It's a myth that great art must come from pain, says American musician Lucinda Williams, but the "certain amount of suffering" she's lived through does get put to use.
"When I'm writing I can just dip my hand into the well and pull something out to write about. I've got it all saved up in this place where I can just pull out a little bit of the suffering and use it to inform my writing," she tells Kim Hill.
Lucinda Williams, New York City, 2022 Photo: Danny Clinch
Lucinda Williams' memoir Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets will be released on 5 July. Her next album Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart is due out later this month.
Williams has been with her husband for 18 years now but many of her songs are about losing herself in relationships with men who weren't so good for her.
"For whatever reason I was attracted to bad boy types, but I was also attracted to really smart guys. So when I met someone who had both of those qualities that would just get my heart beating.''
Singer-songwriter Ryan Adams, who Williams writes about in her upcoming memoir, typifies this combination, she says.
"The first time I ever heard him I was just floored… his writing, mainly, his songwriting just blew my mind. And then on top of that, he was very charming and had this way about him… he had the bad boy thing going for him and then he had the intellect."
Adams, who was accused of abuse of power and sexual misconduct by multiple women in 2019, is a victim of his own bad choices, Williams says.
"There are monsters out there but there are also good people who made bad choices who aren't necessarily monsters."
American musician Lucinda Williams and her partner Tom Overby in 2012 Photo: DANIEL TOROK
The men Williams has written songs about were not abusive, she says, nor really to blame for her dampened spirit.
"It would just be that I started to feel kind of down and I wouldn't work on my writing as much, I'd kind of let a little bit of that go and then I would start to feel disconnected … And it wasn't their fault, that was something I was doing. And I don't really know why… it was an insecurity thing, I guess."
She guesses that the attraction to bad boys can be traced back to the earliest humans.
"The women were the gatherers and the men were the hunters. The men protected, went out and hunted and brought the meat back to the cave. The women cooked and they talked among themselves more. The men didn't want to talk because they were too busy hunting... We're just different.
"We've always been the healers and we've always had the secrets. The healers had the secrets. That's why they went after the witches 'cause it freaked the men out 'cause the women had all these important secrets they didn't know about."
Although Williams observes something "primal" in gender roles, in Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets she writes of never wanting to be a mother until fairly recently.
"I started getting this mothering thing creeping up. I would see someone else's baby and I would just go crazy… It's just crazy that it started happening at such a late age. I was in my 50s when it started getting those urges like that."
Thanks to the "pain in the ass" that is obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Williams also gets the urge to wash her hands countless times a day.
To Williams, the giant containers of hand sanitiser that appeared in offices and shops were a glorious sight.
"I was like 'oh good, I can get a little squirt of hand sanny!"
In November 2022, Williams had a stroke which temporarily paralysed the left side of her body and from which she is still recovering.
"I had to learn to walk again. I couldn't tie my shoes… my brain didn't work right. So you have to retrain your brain, basically.
"I'm still working on walking, I just kind of shuffle along. I can't walk real fast like I used to."
Recovery from a stroke is a slow process, Williams says, and the hardest part has been laying down her guitar after realising her hands "don't work the same".
When she returned to the stage, Williams requested a chair because she thought she'd have to sit down while performing – not the case.
"The main thing is just to keep moving, one way or another, and not just to sit around," she says.
