The latest issue of Uncut โ€“ which is in shops now or available to buy online by clicking here, with free P&P for the UK โ€“ features an in-depth interview with country-rock icon Lucinda Williams. In this extract from her wide-ranging conversation with Stephen Deusner, she discusses moving back to Nashville after a difficult period at the beginning of her career.

โ€œWhat church do you go to?โ€ That was the question Williams remembers dodging back when she lived in Nashville in the 1990s. โ€œIt wasnโ€™t, โ€˜Do you go to church?โ€™ It was, โ€˜What church do you go to?โ€™โ€ At the time the city was geared toward a very conservative brand of country music, with hat acts like Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson leading a country-pop crossover that left artists like Williams behind. โ€œThere was no-one wearing leather motorcycle jackets and biker boots.โ€

Advertisement

Williamsโ€™ time in Nashville was marked by rejection and frustration. Artists were covering her songs, but aside from Mary Chapin Carpenterโ€™s version of โ€œPassionate Kissesโ€, their labels werenโ€™t pushing them as singles, mainly because radio programmers objected to lyrics like, โ€œAnd the only thing I regret is I never kissed your mouth.โ€

After the release of Sweet Old World in 1992, it took six years to follow it up with Car Wheels On
A Gravel Road
, during which time she recorded the album and then had to re-record it. Itโ€™s one of the most acclaimed albums of that decade, but it still didnโ€™t ingratiate her in Nashville. โ€œWhen I got nominated for a Grammy for โ€˜Get Right With Godโ€™ in 2001,โ€ she says, โ€œI decided to drive out to Los Angeles. In the back of my mind I was thinking
I might just stay there.โ€

Nearly 20 years later, the Nashville machine remains rigid and intractable, but Williams isnโ€™t even trying to break in any more. โ€œI donโ€™t have to deal with the music industry now,โ€ she says. โ€œThereโ€™s still crap coming out of Nashville. Thereโ€™s still stuff that annoys me, like four people getting songwriting credit on a song. Why does it take so many people to write a bad song? Tomโ€™s like, โ€˜Honey, just ignore it.โ€™ Iโ€™ll try. I guess I canโ€™t have a perfect town. At least nobody is asking me what church I go to.โ€

Advertisement

Still, Nashville has been a readjustment for her. โ€œI like the anonymity I had in LA,โ€ she says. She does get recognised on the street more often here than out in California, and everybody she meets is somehow connected to the music industry. โ€œEvery time I take an Uber or a Lyft, the driver is a singer-songwriter. When they find out Iโ€™m a musician, they always want to know what kind of music I play.โ€

With her adventurous new album Good Souls Better Angels using blues and country as springboards into heavy rock, punk, rural psychedelica and even hip-hop, thatโ€™s become a difficult question to answer. โ€œI feel like Iโ€™ve been misunderstood to such a degree for so long,โ€ she reveals. โ€œI started out on acoustic guitar doing folk songs, then I moved into Delta blues, but I was always listening to edgier stuff like The Doors and the Stones. I got locked into the singer-songwriter thing by default. When youโ€™re first starting out, usually itโ€™s just you and your guitar. You immediately get put into that category, but Iโ€™ve always loved all different kinds of music.โ€

You can read much more from Lucinda Williams in the new issue of Uncut, out now with George Harrison on the cover.