LUCINDA Williams never spends long in one place. Mostly she’s just passing through, a day here, a day there. Even when she and her husband visit their Los Angeles home, they are barely there long enough to unpack before they are off again. Even at 62, the singer-songwriter remains a drifter, fond of “rambling” around. As she talks on the phone, her voice, gravelled, with the languorous Deep South accent of her upbringing, sounds so relaxed one might almost imagine she had just woken up.

It’s 2pm in a New York City hotel, shortly before Christmas, and Williams is jetlagged, having returned to the States from Australia a few days before. Soon, she'll be back on the road again, flying to Dublin, then Glasgow to play at Celtic Connections. “I’m never really settled,” she drawls. “I don’t think I can ever seem like I can be in one place for too long. I still have that sort of restlessness. I wish I could just live in hotels all the time.”

Perhaps it should be no surprise that Williams's latest album, The Ghosts Of Highway 20, is about an interstate route. The great American tradition of the “the explorer and rambler” is in her soul, has long been since childhood when her family moved from place to place every couple of years as her father shifted university jobs. As a young adult she kept drifting, moving from one relationship to the next, often on the road.

But the highway of her childhood, the Interstate 20 (I-20), which runs through the southern states and along which are dotted many places with personal connections, still haunts her most. It is a route marked with grief’s signposts, one on which, as the album's title single puts it: “Every exit leaves a little death/ In its wake and a memory.”

It was a couple of years ago, when playing a concert in Macon, Georgia, that Williams was struck by the resonance of this road. Macon was the town in which she started school; a place of intense memories. After the concert, as the tour bus pulled away, Williams looked out of the window and noticed “these signs to other towns along the highway: Vicksburg, Mississippi where my brother was born, Jackson, Mississippi, where my sister was born, and Monroe, Louisiana where my mother was from and is now laid to rest”. Suddenly, she recalls, “I saw this thread running through”.

A multitude of ghosts therefore inhabit this album: her mother, her sister Karyn, her brother Robert, her husband’s father, and, of course, her own father, Miller Williams, the well-regarded and popular poet who read at Bill Clinton’s inauguration.

Some of these ghosts have passed away now.

Of course, loss isn’t a new territory for Williams. It has long haunted her writing and life – the story of a boyfriend who died of liver disease, long after they had split up, features in the bittersweet 1998 song Lake Charles. But her recent work seems to spill over with grief. “The older you get the more ghosts, the more memories,” she says.

Almost all her recent work is inflected with this loss, and a craving for something spiritual – though she has said she’s not “a religious person”. “It’s not just my mother and my father,” she says. “There are close friends I’ve lost. And it’s just about trying to deal with all that. But there’s still some joy in there you know. There is faith and grace.” One of the songs on her new album is a plea for “a little more faith and grace, to help me run this race”.

Visiting Macon, Williams was struck by how little it had changed. “I was astonished. Even the place we played, the old Cox Capitol Theatre in downtown Macon, where the Arnold brothers got started. It’s been renovated, but there’s still a feeling in certain towns that they haven't changed. You know a lot of places you go and there’s all this growth and boom and building and all this, but not in Macon.”

Williams had lived in Macon while her father and mother were still together. When they split up, her mother, Lucy, failed to gain custody because of her mental illness and alcoholism. Being there again, Williams was thrown back to a time when her father took her to see the preacher street singer, Blind Pearly Brown, in the downtown area. “He played slide guitar and sang all these gospel blues songs. Needless to say that made quite an impression on me.”

So when she and her husband and manager, Tom Overby, were trying to think of a name for their record label, they were drawn to Highway 20. “We were going to call it Gravel Road records [after her best-selling album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road], but somebody had already taken that. And I’ve always loved the idea of highways and highway signs.” Later, Overby encouraged her to come up with a song about the road, “something to talk to that experience”.

To write the album she didn’t need to go back there physically. So many of the songs she was writing were already ghosts of Highway 20. There were songs, for instance, she had created while working on Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone, the double album recorded while her father was gradually being stolen from her by Alzheimer’s disease. “Highway 20 is just the area I’m from,” she says, “and my music is connected with that part of the south and everything. There is a kind of thread running through it.”

Williams's father died of complications from Alzheimer’s just over a year ago. Her grief is still “real fresh and raw” and there are two songs in this album about him: If My Love Could Kill, and If There’s A Heaven. She also turned her father’s poem, Dust, into a new song containing the bleak lyrics: “There’s a sadness so deep/ the sun seems black/and you don’t have to try to keep/ the tears back.”

It is only the second time she has worked with one of his poems. The first was Compassion, the song that lent its final line to the title of Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone. There is some very touching video footage of the last time she saw her father. About 18 months ago Williams had been playing in Fayetteville, and since her father wasn't well enough to come to watch her, she decided to do a small, intimate concert at his house. In the short film, Miller Williams reads out Compassion, then Lucinda sings the song she created from it. What’s striking is that he seems quite lucid as he reads it out. The disintegration that followed, I suggest, must have been terrifyingly fast. “Yes, he really hung in there,” she recalls. “He knew he had Alzheimer’s and he really just tried to make the best of it. And it was probably over the next few months after that that everything just started heading downhill.”

 

 

She did not see him in those final months. She and Overby were “on the road” when he passed away, as she had also been when her mother died: a fact she finds “hard”. But she does recall a previous time she visited him, one in which he broke to her the fact he could no longer write poetry. “That was the first time,” she recalls, “I really knew that this disease had taken its course. Because my father not being able to write poetry any more was heartbreaking. It was like a part of him had died.” Writing had been what connected them. He had been her mentor, past whom she would always have run her final lyrics. “I just lost it," she says. "I started sobbing. It made me so sad. He was so stoic about it. But I couldn’t believe what I’d heard.”

One of the songs on her current album, If My Love Could Kill, is “about the Alzheimer’s disease that killed him, took his life, finally”. It describes the disease as “murderer of poets, murderer of songs”, attacks it as the one “who robbed me of your memory/ who robbed me of your time.”

The disease had touched her family before. “My dad’s older brother had it. He was a chemistry professor. It happens to the most brilliant minds. Now looking back we realise my grandmother, my dad’s mother, had it. I hope I haven’t inherited the gene. I’m a little worried.”

It has taken Williams decades to find a way of realising her father’s poems as songs, but now they are among her most potent offerings. For years, she tried to work on one of his early poems, Why Does God Permit Evil? “Every so often I would take another stab at it. I just couldn’t get it to work.” Then her husband suggested she consider Compassion, and that Dust might also be worth a try.

Dust, a poem of utter bleakness, which expresses a wish that the “world would mend”, is one that she says expresses her father’s early idealism, a characteristic they both shared in their youth (Williams got expelled from school for refusing to make the Pledge of Allegiance). “I think he wrote it when he was kind of feeling down and feeling troubled, like we all get sometimes. I’ve been at that place before where you felt so sad. It’s interesting it says mend, not end.”

She still retains some idealism, she says. “My dad always used to say, ‘Never lose your sense of wonder.’ And that’s the key I think. Never lose that child’s part of yourself that we all have inside of us.”

Williams' music is a testimony to both her parents. She inherited her father’s gift for words, and her mum’s musical talent. Her mother, Lucy Morgan, began playing music aged around four and had ambitions to be a concert pianist, though sadly all that remained unfulfilled as she was blown off course by mental illness. “When I was growing up and my parents were still together,” Williams recalls, “there was always a piano in the house. I never learned how to play it unfortunately. But at a young age, nine, I was always desperate to find some kind of instrument to play so I could sing.”

Her mother's death, in 2004, was one of the biggest emotional triggers in Williams’s songwriting career. She hadn’t been prepared for this sudden passing. One day, it seemed to her, her mother had gone into hospital for a check-up and the next she was hooked to a ventilator. “I think she was never really open with me. She was having problems with her lungs. She would say, oh the doctors don’t know what it is. I think it was probably emphysema, because she had smoked. That was what my dad said.”

The Ghosts Of Highway 61 contains a song, Louisiana Story, about her mother. In it, Williams digs into the darker corners of her early years and Morgan’s own childhood. “My mother’s relationship with her parents was not good,” she says. “And the song is about her growing up. Part of it is me. I’m the little girl in the song. But also it’s her.” Morgan’s father was a tobacco-chewing fundamentalist Methodist preacher and Williams’s lyrics paint a portrait of a terrifying disciplinarian: “Her daddy’s kind/ Didn’t spare the rod/ Blinded by the fear/ And the wrath of God.” In a past interview, Williams said her mother had been "emotionally, if not somewhat physically, abused" in childhood, adding: "Yeah, she had a rough time. Her mother had mental illness. Passed it down to her.”

The album also contains musical ghosts and influences. “There are references all through the Delta Blues,” she says, “and old country music to highways and roads. It’s part of the history of America. Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie, you know, they all rambled around.”

Williams remains a drifter herself, but one of the pleasures of her recent years has been that she found someone to drift with: Tom Overby, her husband, manager and producer. “I have a rambling partner,” she says. “A travelling partner.” Even their wedding was done on the hoof, the ceremony conducted on stage at a concert of her 2009 tour, with family and friends coming up on stage. “We didn’t have a honeymoon or anything,” she says. “We just got back on the bus and kept going.”

For many years, Williams seemed to live the romantic heartache of her songs. Till Overby, her relationship history had seemed tumultuous and fragmented. Before meeting Overby she had been married once, to drummer Greg Sowerby, but it was a short-lived affair. She had no children.

Following her mother’s death, Williams threw herself into a period of frenzied productivity. Though it has been a "10-year period of loss", in the time since she has “never slowed down”. She also got together with Overby, and the couple bought a house in Los Angeles six years ago. “But still we’re not really settled in one place. We’re trying to figure out how to have a place, a home.”

Williams tells me that she and Overby are planning to spend the festive season in LA, but that they have been “commiserating”, since they both feel like “Christmas orphans”. There are no families, neither parents nor children, for them to go home to. “I was thinking about maybe having a New Year’s party or something,” says Williams, “but it takes a lot of work. A lot of people deal with it by going to Jamaica or some place. Hawaii. Get completely away from it all. But we’ll be fine.”

The season has an extra cloud over it, since it was on New Year’s Day 2015 that Miller Williams passed away. Lucinda notes that the singer-songwriter Hank Williams died on the same date, and her father had been a fan. “Every New Year’s day my dad and my stepmother would listen to Hank Williams music and they would have a drink and toast to Hank Williams. So that was what Tom and I did that day. We listened to Hank Williams and had a toast.”

Perhaps, she says, they may do it again. In any case, despite the sadness, the new year is a time she, ever the writer, her father's daughter, looks forward to. “It’s like a blank page. A brand new notebook with a new pen.”

The Ghosts Of Highway 20 is released on January 22. Lucinda Williams performs at Celtic Connections on January 20 at 7.30pm, www.celticconnections.com