Sweet ‘n’ Sour

Lucinda Williams writes songs for art’s sake, but her excellent work during the 1980s and early ‘90s turned out to be a good investment.

Because of it, she has been able to sit still and watch her stock rise over the past five years--five years in which she hasn’t released anything new of her own.

The Louisiana native’s reputation as an inspired songwriter with a storyteller’s knack and a well-grounded stylistic base in folk, country, rock and blues grew along with her net worth as Mary Chapin Carpenter, Emmylou Harris and Tom Petty recorded her vintage material.

Carpenter’s version of “Passionate Kisses” was the big hit, winning a 1994 Grammy for best country song. Harris lovingly harvested two wistful Williams’ gems, “Crescent City” and “Sweet Old World,” on her two most recent albums, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers showed that Williams is also good for dry humor and rocking crunch in a raucous cover of “Change the Locks.”

It’s a good thing Williams has gotten a boost from others, because her own luck as a recording artist has been miserable. She has released only two albums of her mature work; “Sweet Old World,” from 1992, is the only one still in print. (Two early, woodshedding albums from 1979-80 remain available on Folkways Records.)

And the major-label deal she signed two years ago with American Recordings has turned into a source of frustration. After a slow and painstaking labor, the album, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” is ready to come out. But business complications have caused delays, and Williams’ manager wants to get her released from her contract so that another label might quickly pick the album up.

“I’ve been inundated with the business end of things for so long,” Williams said over the phone from her home in Nashville, a weary note in her Southern twang. She had been packing for a tour that brings her to San Juan Capistrano on Monday and to West Hollywood on Tuesday and Wednesday. “That’s one reason I’m getting out and playing right now. I want to play the new songs and keep my head above water while I wait.”

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A more resourceful, production-oriented sort of songwriter might have used the downtime to churn out more material, squirreling away nuggets for future albums or sending them to other artists in hopes of repeating the “Passionate Kisses” bonanza.

But Williams doesn’t work that way. She writes only for herself, and if other singers want to do remakes once her records come out, that’s fine. Asked whether she had done any lobbying or networking to bring about the high-profile covers, she chuckled. “None,” she said. “People have done it on their own. They picked it up off the record.”

For now, she’s completely tapped out. “I don’t have a lot of extra songs floating around, and I just haven’t felt like writing a lot lately. I’m always taking notes and filing them away in the back of my mind. . . . I’ve just been real distracted [by the business uncertainties]. I think I’ll write a bunch of stuff once this record comes out. Any time you start a project and can’t finish it, you’re in limbo. It affects your creativity.”

Williams, 44, got the writing bug early, inherited from and fostered by her father, Miller Williams, a poet and professor whom President Clinton chose to deliver the ceremonial poem at his second inaugural. They moved almost yearly during her youth, from one teaching post to another, until he put down roots at the University of Arkansas in the early 1970s.

“I was always kind of an indoors kid. As soon as I could play guitar, I just spent hours doing that in my room,” Williams recalled. She took her cues from such accomplished lyricists as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. And growing up in a poet’s household was “sort of a built-in creative writing course.” Williams says she still shows songs in progress to her father and sometimes takes his advice on word choices and sentence structures.

As a teenager, Williams went from solitary strumming to playing in clubs. She settled in Austin, Texas, and found a musical community of singer-songwriters interested in deep expression and a well-turned phrase, among them Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

Williams moved to Los Angeles in 1984 and got used to rejection from record labels, even though her demo tape included “Passionate Kisses.” Her nuggets began to emerge in 1988, when she recorded an album cheaply for the now-defunct English label Rough Trade. Williams says she hopes to reissue that album, “Lucinda Williams,” once her label status is resolved.

The windfall from “Passionate Kisses”--royalties from not only Carpenter’s sales and airplay but also the Muzak version--lifted her out of the scuffling, no-health-insurance lot of the commercially marginal musician. She left L.A. for Nashville in 1993.

“I learned a big lesson. I got a little bread when that ‘Passionate Kisses’ thing started happening. That was fun for a while, taking all my friends out to dinner and picking up the tab. Then, when we got waylaid with this whole record deal thing, the money started running out, and I had to completely reassess my way of living and thinking and get back to where I was before. It’s a better place to be, anyway. It’s better to live below your means.”

Williams has been around too long to have any illusions about the financial prospects of her sort of music, the tradition-based, hard-to-define “Americana” branch where her peers include Steve Earle, Dave Alvin, John Prine, Gilmore and the revitalized Johnny Cash. If commercial country music is a functional Wal-Mart in the suburbs, Americana is a colorful, lovingly tended boutique in the old part of town.

Williams thinks there will always be an audience for what that boutique offers--authentic, tuneful, slickness-resistant music with lyrics grounded in experience and lifted by poetic ambitions. Her own songs go beyond relationships and romance to grapple unsentimentally with death, grief and the personal impact of economic and emotional poverty.

She has enjoyed the kindness of hit-makers, but she doesn’t rely on it.

“The [audience is] out there, regardless what gets played on the radio or who’s promoting what. They come on their own, and it has a life of its own. It’s a good feeling. I know it will always be there, no matter what happens.”

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* Lucinda Williams and Chapped Cheeks, featuring Patty Booker, play Monday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $15-$17. (714) 496-8930. Also Tuesday and Wednesday at the Troubadour, 9081 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. 8 p.m. $15. (310) 276-6168.