Lucinda Williams Songs from a Rock n Roll Heart Review: Resilience, Revival, and Renewal

On “New York Comeback,” the lead single from Songs from a Rock n Roll Heart, Lucinda Williams takes a well-deserved victory lap. Aided by backing vocals from none other than Bruce Springsteen, the Americana legend declares, “You wouldn’t want to miss my New York comeback,” atop anthemic, classic rock-style guitars and drums. We certainly wouldn’t.

Following a debilitating stroke in 2020, it seemed like there might not ever be another Lucinda Williams album. Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart, then, is a triumph against the odds. It’s also Williams’s most lyrically conceptual album to date, centered around resilience, revival, and renewal. Admittedly, such forces have always animated Williams’s music, but the songs on this album exist in a particularly vivid and unified universe, with most directly addressing the healing and transformative power of music at its most evocative.

Songs from a Rock n Roll Heart’s anthemic opener, “Let’s Get the Band Back Together,” is rousing and nostalgic, filled with youthful recollections of living recklessly and joyously. “Let’s get the band back together/And do it again,” Williams sings. The track’s verses convey real loss and the menacing, omnipresent shadow of “real life,” but those undertones are contrasted by the euphoric chorus. As opposed to the dark, affecting music that populated 2020’s Good Souls, Better Angels, Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart feels like a celebration of life.

If Williams originally gained critical acclaim for her expert balancing of country and rock influences, resulting in her distinctive Americana sound, this album, per its title, leans far more heavily into one rock than country. This leads to thrilling highlights like the aforementioned tracks and the stunning “Stolen Moments,” a tribute to Tom Petty that chronicles the seemingly mundane moments when you’re most struck by someone’s absence. Yet, the track’s uplifting sound suggests that such memories can be a greater source of comfort than pain.

The album’s classic-rock influence, most evident in a number of extended guitar solos, at times undermines Williams’s distinctive sound. The title track’s tale of a “working class kid in a dead-end town” who found “everything changed when he heard that song” sounds more like fodder for a Springsteen song than one by Williams. This would be true even if the Boss wasn’t also featured on backing vocals here, but his presence certainly underscores the feeling.

Elsewhere, Margo Price’s airy backing vocals on “This Is Not My Town” captivatingly contrast with the gravelly depths of Williams’s voice, but the song falls back on predictable rhyme schemes and a muddled call to arms: “Shake ‘em up! Shake ‘em up!/Sometimes you gotta shake ‘em down.” There’s a sense that Williams, who’s been unable to play guitar due to the effects of her stroke, has attempted to refigure her songwriting around melodies created by others.

A number of the slower cuts on Songs from a Rock n Roll Heart, though, prove beyond a doubt Williams’s continued vitality as a songwriter and performer. The six-and-a-half-minute “Where the Song Will Find Me” moves at an almost glacial pace, which allows Williams to ruminate on her revelations. “I know they will find me/Like they somehow do,” she sings. It’s a simple but immensely moving line given the resilience required to make this album possible.

The album’s centerpiece is “Hums Liquor,” which joins the ranks of Williams’s “Drunken Angel” and “Real Live Bleeding Fingers” as another immensely affecting song about addiction. Like Songs from a Rock n Roll Heart’s best songs, it’s an evocative, intimate, and sympathetic portrait that reconfirms that Lucinda Williams is one of the greatest living songwriters.