Lucinda Williams was a teenage activist singing We Shall Overcome at protest marches and she’s taken up the cudgels again on her new album World’s Gone Wrong. She talks to us here from her home in Nashville about …

… early inspirations - Dylan, Donovan, Joan Baez, Peter Paul & Mary, Buffy Sainte-Marie – and her love of Sandy Denny, Bert Jansch, Nick Drake and ‘60s British folk

… playing Delta blues for tips at Andy’s in Bourbon Street in 1971

… her sudden favourite Beatle switch – “Paul … then George!”

… her Dad’s Ray Charles and Hank Williams records

… seeing jazz pianist Sweet Emma Barrett in Preservation Hall in the ‘60s and Hendrix at a New Orleans sports arena

… the effect of her stroke in 2020 and having to re-learn the guitar – “I tend to write in G now as it’s the easiest chord to play”

… the allure of medieval murder ballads, “far too dark” for most Americans

... songs she always plays live (one by Neil Young)

… finding her tribe in Nashville – “when I arrived people asked, ‘What church do you go to?’ not ‘Do you go to church’?”

… being “a quarter Welsh”

… and the song she wrote about her president in 2018 – 'We have slow-danced with the devil/ We have swallowed the liquid of his lies’ - and the new version she’s just recorded.

2026 tickets here: https://www.lucindawilliams.com/tour

Order World’s Gone Wrong here: https://30tgrs.ffm.to/worldsgonewrong

Help us to keep The Longest Conversation In Rock going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear

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