“I’VE learned so much about the human brain and the body,” says Lucinda Williams, sitting on a window seat in the ornate bar of a Bloomsbury hotel, bathed in early spring sunshine. “I mean, everything is controlled by your brain, you know? You never know what’s gonna be affected.”
You wouldn’t consider it today, fresh from a triumphant European tour, but two years ago it seemed like Williams might never walk or pick up a guitar again. Back in November 2020, her partner Tom Oversby found her collapsed on the bathroom floor of their Nashville home. He rushed her to Vanderbilt Medical Centre where medics discovered a blood clot on the right side of her brain. The stroke affected the motor skills along the left half of her body; only timely intervention and the long, arduous process of rehab prevented more lasting and profound disability.
“It was kind of biblical, really,” she laughs now, recalling the shocking events of that year. “We’d been staying so much in Nashville while we were on tour it made sense to buy a place there. A couple of weeks after we closed on the house a tornado hit and took off part of the roof and blew up the porch. A few weeks after that, the pandemic came along. And then, just before Thanksgiving, I had my stroke…”
Sitting at the bar, dressed in Converse, Levi’s and an old leather jacket, posing for the photographer and telling tall tales in a Louisiana drawl as wide as the Mississippi, Lucinda Williams seems as active as ever. Just a few days before we meet, on the eve of her 70th birthday, sees her lead her band onstage at London’s Barbican theatre through a barnstorming encore of “Keep On Rockin’ In The Free World” to an audience that never wants the song to end. It felt like she could keep going all night: a singular,
