Features

“I guess I just have a lot of drive and a lot of ambition. It really takes that you know. And trust me, I’ve had my down days,but at the same time I ain’t no fool. I don’t have a death wish, you know.There’s just too much to love to leave.”

While first impressions might suggest that Lucinda Williams has made the most upbeat album of her considerable career in Little Honey, a closer look reveals a(nother) set of songs preoccupied by abuse and destruction.

Though Williams’ current contentment with partner (and manager/producer) Tom Overby has been widely reported, most of Little Honey ’s songs were written before Williams and Overby got together three years ago. A good portion of the songs were written for previous album West, and a couple – ‘Circles And X’s’ and ‘If Wishes Were Horses’ – date back to the ‘80s. ‘Honey Bee’ is, Williams admits, openly about Overby and an unabashedly joyful tune.

However, raucous album opener, ‘Real Love’ is neither about Overby nor as joyous as most reviewers (myself included) initially proclaimed it. In fact, look a little closer and the song appears to bed ripping in sarcasm. Then there are ‘Little Rock Star’, ‘Jailhouse Tears’ (a spiky duet with Elvis Costello), ‘Rarity’ and album closer, AC/DC’s ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top’, all concerned with the pitfalls and tragedy of the glamourised lifestyle of rock and roll and excess.

“You know, ‘Jailhouse Tears’ sounds like a kind of corny country song,” says Williams, “but that was written about the last relationship I was in before I met Tom who I’m with now, you know I was with this guy who turned out to be a really bad alcoholic and started doing heroin again towards the end of the relationship, and was very abusive… it was horrible. So after that I said, ‘okay, that’s it. I’m gonna be by myself for the rest of my life!’ And then Tom came along. But you know I think we go through relationships in order to hopefully learn something from them, as we grow and mature. And that’s the difference with some people I think, is they don’t learn. They just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

“But anyway, so that’s what that song is about, that’s not a quote unquote happy song. Just because something is up tempo doesn’t mean it’s happy.”

“Yeah I know it’s really stupid,” Williams continues in candid response to the rash of ‘Shock! Lucinda Williams releases a happy album!’ headlines. “Because that song ‘Real Love’ was written about this other guy who was a total jerk. Not Tom! That was a short-lived kind of fantasy affair with this musician guy, who will remain anonymous, until I publish my memoirs. He’s the same guy I wrote ‘Come On’, you know that song ‘Come On’ on the last one? The same one! Because ‘Real Love’ was going to be on West, I already had that song written before I met Tom. Everybody’s ‘oh that song’s about Tom!’ No, it’s not about Tom (laughs), it’s about this asshole musician guy, who was after the abusive, alcoholic, drug addict guy! You know... that’s what most of the songs on the record are about.

“The only songs on there about Tom are ‘Honey Bee’, which is a happy song, and you know, ‘Plan To Marry’ I wrote that about Tom and me but it’s certainly not... it’s a more sort of serious sing.”

Phew! I’d heard Williams could be a prickly interviewee, but here she is minutes into our conversation gushing insights and details more intimate than I could have ever expected. From the moment Willliams picks up the phone she is lively and laughing, profusely apologising for her extended absence from Australia and promising to make up for it when she finally returns next month with her crack band as guests of Byron Bay’s Bluesfest.

Though Williams has made a career out of writing about bad relationships, by her own admission, she is as settled and content as she’sever been, having moved into a house in Studio City, LA, with Overby. Her childhood was rarely blessed with such stability, her father, poet and professor Miller Williams, taking teaching jobs all over North and South America. Williams’ father and mother, Lucille Morgan, divorced long ago and it was the death of her mother that forced Williams to cancel her last scheduled Australian tour a few years ago.

The loss of her mother proves that no matter how content you may be, death and tragedy are never far away, and this is something that occupies most of my interview with Williams. The topic is introduced by our discussing the impending set lists for her upcoming Australian tour and my observation that she’s covered Australia’s Unofficial Anthem in ‘It’s A LongWay To The Top’.

I point out that her own composition ‘Hey Little Rock Star’ (a fuzzed out epic recorded with Matthew Sweet) is a variation on the same theme. In ‘Hey Little Rock Star’, Williams takes a sympathetic tone in observing the all too common self-destructive behaviour of the professional rock musician with lyrics like, “This is not all that it’s cracked up to be. And I can’t blame you for throwing the towel in…” I ask Williams what’s prevented her from throwing the towel in over the years, and we’re off…

“Um, that’s a good question,” Williams cackles.“Nobody’s ever asked it quite that way before. I don’t know, I guess I just have a lot of drive and a lot of ambition. It really takes that you know. Andtrust me, I’ve had my down days, but at the same time I ain’t no fool. I don’thave a death wish, you know. There’s just too much to love to leave. I mean, I guess I have my frustrated times and my down times where, you know, ‘fuck it, I hate this! Life sucks!’ But there’s always something to pull me out of it. And I have my art! I have my writing and everything and that’s why I write. I write to deal with life, to try to help me deal with things and get through things. So for me it’s very therapeutic.”

“And everybody’s different,” Williams continues,clearly compelled to delve deeper into the topic, “but that’s what’s so frustrating when I see someone like Amy Winehouse and she’s so talented and so young and just, you know, why do you want to toss it all away? But she can’t see what she’s doing at the time I’m sure, she’s not thinking consciously about it.

“So I was looking at that, and just reading all the articles that were coming out every time you open up one of the music magazines. Pete Doherty was on the cover of Rolling Stone at one point and you know his whole story about what he was doing. I don’t really know his music and stuff, but it’s just the same story over and over again. And Ryan Adams was a big influence in that song too. Because I know him, I mean we haven’t been in touch in ages, but he was living in Nashville when I was living in Nashville and when I first went to see him play, my late manager Frank Callari took me to see him and it was in Nashville at a little club and Ryan was playing acoustic guitar with his harmonica and it was like, you know, he was like an early Bob Dylan. Because not that much stuff impresses me but I just stood there, I couldn’t believe it, I was just stunned at his talent. And I turned to Frank and said, ‘God, Frank, this guy’s a genius!’ I saw it immediately in him. And then he started going through that whole self-destructive phase, it was just… you know now he’s supposedly sobered up. I haven’t heard his new record but I read a really good review about it.

“So that’s... I hard a first-hand view of that. And, of course, there’s a whole history going back to Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix…it’s just that whole thing of when there’s so much talent like that, like Jimi Hendrix - I mean my God!”

The label bio for Little Honey makes the (unusually) pertinent observation that Williams’ father instilled her with an invaluable sense of stoic professionalism. Perhaps it’s that which has helped ensure her survival in an emotionally tumultuous world of artists falling around her.

“Yeah, yeah definitely. Absolutely,” Williams confirms, before picking up where we left off. “Yeah, because when that guy [poet] Frank Stanford died, I was in my twenties when that happened, who I wrote ‘Pineola’ about on the Sweet Old World album, and that was my first hand experience with that where I was actually at the funeral and the whole thing and I had known him before, and he was a young, promising, up and coming writer. He was the darling of the poet world, had this beautiful bright future ahead of him, was a really handsome looking guy, you know, very charming, very intelligent, and, yeah, he shot himself. It was just like ‘what the fuck!’ I hate that!

“A friend of mine took his own life the other day, another musician friend of mine. Right after we got home from the tour, and he had just moved back to LA, Michael Bannister his name is, a drummer, and I knew him back in the early ‘80s. He actually was friends with Gurf Morlix my old guitar player, he and Gurf were both from Buffalo New York. So we used to all hang together back in the mid-‘80s in LA and then everybody went their separate ways. Michael kind of got out of the scene for a while, he moved to Arizona and was playing in an American Indian band, and had a kid and stuff. And then he came back to LA a couple of months ago and I was trying to help him get back into the scene and stuff and I don’t know, I knew he had a problem with depression, but I had no idea it was that bad. I had just seen him at a party in September, at Pamela Des Barre’s fiftieth birthday party, and he was there and… he was having trouble getting work and stuff, I knew that it was hard for him, but I don’t know they found him outside of Tempe, Arizona somewhere. It kind of sounds like the Gram Parsons thing, you know, where he went to the desert… (sighs).”

It’s just such a repetitive cycle through history, that you can hardly believe it still happens until you experience it first hand.

“I know! And now these friends of mine want to have a memorial service for Michael and I’m like, I don’t know, I’m not necessarily going to go to a memorial service for him. He pissed me off! You know. ‘Cause I just lost a friend of mine to brain cancer, and she wanted to live! This is how unfair everything is. If there was ever a person who wanted to live, it was her. And she deserves a song, ‘cause she didn’t do anything tocause her own death. She didn’t smoke cigarettes, she didn’t do drugs, she was a beautiful caring person and, you know, it killed her. And that happened whenI was on the road earlier this month, and then I get home from the road and find out this other friend of mine has killed himself… ohhhh (sighs) anyway."

Williams’ immediate world must seem like an oasis of tranquility in comparison. Not only is there fiancé Overby, who took over as Williams’ manager following the death of Frank Callari in 2007, but Williams has gathered around her a stable band of incredible musicians. At the core of the new line-up is guitarist Doug Pettibone, who first stepped up to prominence on 2003’s World Without Tears. His laconic, poetic, tremolo soaked guitar was a highlight of the record and has really become the signature sound of Williams’ band on all subsequent work.

Since West , Pettibone has been joined by drummer Butch Norton and guitarist Chet Lyster, both formally of Eels, and bass player David Sutton, to form Williams’ live and studio backing band Buick 6. They make for a formidable combination and we’re in for a real treat to be able to see them backing Williams next month.

Pettibone recently released a debut solo album, The West Gate , and Williams reveals that Buick 6 have also recorded an album of instrumental material that they’ve been selling at shows. Buick 6 have even been opening for Williams’ US shows (perhaps 40 minutes could be found on one of this year’s Bluesfest stages for ‘em?).

Williams says she’s “absolutely thrilled” with the band and provides an example of how involved they were in the recording in talking about album track ‘Reason To Marry’.

“Yeah I was very proud of that one, that’s a demo for that song. I was really putting it down, the way you hear it on the record is the way that I taped it to show it to the band. We were going to go in and produce it and do the whole thing, and then one of my guitar players Chet, he says, ‘you gotta leave it, leave it like it is’. It made him cry.

“We gave him a tape, ‘cause usually what I’ll do is I’ll go in and make an acoustic demo if I have a new song and then the guys will take it and listen to it and come back the next day and we’ll start tracking it and all that. And he was listening to it the next morning on the way to the studio and he called Eric [Liljestrand] the engineer and said ‘we don’t need to cut this song, it’s done’. So that’s how we left it – like that –‘cause a lot of people liked it already and it’s just one of those real, raw things that just happens.”

Another piece of good news for Australian fans is that Williams and Buick 6 recently completed a five night run at LA’s El Ray Theatre, playing a different album each night. That means almost every song Williams has recorded is rehearsed up and ready to go. Williams says they’ve even worked up Happy Woman Blues.

Considering there’s about four albums’ worth of material Australians are yet to see live, Williams’ has license to roam far and wide with her set lists.

“I know!” she laughs. “I guess we’ll just have to do more different… you know we play for usually a couple of hours when we can, it depends on if there’s a curfew or not. We always come out and do… if we have time after the set, we usually put about 18 songs in the set, and then we go off, and then we come back and do, we’ll do four or five more songs if we have time. So it ends up being a pretty good amount of songs. We have some of the same songs we do in all the sets anyway from different albums, so it’s pretty all mixed up.

“But we have the same challenge over here, too, just because we have so many, I’ve got so many more songs now than I ever did. So trying to get ‘em all out there in the sets and everything is challenging.”

Little Honey is available on Lost Highwaythrough Universal. Lucinda Williams plays Byron Bluesfest on April 11 & 12.Plus: Hamer Hall Melbourne on April 1; Canberra Theatre on April 4; EnmoreTheatre Sydney on April 6; QPAC Concert Hall Brisbane on April 9.