Lucinda Williams

By Emmylou Harris

Lucinda Williams is a righteous singer. The sound of her voice is so overwhelming and so moving that she could sing the phone book and probably give it meaning. But she comes up with extraordinary words for that voice to sing--deceptively simple words like back steps or hairdo. How do you use the word hairdo in a song and make it so poignant that it almost breaks your heart?

As a person, Lucinda, who's now 48, doesn't censor herself. She's without guile, and she suffers from that sometimes because people don't know what to make of someone so forthright. They feel as if they want to protect her. But she is a real survivor, and the key to her success as an artist is that she has managed to survive without putting the armor on.

Lucinda writes from a very personal standpoint, and that can be difficult. When you go that close to the bone, you are always risking bathos--or being corny or cloying. She plays in dangerous territory, and sometimes you're not sure she's gonna pull it out. I am always amazed by her song Sweet Old World because it could so easily have been sentimental. Instead it is just haunting. It goes right to the heart of a kind of desperation that everyone has felt. And her words take you to another place and make you look at loneliness in a way that you never would have looked at it before.

Songwriting can be a very frightening thing. For me, the fear is about failing to follow the scent of a lyrical idea, failing to come up with the truth of something that you know is there. You've caught a glimpse of it in one line, one phrase, or the emotional idea that's come to you. The fear for me is always, "Am I going to be able to capture that? Can I build a fence around that horse?" A Lucinda Williams song always does.

Singer-songwriter Emmylou Harris has recorded since 1967. Her latest album, Red Dirt Girl, earned her a 10th Grammy Award