Lucinda Williams

Alongside the likes of Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt and Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams was part of a gang of hard-drinking country songwriters who congregated in Austin, Texas in the mid-1970s. The daughter of a literature professor and poet, Williams was born on January 26th, 1953 in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and first started performing as a 17-year-old in Mexico City before finding herself in Texas in her mid-twenties, surrounded by a wealth of brilliant songwriters. Her early albums Ramblin' (1979) and Happy Woman Blues (1980) received little attention but she moved to Nashville in the early 1980s and developed a fuller, country rock sound and came to recognition with the track “Changed The Locks,” later recorded by Tom Petty. Williams won her first Grammy Award in 1993 when Mary Chapin Carpenter covered her song “Passionate Kisses,” and repeated the feat when her critically acclaimed fifth album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road (1998) was named Best Contemporary Folk Album. Featuring guest appearances from Elvis Costello, Susannah Hoffs and Charlie Louvin, Little Honey (2008) became her most commercially successful record, reaching number nine in the US charts, and she remains a highly respected artist, full of heart-on-sleeve Southern honesty and embittered passion. Her 2020 effort, the critically acclaimed Good Souls Better Angels, found her lambasting then-president Donald Trump on its lead single, “Man Without a Soul.” It received two Grammy nominations, topping the UK Jazz & Blues and Americana album charts and reaching Number 144 on the Billboard 200. After receiving the Americana Music Association-UK International Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022, Lucinda Williams returned in 2023 with her fifteenth LP, Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart, which was preceded by the single "New York Comeback" featuring Bruce Springsteen on backing vocals.