Music Preview 1
Lucinda on music, loss and braving the storms
. I can’t speak for everyone who was there, but it was the first normal thing I’d done since the infamous 9/11 attacks a week earlier, and it all seemed more profound than your average rock show. The promoters collected about $5,000 for FDNY that night, and Lucinda met with local firefighters after the show.
Four years later she returns to Louisville amid another national tragedy, one that is clearly more personal for someone born and raised in Louisiana. (Donations for the Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity will be collected during Thursday’s show, and the promoter, Production Simple, will also donate some proceeds.)
During a phone conversation last week, days before Hurricane Rita whacked rural Louisiana, Williams talked about what was lost to Katrina and what may happen next. She also discussed her recent live album, her next recording project and the merits of working with a smaller band.
LEO: Does a disaster like this in your home state make it more difficult to go about what you do?
LUCINDA WILLIAMS: There’s a lot of things that make life difficult, and that certainly hasn’t made it any easier. The thing I’ve had the hardest time with is my mom being gone. Not only did I lose her a year and a half ago, I’ve essentially lost the place where she lived. There’s a lot of ghosts, a lot of memories. This stuff has kinda been haunting me. It’s like your memories have been wiped off the map or something. I wonder about my old high school or my mom’s apartment.
LEO: What gets you through?
LW: My music is what always keeps me together and keeps me sane. Being able to get up and sing my Louisiana songs has been so gratifying. I’m trying to do as many as I can at all the shows now. I do one or two or more every night as a dedication. “Bus to Baton Rouge” is kinda hard to get through.
LEO: What’s it like to have a Live at the Fillmore album?
LW: I feel like I’m in good company. We recorded at the Fillmore and also at The El Rey (Theater in Los Angeles). We A/B’d everything and I wasn’t sure if all the best stuff would come from the Fillmore. It turns out it did. I wanted it to be Live at the Fillmore. I really identified with that era, when all those great bands were playing at the Fillmore.
LEO: I happened to catch the first show of this tour, in San Diego. You said you have 23 new songs. What’ll become of them?
LW: It’s 24 now. I wrote another one that I haven’t even taught the band yet. We went in the studio in March and April and we have basic tracks for all the songs. We’ll go back in at some point. I’m playing a lot of the new material on this tour.
LEO: Your band now is smaller — down one guitar player and a keyboard player. Why is that?
LW: At one point we were at rehearsal and our guitar player and keyboard player weren’t there for some reason. We all thought, this is kinda cool. It allowed (guitarist) Doug Pettibone to strike out a little more. We did a few gigs that way and liked it a lot. Plus, it allows these guys to make more. It’s pretty expensive to come out here on the road. So there are different reasons for it, but we just really liked the feeling of that stripped down thing.
LEO: Can New Orleans culture be revived to an acceptable level?
LW: That’s a hard one. Yeah, of course. As long as the people are there, you won’t kill the art.
LEO: There are fears it’ll turn into a sort of Manhattan.
LW: There’s a certain component of society that’s trying to make that happen everywhere. It’s happening in Nashville, it’s happening in Austin, it’s happening in all the cool older cities. They won’t build something with the same vibe as buildings from the ’20s or ’30s, but I don’t know, maybe it’ll be a brave new world. People are more in control than they think they are. It’s really gonna be up to the people who decide to stay and rebuild. Unfortunately, a majority of the city is owned by one or two people who’ve been able to systematically “clean up” the city.
I wrote this thing that I was gonna s/files/storyimages/out to a few people. I’m gonna try to look at this philosophically. What I was writing was, if this storm has brought people together and raised our awareness and made us realize and made us cry together and made us feel the fragility of the human spirit and caused us to wonder at the great mystery in all its power and feel the strength in our own weakness, then those who suffered and died did not do so in vain. That’s pretty deep, but that’s the way I’m looking at it. It’s all very global and it’s extremely powerful.
Lucinda Williams
w/ Strays Don’t Sleep (featuring Matthew Ryan)
Thursday, Sept. 29
Brown Theatre
315 W. Broadway
584-7777
www.kentuckycenter.org
$26.50-$41.50; 7:30 p.m.
BY CARY STEMLE
cstemle@leoweekly.com
