“I VE BEEN MISUNDERSTOOD FOR SO LONG”
“I ALWAYS said you’d have to pay me to move back to Nashville!” Lucinda Williams exclaims. She’s sitting in one of the few chairs in her new house in a quiet neighbourhood just north of downtown. Her voice – with its sharp Arkansas/Louisiana twang – reverberates around the open-plan kitchen-diner-living space, bouncing off the freshly painted walls. She and her husband, Tom Overby, have only been living here a matter of days. They haven’t had a chance to move their possessions from Los Angeles, so they’re making do with furniture left behind by the previous owners. On the kitchen counter, next to printouts of cover art and liner notes for her ninth album, Good Souls Better Angels, sit packs of new dish towels and unopened boxes of red and white wine glasses – a recent gift from her tour manager.
“I hated Nashville when I lived here back in the 1990s,” Williams says. She’s decked out in all black: biker boots, jeans, a T-shirt with a Baudelaire quote obscured by a cardigan. “But I got so tired of flying in and out of LAX. Tom and I were travelling so much, and we’d only have ten days or two weeks off in between tours. The tour bus leaves from Nashville and ends up back here, so do we really want to keep going back to LA for such a short time?”
The couple had been looking at houses for a while but had no luck. Real estate prices had skyrocketed since she moved to California in 2001, and the small bohemian neighbourhoods where she and her friends once lived had been overrun with condos and AirBnBs. “Prices have gotten ridiculous. This is the last neighbourhood in town where you can find something nice for not too much.” But this freshly refurbished house and this quiet locale were perfect. Robyn Hitchcock lives just a few blocks away, as does Williams’ US publicist. She has friends
