Lucinda Williams

Artist Information

Three-time Grammy Award winner, Lucinda Williams has been carving her own path for more than three decades now. Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Williams had been imbued with a “culturally rich, economically poor” worldview. Several years of playing the hardscrabble clubs gave her a solid enough footing to record a self-titled album that would become a touchstone for the embryonic Americana movement – helping launch a thousand musical ships along the way.

While not a huge commercial success at the time Lucinda Williams (aka, the Rough Trade album) retained a cult reputation, and finally got the reception it deserved upon its reissue in 2014. Jim Farber of New York’s Daily News hailed the reissue by saying “Listening again proves it to be that rarest of beasts: a perfect work. There’s not a chord, lyric, beat or inflection that doesn’t pull at the heart or make it soar.”

For much of the next decade, Williams moved around the country, stopping in Austin, Los Angeles, Nashville, and turning out work that won immense respect within the industry (winning a Grammy for Mary Chapin Carpenter’s version of “Passionate Kisses”) and a gradually growing cult audience. While her recorded output was sparse for a time, the work that emerged was invariably hailed for its indelible impressionism -- like 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which notched her first Grammy as a performer.

The past decade brought further development, both musically and personally, evidenced on albums like West (2007), which All Music Guide called “flawless…destined to become a classic” and Blessed (2011), which the Los Angeles Times dubbed “a dynamic, human, album, one that’s easy to fall in love with.” Those albums retained much of Williams’ trademark melancholy and southern Gothic starkness, but also exuded more rays of light and hope. This all lead to the 2014 release of Williams’ first double studio album Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone, followed by the 2016 release of her second double album, the The Ghosts of Highway 20. Both albums received overwhelming praise from the media and fans. 2020’s Good Soul Better Angels was a sociopolitical masterpiece, garnering two Grammy nominations as well as features in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times and so much more, Lucinda made a return appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and was the subject of a feature segment on NPR’s All Things Considered.

In October of 2021, Lucinda Williams was inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall Of Fame.

In April 2023, Williams released her long-awaited memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You (Crown, a division of Penguin Random House LLC), to wide critical acclaim. The memoir debuted at #5 on the New York Times Bestsellers and Williams was featured on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Styles. Williams was featured at Vanity Fair, NPR All Things Considered, The Associated Press, Esquire, The Nation, and many more, including a sit down on Late Night with Seth Meyers.

In June 2023, Williams release the critically acclaimed album Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart (Highway 20 Records/Thirty Tigers), which received high praise from the press as she was featured on CBS Sunday Morning and the subject of major stories in Rolling Stone, Billboard, Paste, The FADER, SPIN and more. The Associated Press referred to the album as “another important chapter to one of the most important musical journeys of the last half-century.”