Lucinda Williams Talks with Ariel Levy

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2019

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Despite winning a Grammy for her song “Passionate Kisses,” which was performed by Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lucinda Williams spent many years overlooked by the music industry: she was too country for rock, too rock for country. In 1998, American music caught up to her, and her album “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” broke through. The staff writer Ariel Levy sat down with Williams at the New Yorker Festival, in 2012, to talk about God, Flannery O’Connor, and the musician’s path through the industry. Williams topped it all of with a live performance.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:11.1	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In 2012, staff writer Ariel Levy sat down with one of the most acclaimed American songwriters of recent years,
0:21.4	Lucinda Williams. Williams has released 13 albums, and she's written songs for everyone,
0:27.4	from Mary Chapin Carpenter to Tom Petty. She's a winner of three Grammy Awards,
0:32.7	and now here's Lucinda Williams with Ariel Levy.
0:38.5	A lot of your music strikes me as really spiritual, and you've got God on your belt buckle,
0:44.3	and you told me...
0:44.9	Get right with God.
0:46.0	Yeah, right with God.
0:47.1	Right on your belt buckle, just like your song.
0:49.1	Yeah.
0:49.8	And you were telling me that you've got...
0:51.5	That you had...
0:52.2	And your house naturally, this wall of crosses.
0:55.1	Different crosses, yeah.
0:56.7	Like art, Day of the Dead kind of stuff and Santeria.
1:01.8	And both your grandfathers were ministers.
1:04.4	Methodist ministers, yeah.
1:05.8	So tell us a little bit, if you would, about the role that religion and God have played in your life and in your
1:11.4	music and I'm particularly interested in concepts of sin and redemption which I think
1:16.3	in your music a lot. My dad's father, for instance, was a Methodist minister, but you know, he was
1:23.1	what I liked it, what I described as a Christian in the true sense of the world, you know,
	...

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