New Book Lucinda Williams
‘Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You’
Lucinda Williams’s Memoir
Available April 25, 2023
One of the defining voices of modern roots music.
If not the most passionate lyricist of all time, surely one of them, boldly displaying personal fragility and uncertainty with immense courage.
On stage, her performances are often transformative, occasionally difficult.
Lucinda Williams, a much beloved singer-songwriter and three-time Grammy winner, is soon to open up to her faithful audience, covering a traumatic childhood in the Deep South, the years of being overlooked by the music business and the narratives surrounding those unforgettable songs.
According to the media release from Penguin Random House:
Lucinda Williams’s rise to fame was anything but easy. Raised in a working-class family in the Deep South, she moved from town to town each time her father—a poet, a textbook salesman, a professor, a lover of parties—got a new job, totaling twelve different places by the time she was eighteen. Her mother suffered from severe mental illness and was in and out of hospitals. And when Williams was about a year old she had to have an emergency tracheotomy—an inauspicious start for a singing career. But she was also born a fighter, and she would develop a voice that has captivated millions.
In Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, Lucinda Williams takes readers through the events that shaped her music—from performing for family friends in her living room to singing at local high schools and colleges in Mexico City, to recording her first album with Folkway Records and headlining a sold-out show at Radio City Music Hall. She reveals the inspirations for her unforgettable lyrics, including the doomed love affairs with “poets on motorcycles” and the gothic Southern landscapes of the many different towns of her youth, including Macon, Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. Williams spent years working at health food stores and record stores during the day, so she could play her music at night, and faced record companies who told her that her music was “too unfinished,” “too country for rock and too rock for country,” and criticism that she didn’t have the right voice for radio or TV. But her fighting spirit persevered, leading to a hard-won success that spans seventeen Grammy nominations and a legacy as one of the greatest and most influential songwriters of our time.
“For decades now, I’ve shared my innermost thoughts and experiences via my songs. After years spent toying with the idea, I’ve decided to finally tell my stories more fully. But this won’t be a sugar-coated memoir; I want people to really see the truth of my life.”
Lucinda Williams
Apparently Williams recently completed the book, but ends the narrative before her stroke in 2020.
It promises to be an extraordinary and compelling read.
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New Book Lucinda Williams
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