Catch her in the rind: Lucinda Williams is NOT out of her gourd

LUCINDA WILLIAMS has never sold a lot of albums, but she has always been a critics’ sweetheart. Her latest disc, ‘Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” topped many top 10 lists as the best album of 1998, and it also earned her two nominations in this year’s Grammy Awards competition. Next week, the American roots-rock musician will play a pair of shows at Irving Plaza. Here’s what’s on her mind.

Q: When I listen to your music, whether it’s your old stuff or your new album, it seems as if you try to sing what you mean – in very plain words. Is this a conscious effort?

A: I’m tied to those words – we’re connected. That’s me. I’m the person who wrote those words. When I listen to someone else’s music, I like to learn something about them. I want their music to tell me something about them, about who they are. Unfortunately, a lot of music doesn’t do that for me. I avoid the intellectual elitism of very introspective songs where you either have no idea what the singer is singing about or have to try too hard to figure it out.

Q: What about songs that can be interpreted on different levels?

A: My song ‘Joy” is that way. There are levels of understanding there, but I didn’t write it as a mystery. Any kind of art is going to present different dimensions to the viewer. There is a challenge of writing and hearing different things in the music, but it shouldn’t be frustrating. There is a difference between being elitist and being complex or interesting.

Q: Your father, Miller, is a famous poet. Someone once said of his work, ‘He writes about the quiet emotions that run deep and last long.” Are you your father’s daughter?

A: Yes, I’d agree with that. He has taught me to be direct and concise in my writing, to deal with important subject matter and not be afraid to delve into the human psyche. The way he once put it was, ‘Get some dirt under your fingernails,” and don’t sugarcoat things – get straight to the point and avoid cliches.

Q: On the new album, there are some songs that deal with death. Was there any song that was harder than the others to write or to include on the album?

A: I wrote these songs out of necessity. First, to get them out of my system. They’re expressions of myself, of what I am going through. I don’t question the process. Some of the songs did take longer to write. There are songs that I worked on for years, off and on, until I got them right. To write about someone’s death is not an easy thing to do; like ‘Lake Charles” and ‘Drunken Angel” – both took a lot of work. They went through many drafts. The challenge is not to seem too self-righteous or too judgmental. And you don’t want to over-romanticize the subject.

Q: When you write a song, how do you do it – on guitar, or with a word processor?

A: I use a pen and pad. I don’t have a computer. I’m not technology oriented. When I get ready to sit down and write, I do it with my guitar. I get all my lyrics out. I have a folder where I stash ideas in – bits and pieces of older songs that I haven’t finished yet; ones that I started, finished and decided weren’t good enough, but I keep ’em anyway. I go back to them and cannibalize them. . . . I don’t throw anything away. I keep it all. There might be one line that I thought up five years ago, and then, all of a sudden, I write a song around it.

Q: Could you give me an example of that?

A: ‘Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” was like that. I had that line for years. I never did anything with it. Somehow it all fell together with that one line.

Q: A few years back, Joni Mitchell put out a book of all her lyrics as poetry. Would you feel comfortable doing the same?

A: Some of my lyrics work as poetry more than others. But as a general rule, song lyrics don’t work on their own.

Q: Why?

A: The music is part of a song; the music carries the lyrics. If you take the music away, most lyrics can’t stand on their own. In poetry, you don’t have the melody, you have rhythm. You have to rely on the words as the focal point of the poem. In songs, you have both.

Q: What are your tastes in music and poetry?

A: My favorite kind of writing is contemporary Southern writing, especially short stories like Flannery O’Connor or Eudora Welty. In poetry, I love e.e. cummings and my dad’s work. I like stuff that is gritty and human and doesn’t read like you are trying to figure out a puzzle. As for music, my tastes are pretty varied: blues and folk, rock and old jazz. I love bossa nova. I like stuff that’s kind of moody.

Q: I have this copy of Rolling Stone and there’s this photograph of you with watermelons. Can you talk about this picture? What were they trying to say here?

A: That was actually a cool thing; that was the photographer’s [Mark Seliger] idea. . . . We took those photographs in a big old Civil War-era mansion that was being renovated. I walked into a room and there were all these watermelons. There had to be maybe 50 or 60 of them piled up in one corner of the room. I was wearing a red vintage slip that looked like a dress. He told me to sit in the corner among the melons. I was hesitant at first. I thought, ‘This guy’s out of his mind.” Finally, I said OK, and then I started getting into it. . . . He came over to me and sliced a watermelon in half, dug his hand into it and scooped out a big piece and said, ‘Here, hold this.” He also handed me the half of melon. I started eating the piece, thinking, ‘This is insane.” The practical part of me said, ‘This is silly. I’m going to get watermelon juice all over my slip,” then another part of me said, ‘Cool!” It was almost a sexual thing – maybe ‘sensual” is the better word. The watermelon juice was running down my mouth and onto my dress. Seeds were going everywhere. . . . The whole thing with the watermelon was a Southern thing. It made me believe that he understood my music and where it comes from. He took a stereotype and kicked it around.

Q: Have you ever done a video?

A: I did one for ‘Passionate Kisses” and it never went anywhere, and I haven’t done one since.

Q: Isn’t videomaking a part of music nowadays?

A: Yeah, but I’m not planning on doing one. I don’t think it should be a requirement in order to make music. I’ll play anywhere and go out on the road, but I don’t like the commercialized part of music. It started out as an interesting artistic expression, and then they discovered it was big business. If you don’t have a video, you can’t be played on TV, you can’t be played on radio. If you’re not played on the radio, you can’t get a video on VH1. If you don’t sell enough records, you won’t get recognized as an important artist. I don’t agree with all that and I don’t want to contribute to it.

Q: This is pretty radical.

A: It’s time people started speaking out against this system. I’m tired of this power struggle between the artist and the corporation. I probably just p – – – ed everybody off, but I can’t stand complacency.