Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir

by Lucinda Williams

In all the areas of human life there is a fierce struggle for control going on between those who want to restore a vanished past and those who want to create a better future. There are those who want to set the world back in the precise order it was before the two World Wars and the world wide Depression, as one would arrange a living room after a wild party the night before. There are the profiteers who want to get all four feet back in the financial trough in which they used to wallow. There are the lip servants of democracy who are willing to use the world as a fighting slogan, but have no use for democracy when it means giving equal opportunities to all peoples, or when it means lifting millions all about us to where the four freedoms would apply to them, too.

The listening experience was very serious, almost religious. We’d put on one album and everybody would sit there and listen to the whole thing and not say a word until the side was over. Rock music was everything to most of the kids there, but I had my acoustic blues and folk and roots background and I introduced that element into the mix. There was a schism in New Orleans at that time. And maybe there still is today, and not just in New Orleans. This was the 1960s and there was Vietnam and the assassinations and integration. Everything was polarized. You had the group that hated the counterculture—the conservative business and civic leaders and the churchgoing types—and you had the group that embraced it. We were of course in the group that embraced it.

An aspect of my life that I think was a result of hanging around this wild scene as a teenager is that I had no desire to have my own kids. Never. It wasn’t a gut-wrenching decision for me at all and I don’t regret it today. I went on birth control at age eighteen and it never occurred to me to become a mother. Not once. When I was growing up, I never saw any families really enjoying their children. I remember thinking as a teenager, “Wow, nobody seems to like having kids. Nobody seems happy having kids. It’s a burden, not a joy.” It seemed like everybody would rather be partying and fucking each other freely. Family obligations and responsibilities didn’t seem to be the most important thing to anyone, so why should they have been important to me?

One of the drawbacks of growing up the granddaughter of two church families is that I was riddled by this horrendous personal guilt all the time. So on the one hand you have all of this crazy southern gothic stuff going on in the background of my childhood, but then you also have southern Sunday church expectations to contend with. I didn’t have a mother saying I should do this or do that or wear these proper clothes when you go out in public. My parents didn’t do that. But the rigid, proper church culture was always there. The pressure of a certain ideal makes you feel really guilty if, like me, you come nowhere near approaching it.

A lot of these blues guys are insistent about what songs they’ve written that they didn’t get credit for. They don’t suffer fools gladly at all. Mance played “Key to the Highway” for us and he insisted that he had written that song back in the 1920s or 1930s. Today that song is considered public domain and is not credited to anybody. Big Bill Broonzy’s version is the first one I heard and then of course Eric Clapton made it famous as a rock song. When Duane Allman died, “Key to the Highway” was played at his funeral in Macon, Georgia. Mance swore he wrote it.

I never finished high school, much less college, but I’m aware that everything I just wrote could be deemed part of this “noble savage” tendency that is discussed in academia. I see that. The thing is, my pain was real and I was processing my childhood pains for the first time. I identified with those blues musicians. Their lack of pretense stood in contrast to much of the social literary scene I’d experienced and enjoyed, to be honest, over the years. Also there was an inherent work ethic involved in being a blues musician. You can’t learn to play this music unless you put in a shitload of time practicing it. Mance had been playing these songs his entire life. He wasn’t trying to get something on his résumé or get accepted into anything. He was just playing these songs that he loved. That’s what I wanted to do: to play songs that I wanted to play.

I’ve been called an “erotic” songwriter. I don’t disagree, but even though I had plenty of sex when I was younger, I was never promiscuous. I always had partners. Some of them didn’t last that long, but I wasn’t sleeping around willy-nilly. The brain is the real erogenous zone, at least for me, so I have to connect with somebody intellectually and almost spiritually in order to be attracted to them physically, and that rarely happens immediately. I realized early in my adult life that talking—real, honest, substantive conversation—could be superhot, and it didn’t have to result in anybody taking their clothes off for it to be erotic in a lasting way, in a way that can really last longer in your mind and memory and in your feelings than physical sex. Very often a good conversation is more memorable than fucking. That’s what I was getting at with my song “Something About What Happens When We Talk” on the Sweet Old World album.

was invited to South by Southwest in Austin to take part in a public panel discussion called “How Does Commercialism Affect Creativity?” Oh, man. This was perfect. Now I had a forum for my story. When it was my turn to talk in Austin, I laid it all out exactly as it had happened at RCA. I was bluntly honest. The next day I got a call from my manager, who was livid. He worked for one of the biggest promoters in the business. He said, “Congratulations, you got kicked off RCA.” He was unhappy about it, but I was exuberant. I was free.

Sweet Old World was released by Chameleon in 1992. One of the songs that is significant is “Hot Blood” because it was the first time I’d written explicitly about lust, which is one of those things that women aren’t supposed to do, even though the history of rock and roll could be told from men writing songs about lust. You could go on and on with examples, like “Brown Sugar” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together” by the Stones, “The Lemon Song” by Zeppelin, “Foxey Lady” by Hendrix, “Light My Fire” by the Doors, “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye, and almost everything James Brown ever did, to name just a few. “Hot Blood” wasn’t based on anybody in particular. I imagined a woman character for the point of view in that song, although like all the characters I imagine there’s a little of me in there.

Mary Chapin Carpenter covered “Passionate Kisses” and it went to the top of the charts, exposing my music to a whole different world of popular music fans. I won a Grammy for Best Country Song for that song. My reaction was mixed. Of course, I was honored and excited and I felt much gratitude to Carpenter for giving me this kind of exposure, but I was also insecure and terrified.

But the label of obsessive perfectionist has haunted me ever since. The veteran music writer Holly George-Warren later wrote an essay in my defense and said, “The issue goes beyond an artist being held to task for taking too long to finish a record. A lot of things I’ve heard said about Lucinda are sexist—that she’s difficult, for example. You don’t hear things like that about Bruce Springsteen or John Fogerty. Both of them have taken a long time to make records.” She went on: “It seems that happens a lot, especially if a woman hears things a certain way—her way—rather than the way a male producer tells her they should sound.”

If I’m honest, one thing that might have pushed me in this direction was that after Car Wheels came out, everybody started lumping me in with Americana or alt-country, and I can’t stand either of those terms, as I said before. They are so limiting. I realize that people were trying to be complimentary, but it still bothered me, so on some level I said to myself, “I’m going to do something different.” That’s just my nature.

Today, a lot of people come up to me and tell me that Essence is their favorite one of my records. I try not to pick favorites, but I understand when someone says that.

With most of the photographers I work with, you can tell if a certain shot is going to be cool or not while it is being shot. With Annie, you can’t tell anything. She told me that whenever she shoots someone, the subject always says, “This is the worst shoot I’ve ever had. Nothing cool is going to come out of this.” Then, when they see the photos, they can’t believe it.

On first listen, Lucinda Williams’ new record inspires one overriding thought: This chick is crazy. Here she is, 50 years old, America’s most respected songwriter—and she puts out a disc full of snarls, mumbles and groans that fixate on one failed, possibly sleazy romance, songs veering from spiritual lunacy to gutter-level misery. The rock numbers are nasty and the ballads bloody, and she makes two attempts at, yes, rap. This is not how elders are supposed to behave.

Looking back, I can see that Car Wheels, Essence, and World Without Tears form some sort of trilogy, although I didn’t envision it that way. My career had been about taking small steps over a long period of time and in those three records, which came out in a five-year span, everything was uncorked. We recorded World Without Tears in a way similar to how we recorded the Rough Trade record. We went into the Paramour and we just cranked the songs out. We wanted it live and fresh and gnarly. The trilogy, in a way, is like three different ways of making music about sex, love, and the state of the world—or my world.