It was a bit of a shock to see Lucinda Williams being helped onto the stage for her Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets tour at the sleek new Capital One Hall in Tysons, VA. Unsure on her feet and moving slowly on the arm of a roadie, she presented quite a different vision than the strong and vibrant, guitar-slinging singer-songwriter we’ve come to know over the past few decades.
The path was to a stool where she sat, minus guitar, swinging her feet, as she alternated stories of her life with appropriate songs. Her condition precluded her playing her guitar temporarily, she said. “I like to think of it as temporary.” And while she freely noted that it was due to “a stroke I had last year,” it was 2020 when she suffered that stroke. Luckily, it didn’t affect her voice, which still had its lilting drawl while speaking and was absolutely strong, clear, and ringing through her songs.
Because the tour is named after the memoir she released earlier this year and not the album she also put out in this year (that has a title like a book), Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart, the evening took the format of one of those book and music shows, most successfully done by Bruce Springsteen on Broadway from 2017 to 2021, but also attempted by Ray Davies for his book X Ray in 1995.
Williams never read directly from her book, though. Rather, she shared her vignettes of growing up in various towns in the South, playing guitar since she was 12, extemporaneously—often wondering if she was going a little too far off track before she’d get back to the song with which she’d pair it.
It was an enriching and enthralling evening. Especially after that careful entrance, the audience hung on her every word and were absolutely silent when she paused. Backed at first only by guitarist Doug Pettibone, but eventually by a talented four piece band, each song was accompanied by a film above her, often from her own home movies and archives.
Proceeding chronologically, she started with the song she wrote about a local bluesman who had inspired her, “Blind Pearly Brown,” and proceeded to other early influences, from Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train” to Bob Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” to Hank Williams’ “Jambalaya.”
Then it was all on to her own songs, which reached a sweet spot on albums like Car Wheels on a Gravel Road and Sweet Old World, a period in which every song seemed dedicated to a series of troubled souls, some of whom took their own lives, in “Pineola,” “Lake Charles,” and “Drunken Angel,” or a touching song about her own wayward kin, “Little Angel, Little Brother.”
She stood at one point (“to get more air”) to sing rockers like “Real Love” or “Heaven Blues,” a standout number with a raucous, junkyard percussion from drummer Butch Norton. It almost seemed like she was shifting her approach for the second half of a show, leaving the extensive storytelling behind and sometimes just moving to the next songs without any introductions whatsoever.
Though hobbled physically, her voice soared throughout the evening, and unlike fellow rockers of a similar vintage, she never required cue cards or teleprompters to nudge her through her own songs. Her stories, and her carefully-chosen lyrics were indelible to her.
Williams was helped back to her seat for a song she created from her father’s poetry, “Dust,” because “this is more of a sit down song.” But after a few more recent compositions, she was up again by the end, to declare her own “Rock ’n’ Roll Heart,” topping it with a snarling, ultimately triumphant “Joy.”
SETLIST
Blind Pearly Brown
Freight Train
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, IT Takes a Train to Cry
Jambalaya
Happy Woman Blues
Crescent City
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
Bus to Baton Rouge
Little Angel, Little Brother
Pineola
Lake Charles
Drunken Angel
Those Three Days
Fruits of My Labor
Heaven Blues
Real Love
Dust
Ghosts of Highway 20
Where the Song Will Find Me
Rock ’n’ Roll Heart
Joy
