Circles ’Neath Your Eyes

Again and again in the music of Lucinda Williams, the sins of the father are visited upon the son’s girlfriend. Over more than four decades, working across country, rock, folk, the blues, and (briefly, in the early 2000s) hip-hop, Williams has assembled a vast catalog of songs about abandonment, addiction, suicide—what in an early lyric she calls “the dark side of life.” Most are also love songs. On “Sweet Side,” from her 2003 album World Without Tears, she repeats a simple, upbeat chord progression on acoustic guitar over ambling drums. She sings energetically (raps, really):

You were screamed at and kicked over and over
Now you always feel sick and you can’t keep a lover
Every Christmas there were presents to unwrap
But the things you witnessed when you were five and a half

That unflinching “you” startles as much as the violence the lines describe. She is speaking to her lover but also for him, about pains he can’t acknowledge. The demons are his, not hers, but when she fights with him she’s fighting them, too. Williams knows her way around this damage, though sometimes her foot falls through the floorboards:

You get defensive at every turn
You’re overly sensitive and overly concerned
Few precious memories, no lullabies
Hollowed out centuries of lies

Centuries of lies! Mundane domestic cruelty gives way, dizzyingly, to a subterranean cache of pain. But she doesn’t linger, moving immediately into the chorus and then back to the unexceptional business of living: “I’ve seen you in the kitchen cooking me supper.”

I was twelve years old when that album came out; I remember singing the chorus of “Sweet Side” around the house with my mom. Only years later did I mentally refile it into the extensive subgenre of Williams songs about men who’ve been hurt and hurt in turn. Their suffering is nothing special, and they’ll never get over it. Many of them resemble the man she addresses with plaintive resignation on “Greenville,” from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998): “You scream and shout, and you make a scene/When you open your mouth you never say what you mean.”

These lines model the plainspokenness that “you” have shirked and for which Williams is often praised. And yet hardly anyone in a Williams song says what they mean. Even in one as candid as “Sweet Side,” there are corners around which the singer can’t see. The things you witnessed when you were five and a half never gets a referent. She keeps the relationship alive not by healing or even probing his affliction but by finding tenderness where she can: “I’ve seen you sewing buttons on your shirt/I’ve seen you throwing up when your stomach hurt.”

In her memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, which came out in paperback last month, Williams not-quite-confides that “Sweet Side” was inspired by “one particular former boyfriend,” a bartender and bass player from Nashville—“But he really could have been anybody.” Williams’s lovers often fall apart, but she rarely indulges the temptation to do so herself. In “Greenville” her addressee suffers theatrically—picks fights, breaks things—while she looks on with composure, or tries to, and sends him away. “You don’t really love me, you’re not my man,” she sings over a single guitar, sounding more consoling than accusatory. The band fills out—tambourine, bass, and finally electric guitar and accordion—as her indignation builds; lines swell in dismay and sink again; Emmylou Harris’s harmonies at once amplify Williams’s exasperation and seem to talk her down.

Music journalists like to quote Harris’s quip that Williams “could sing the chrome off a tailpipe,” though what Harris said about Tammy Wynette also applies here: “She could just milk a vowel.” Williams’s delivery is by turns urgent and offhand, piercing and cool, woozy and alarmed, bottling ambivalence in a single word. She can tear the skin of the simplest phrase. Her book points out dark imprints on lyrics that would otherwise escape notice. It’s hard to imagine a more neutral line than “Mama lives in Mandeville,” and yet Mandeville, it turns out, refers not just to the small Louisiana town but to its mental hospital, where Williams’s mother “spent some time…during one of her tough periods.” (The song, “Crescent City,” is about drowning out melancholy with dance music.)

Wynette’s resonant quaver risked effusiveness; on “Stand by Your Man” she warbles glumly through the verse and wails that notoriously prescriptive chorus. A Williams narrator tends to stick around longer than is good for her, too, but her voice warps in more than one direction. It invites and evades, expands and contracts, encompasses minor slights and major violations. On successive listens, a line like “You don’t even wanna talk to me” might sound beseeching, petulant, derisive, or bored.

Success arrived late for Williams. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, her most acclaimed album, came out when she was forty-five. The wave of press around it unnerved as much as it gratified her. In Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, she singles out a “long, horrendous feature story” from a 1997 issue of The New York Times Magazine that “unfairly threw gasoline” on industry rumors about her perfectionism and impulsiveness. That article—headlined “Lucinda Williams Is in Pain”—and a profile in The New Yorker three years later both made her out to be what the latter called “a poet of loss.” They were also both explicitly infantilizing, depicting Williams as if she were arrested in rather than haunted by youth. She “achieves a childlike intensity of emotion in her songs because on some level she isn’t, even at the age of forty-seven, quite an adult,” The New Yorker observed.

Williams describes her own songwriting process as instinctive—“I let my head go where it wants to go”—but she also insists that it involves “a tremendous amount of rigor.” It must have annoyed her to see her best work received as an extrusion of her life’s wreckage. And yet the pain of family life is the closest thing to a spine in her charmingly loose memoir. The book reprises a theme that has been central to Williams’s songs: the effort to turn the injuries that made you into something you can live with, and something the people who love you can live with, too.

Williams was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1953. Her father was the poet Miller Williams, who proudly identified as a “southern writer” and believed that artists owe their sensibilities to the “wrinkles, folds, and scratches caused by [the] land” they come from. Even so, he had trouble staying put. Temporary teaching gigs and fellowships kept his family on the move until he secured a permanent job at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, when Lucinda was eighteen. (The frontmatter of Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You includes a “Chronology of Places Where I Lived” with twenty-three entries, including Utah, Mexico City, and Santiago, Chile.) Flannery O’Connor was a mentor to Miller—eight-year-old Lucinda chased O’Connor’s peacocks around her yard—and as his career took off a loose scene of artists swirled around him. At the University of Arkansas, he hosted readings, workshops, and raucous parties, which Lucinda sat in on, “watching and observing.”

Her mother Lucille was mentally ill and an alcoholic, in treatment for manic depression and paranoid schizophrenia for long stretches of Lucinda’s youth. Williams has written few songs explicitly about her parents, but in her book they emerge as prototypes for the couples that fill her records: one partner flamboyantly self-destructive, the other bearing imperfect witness. When she was older Lucinda learned that as a child Lucille had been sexually abused by her father—a Methodist minister—and at least one of her brothers. The memoir also hazards a link between Lucille’s breakdowns and her thwarted musical ambitions; she was a brilliant pianist, but “nobody in her family encouraged her to take it seriously.” In “Bus to Baton Rouge,” from Essence (2001), Williams describes a visit to her maternal grandparents’ house:

The driveway was covered with tiny white seashells
A fig tree stood in the backyard
There are other things I remember as well
But to tell them would just be too hard

Her voice mostly hovers a few notches above a whisper, erratically cracking into a louder cry. Time is kept by an unrelenting snare, which stings when brushed too insistently.

Her father had a temper, but Lucinda credits him as a stabilizing force: “I believe I survived because of my bond with him.” Her memories of these earliest years are studded with the kinds of detail—vivid but not belabored, suggestive but not metaphorical—for which she’s always had a gift. She can’t recover the conversation in which she learned her parents were separating, but she does recall “going into their closet and caressing their clothes, individually—my mother’s dresses and my father’s shirts.”

That memory echoes another. When Lucinda was beginning to show her own depressive streak in her teens, Miller often recounted what he considered the source of her “troubles”: once, when Lucinda was three, Miller came home from work to find that Lucille had locked their daughter in a closet because she wouldn’t stop crying. “How could a mother do that?” Williams still wonders. “But there was always my dad there to say, ‘She can’t help it. It’s not her fault. She’s not well.’”

By way of explanation for her father’s lay analysis, Williams notes that he “was really into Freud.” Miller might therefore deserve some credit for the vocabulary of trauma and PTSD on which Williams leans so heavily throughout Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, although he was also a man of his time and place, affectionate but stoic. His manner of excusing Lucille’s illness seems to have inhibited Lucinda’s resentment, preempting messier feelings: “My family wasn’t allowed to talk about problems out loud.”

Freud is in the air again now, as he was in Miller’s postwar academic milieu. More than once while reading Williams’s memoir I thought of Janet Malcolm’s account of transference, Freud’s name for the way our earliest attachments form patterns which live on in our adult relationships: “We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain.” Williams’s songs are records of this groping and its anarchic, undignified alternatives: thrashing, stealing, pissing, shooting. Some, like “Bus to Baton Rouge,” account directly for her past’s persistence into adulthood. But erotic life seems to have supplied her with richer scenes for restaging the Williams family dynamic. While her men stumble through the aftershocks of their childhoods, her women—like Miller, like her younger self—hold steady. They jump in the car or put food on the stove. They get along.

Williams describes the family world that haunts her as “southern gothic.” That atmosphere fills her early albums, which are populated by anonymous, archetypal figures: an unloved killer with a trucker dad and a runaway mom; a small-town waitress seeking pleasure in the city; a visionary busker named Bill. You can hear her adjusting the dial of specificity across these songs, sometimes under- and sometimes overelaborating the histories that intrude on her characters. “Maria, you’re still wild and restless,” begins “Maria,” hinting at a backstory which is never filled in. “He Never Got Enough Love,” meanwhile, is all backstory, cataloguing the family disasters that drove a nameless teen to shoot “a kid near a liquor store one night.” From the beginning, Williams was interested in the drama of failing to comprehend one’s loved ones, of studying symptoms and looking for causes. “You think that I don’t know the troubles you face every day,” she sings on “Dark Side of Life,” from 1988. Williams insists she does know, but her most devastating lines linger on appearances: “You don’t look too good, there’s circles ’neath your eyes.”

She almost sounds competitive: I’ll show you dark. Williams gravitated in young adulthood to wounded brooders of the kind who fill her songs, men with ghosts of their own for hers to jostle against. In her memoir she traces her attachment to this kind of “roughneck intellectual” back to a poet she met in her father’s literary scene. Frank Stanford had achieved a mythic status among Fayetteville artists before turning thirty. Williams loved him for his apparent unguardedness and for the easy flow of talk between them. Where other lovers had mocked her creative ambitions, Stanford seemed to share them.

Behind this quick intimacy were areas of feeling from which she was barred entry. Two months after meeting Williams, Stanford was confronted by his wife, Ginny, and his lover, the poet C. D. Wright, about his infidelity. He killed himself that evening. “Pineola,” one of Williams’s most taut and chilling compositions in her southern gothic mode, recounts his death, but it tells us almost nothing of the mourned figure except where he was born and where he was buried. As in so many of her songs, these town names—Pineola, Subiaco—take on a numinous power. She presses heavily on them, drawing out each syllable, as if to imbue them with indelible but inscrutable meanings.

Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You quotes at length from an epic poem of Stanford’s, an unpunctuated pouring-out of memories and surreal hallucinations. Williams calls his writing “feral and on fire.” She can be fiery, too, and magnetically self-assured, but she’s also always attuned to other people, which keeps her restrained. “Lake Charles,” a song about a bullish, ebullient man she dated in the early 1980s, condenses a whole life’s history into a handful of proper nouns:

He had a reason to get back to Lake Charles
He used to talk about it
He’d just go on and on
He always said Louisiana
Was where he felt at home

The song is earnest; you believe that Williams really is straining to understand why this city matters so much to him. But her voice teeters between conflicting emotions, not least despair that so much carrying “on and on” has yielded so little insight. If this is the level on which he expresses himself, she’ll meet him there, worrying the verbal surfaces that can’t be dug under. “He was born in Nacogdoches/That’s in East Texas,” she continues in a fried, nasal whine, abrading the name of the place he came from before settling gently again on the place he claimed.

Fourteen years passed between Stanford’s death and the release of “Pineola” on Sweet Old World in 1992. This long simmer was not unusual for Williams’s early career. She jumped between scenes in Houston, Austin, and New York, in search of a context and a sound. Her first two records, put out by the legendary label Folkways in 1979 and 1980, earned her respect but little money. She cycled through ad hoc configurations of session musicians and backing bands as friends and patrons schemed to get her a larger deal, but her songs weren’t legible to record company executives.

Williams is fond of repeating the verdict issued by the bigger labels upon hearing her demos: “It’s too country for rock and it’s too rock for country.” She began to tire of the folky, singer-songwriter image she had so far cultivated, and she was wary of the dominant country sound of the 1980s and 1990s, which struck her as artificial, overproduced. Her more successful contemporaries—Rosanne Cash, Nanci Griffith, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lyle Lovett—sometimes shared stages with her, but they bent more readily than she did to this “slick” aesthetic.

In the mid-1980s Williams began playing with the guitarist Gurf Morlix, the bassist John Ciambotti, and the drummer Donald Lindley, a band that would hold together for a decade. Even with regular collaborators she continued to write alone, assembling songs from images and phrases that came to her unbidden. Her memoir is confident in her personal vision even as she struggles to articulate it; her role models were Bob Dylan and Neil Young, who experimented freely while always sounding like themselves. One of the things that alienated her about mainstream country music was “the idea of two, three, four, or even five or six people writing a song together.” (She and Morlix split for good during the recording of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, when he felt his creative input was being ignored.)

Her break came when the British punk label Rough Trade, which was less blinkered by the genre divisions that structured the American market, put out her third album, Lucinda Williams (1988). She had worked odd jobs to cover food and rent well into her thirties (a favorite was preparing gourmet sausage samples in a supermarket, because “I made seventy-five dollars for the afternoon and nobody bothered me”), and the record’s success finally brought her the resources to commit to music full-time. She began touring internationally and attracted the interest of “all of the major labels that had turned me down.”

The songs on Lucinda Williams sound native to the Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas landscapes in which she lived much of her first thirty years. The lyrics invoke farmhouses and open plains; her band’s four-piece rock arrangements are embellished with mandolin, fiddle, and steel guitar. But most of the album was written in a spare apartment in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, where she had moved in 1984. The city’s music scene “was wide open in terms of genre,” which suited her. Like her father, Williams is avowedly nomadic. She wrote much of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road in “one of those chain hotels that caters to long-term renters” in Nashville, World Without Tears while touring, and West (2007) and Little Honey (2008) at LA’s Safari Inn.

In her memoir Williams writes that Car Wheels on a Gravel Road and its two successors, Essence and World Without Tears, brought her to the peak of her critical and popular success. Suddenly she was performing on Saturday Night Live and being pitched music videos by Paul Schrader. (He showed up to dinner drunk, came onto her, and confessed that her label had warned him against letting her “do something dark and arty.” As Williams notes wryly, “Car Wheels did fine without a video.”) Now she was releasing records at a brisk clip, which has never let up. Last year she put out her fifteenth studio album, Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart.

After Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, she writes, she made an effort to “get away from narrative songs” in favor of more elliptical lyrics, and as she turned away from storytelling she seemed to loosen the hold of the memories that once bound her. Her personal life stabilized, too: in 2005 she met her current husband and manager, Tom Overby, a patient, even-keeled industry professional whom she credits with breaking her “down-and-out poet-motorcycle-bad-boy” pattern. Many of the insights in her memoir are attributed to years of therapy.

Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You concludes—rather abruptly—with Miller’s death in 2015. Among the book’s omissions is a stroke that Williams suffered in November 2020. When I saw her live in 2022, she had recovered enough to walk and sing but not to play guitar (though she promised us she was working on it). On Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart, she sounds reassuringly lively, focused, powerful. Its songs exhibit a hard-won solidity that’s evident on all her recent records. Her past hasn’t receded, exactly. “This Old Heartache,” from the double album Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone (2015), is self-aware about her great themes: “I wish I could kill all this worry and regret/But I am haunted still by the things I can’t forget.” And yet that haunting sounds less torturous now than it once did.

In 2017 Williams rerecorded her fourth album, Sweet Old World, as This Sweet Old World. The original record, made between her self-titled and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, was her first for a major label and marred in Williams’s view by the pop ambitions of its producers. Twenty-five years later, she could revisit the songs on her own terms but could not let them go. What the new versions lose in ferocity they gain in texture and warmth: her voice has grown richer with age, deeper, with lots of vibrato substituting on ballads for the clear tones of her early records. She still growls, but she doesn’t roar.

This Sweet Old World includes a few bonus tracks—songs that were in her live-show rotation in the 1980s and 1990s but didn’t make it onto a studio album. They’re among my favorite cuts in her catalog. The Jim Lauderdale cover “What You Don’t Know” features a gratifyingly weird falsetto, at once funky and spectral, as though Williams were lampooning her elder-oracle mode. The lyrics adopt a teasing ease with incomprehension: “There is a key, but you’ll never find it/To the house where nobody goes.” “Wild and Blue” was made famous by John Anderson, but its tale of self-destructive lovesickness told in the second person feels textbook Williams. On a live recording from 1989, she strains her voice to the point of yelling while Morlix attacks the chords; the line “Someone is trying to satisfy you” sounds violently ejected from her body. The version on This Sweet Old World is instead wistful, contemplative, wise in the manner of hindsight. She knows the experience she’s singing about, but she’s not singing from inside it. The album ends with “Dark Side of Life.”