- In November 2020, six months after the release of her last album, country legend Lucinda Williams suffered a stroke. It partially impaired her motor skills on the left side of her body, and she was forced to relearn how to walk. She is still unable to play guitar two and a half years on, and yet Lucinda is back with Stories From a Rock’n’Roll Heart – her sixteenth studio album.

Lucinda turned seventy this year, and with serious health issues as well; you could understand her contemplating matters of mortality. But to be honest, even for a country musician Lucinda Williams has always sung a lot about death - so it would be more surprising if this album was devoid of memento mori.

Not many artists have written as beautifully about loss and grief as Lucinda over the years. Now she has outlived so many of her peers this continues to provide plenty of songwriting inspiration. The upbeat opening track Let’s Get The Band Back Together contains the line “Some are missing and some still here / Let’s sing a song for the disappeared”, while album highlight Stolen Moments is dedicated to the late Tom Petty, singing “in stolen moments you’re riding with me again”. The portrait of an alcoholic in Hum’s Liquor fits into her self-described “beautiful loser” series of tribute songs. It is given extra gravitas by featuring on backing vocals Tommy Stinson, whose brother and Replacements bandmate Bob Stinson drank himself to death aged thirty-five.

At times it’s Lucinda’s own mortality that comes up – in Last Call For The Truth she sings “give me one last taste of my lost youth”. Jukebox finds an immobilised Lucinda feeling like a “prisoner in these four walls”, while closing rack Never Gonna Fade Away lists everything that goes wrong in life but defiantly repeats the title as a chorus.

Perhaps Lucinda’s health has been cause to think about music itself – this activity she has dedicated her life to. Half the ten songs here are about playing or listening to music, all of them tributes to the life-affirming power a song can have. In a way this is just a more explicit exploration of what she has always done by peppering her lyrics with musical references.

So we have the contrasting themes here of music and death, grief and celebration, decay and hope. Sounds like the basis for a great country music record, and we wouldn’t expect anything less from Lucinda Williams.

In the last couple of decades Lucinda has become a venerated elder of alt-country music, an inspiration for a generation of songwriters seeking something deeper than just the cliches of the Nashville industry. This album itself features a few of them – Jesse Malin co-produced the record, while Margo Price and Angel Olsen provide backing vocals, as does one of Lucinda’s more famous fans in Bruce Springsteen.

At times it seems like Lucinda is made for the role – ladling out pearls of wisdom in her southern drawl like the aunt we all wish we had. Interviews with her are a joy to read – this strong yet humble woman who has lived through a lot but still views the world with kind-hearted and grateful eyes. She has survived a difficult childhood, loss, heartbreak and the precariousness of the music industry to find success and married contentment later in life.

Each new album is a reason to celebrate getting to hear from Lucinda and see a little more of her personality in its natural habitat of a song. And thankfully, Stories From a Rock’n’Roll Heart shows it will take more than a serious health scare to stop her.

- Andy Paine.