all that. I was wondering if you could tell folks down in New Zealand a little bit about what the Americana Fest is all about and what it was like for you personally.

LW: Well, it’s a really fun time in Nashville. It goes on, it’s mid-September, and it goes on for a week. There’s a main concert, it’s held at the Ryman Auditorium, and that’s the awards show. That’s where the awards are given out and different bands…there’s a house band, actually, and then different artists go out and do a couple of songs. So there’s music in between the awards being presented. Besides the awards show, they have all these different clubs in town feature different bands and a lot of people travel from all around to go there for that whole week. It’s a really good thing. Of course it features Americana-type music, anything from roots music, basically anything from folk, singer-songwriter, country, blues, rock.

MD: We have a little mini-Americana Fest here in Auckland but it’s not quite as expansive, I imagine, as the Nashville version. It seems to be a genre of music that is getting more and more popular, or becoming more of a thing, I guess, where it’s always been around one way or another.

LW: Exactly, yeah. At least they have a name for it now. They used to call it “country”. I remember when I first played in New Zealand and Australia and my music was considered country. Everything was either…if it wasn’t dance music, or something like that, it was country. Anything that had anything to do with a roots kinda sound was called country, because there wasn’t another word for it. So now at least they have…Americana kinda covers the whole group, anything within that group. Cause my stuff…people ask me, “what kind of music do you play?” and I have to say, “Well, country, blues, you know, folk-rock, country-soul”.

MD: It can get complicated. It’s hard for people to latch on to it. They make immediate assumptions when they hear a word like “country”.

LW: Exactly, yeah, because I used to have people…you know, when I first started touring and everything…I used to have people come up and they’d say, “I’m not a big fan of country music but I really like your music”. I’d say, “That’s because it’s not really country in the way that you think of country”.

MD: And you’ve got a new album that I believe you’ve just recorded and is about to be released in a few months, Ghosts Of Highway 20. I found an article on line that was written about a year ago and the writer in there had mention he’d seen a folder, or something, with notes with that particular title on it when he was talking to you. So apparently this idea must have been rattling around for a while.

LW: Yeah, the title came up…call the album that, or that line came up, I guess. Tom actually came up with the idea for that. I wasn’t sure how I was going to proceed the song, you know, because I felt like, “Well, I’ve already said quite a bit about where I’m from with that song, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, and my song Bus To Baton Rouge and my song Jackson, so I mentioned it…you know, Highway 20 runs through several of the towns that I grew up in, so the whole idea of it was to sort of go back and look at that area, because it was a real important area for me. It kind of all started a few years ago when I went back and did a show in Macon, Georgia and I felt myself moved…something about being there…because that was where I first started school. And Macon, Georgia’s one of these towns that hasn’t really changed that much. It’s not like a big boom town like Nashville is or Austin, Texas, you know. The concert we did was at the original Cox Theatre in downtown Macon and I just remember looking around and thinking, “Wow, it’s almost like it was back then”. And then as we were on the bus and Tom and I were looking out the window and I kept seeing these exit signs for Jackson, Mississippi and Vicksburg, you know, where my brother and sister were born and I said, “Wow, this highway runs through all these towns where I lived when I was real young. So that kind of started the whole vibe of it. And then Tom came up with the idea of The Ghost Of Highway 20 and so anyway, with him nudging me, you know, “Can you please write a song called The Ghost Of Highway 20?” I said, “Ok, I’ll see what I can do”. And so I got started on something…a couple of things…you know I keep a lot, I have a lot of notes written down from ideas and things like that. That’s what I’ll do when I sit down to write, I get my folder of stuff out and see if something kind of strikes a chord. Then once I get going…figure out the outline of it, what I’m trying to say. Anyway I’m really happy with the way the song came out and the recording of it came out really good. It just kind of seemed to pull the whole album together.

MD: So is it kind of like a concept album? Do the songs all kind of relate to Highway 20?

LW: Well, you know, there’s a lot of songs about, you know, looking back and loss. I’ve got this one song that sounds like an old gospel hymn and it’s called…you know, I wrote it after my dad passed away. He died on January first of this year…the same day Hank Williams died. So I wrote this song, it’s called, When You Go, Will You Let Me Know If There Is A Heaven. It sounds like an old-timey kind of hymn or something, you know, like an old kind of gospelly-folk song. Then I’ve got this other song called Doors Of Heaven and I wrote this other song after my mother…you know it’s been a pretty intense…she passed away in 2004. I’d written the song actually shortly after that but hadn’t recorded it yet and it’s called Death Came. Death came, death came and gave you his kiss and took you away from us. If kind of reminds me of, you know that Ralph Stanley, that old traditional song that he sang. I think he sang it at the Grammys one year. It was right after that O Brother, Where Art Thou album came out and it’s called O Death and he sang it acapella. It’s a real haunting song about death…as the personification of death. You know, death came…cause that’s how they used to sing about it, you know in the early days.[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xmRWj7gJEU]

MD: From what I understand you cover an obscure Woody Guthrie tune, House Of Earth.

LW: Oh yeah! The story behind that is Norah Guthrie, who is the daughter of Woody Guthrie, she came across yet another collection of his lyrics that didn’t have music. So one of them was this song, that it hadn’t become a song yet, but the lyrics were written out, called House Of Earth. You know there was also a book that was called House Of Earth that was in the process of being published at the time and released. So she sent me these lyrics and she said, You know, they’re kind of racy compared to some of his other songs”. And she said, “I thought you might want to take a stab at it”. She was right, it’s a little racy. You know, he was that kind of guy, he was out there rambling around and having affairs with different women and stuff. The song is about him visiting a prostitute. And The House Of Earth was meant to describe…cause it was out…he had travelled out West from Oklahoma and he discovered for the first time, he saw these stucco houses and he was impressed with how strong they were, because they were built out of stucco. He was going to go back and tell the people of Oklahoma about these stucco homes, how they were strong and they wouldn’t blow down in the wind. The wooden houses in Oklahoma would blow down every time there was a dust storm. So, he was real impressed. Anyway, so it’s called House Of Earth, that means the house is built out of earth.

MD: And a house of Earthly delights…

LW: Yeah, exactly, yes. That’s a good way to put it. But it’s also a very liberal take on the idea of the prostitute and everything because he says in the song, you know the prostitute, it’s kind of from her perspective and she says, “You know, I can teach you these things. You know I can do these things that your wife refuses to do and your wife should be thankful that I’m showing you these things. You can go back and show her what I did and that can make your relationship better.” That was very forward thinking.

MD: Absolutely, because it was probably written in the forties…

LW: Yeah, exactly!

MD: And you’ve got Greg Leisz working with you again on the record?

LW: Oh yeah, he was an instrumental part of it, you know, co-producer. We brought him in first on the current record that’s out now, he came in as a musician, you know, to play on it, then he and Tom and I just bonded and told Tom, I said, “We need to officially make Greg a co-producer”. So the same line of thought carried over into this next album. But he plays guitar, pedal steel, lap steel and Bill Frisell is featured on the…he’s on a couple of songs on this album but on the next one, I think he’s on every song on the next one so…

MD: That’s some serious guitar players you’ve got there.

LW: Yeah

MD: I was wondering if the reaction to the previous album has any effect on you when you’re contemplating and putting together the next album? Do you take anything to heart or do you react to things that people say about the music? Do you try to do something notably different?

LW: No, it really has to do with what songs, how they fit together and that’s really where Tom and Greg come in. Tom has a real good sense of sequencing. You know, once you get all the songs done, you just separate them out…at a certain point it becomes obvious which ones work together. So that’s really the way we do it. It’s not about what…and I do like each album to have its own different vibe and everything. But it’s not really a conscience effort; it’s more about, these songs work well together.

MD: I assume when you’re coming down to New Zealand you’re bringing the band and you’re going to be performing some of the new songs. I know the album isn’t out until February.

LW: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve got my long-time rhythm section Butch Norton on drums, David Sutton on bass and Stuart Mathis on guitar. He was out there with us the last time we were there. You know, he was a long-time member of The Wallflowers, Jakob Dylan’s band.

MD: That’s right, Jakob Dylan played on your previous record, didn’t he?

LW: Yes, right, he sang on that song It’s Gonna Rain. Yeah, so we mix it all up. We’re going to be doing songs from the current album and then some of the ones that are on the one that’s coming out and older songs…Change The Locks and Joy and some of the, you know, my usual…two of my most requested songs are Drunken Angel and Lake Charles so we usually do those almost every show.

Click here for more information and tickets to see Lucinda Williams at the Vector Arena.

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