A restless pursuit of love and perfection

Lucinda Williams, looking ready for a night out in tight jeans and a cowboy hat, is confused as she stands in the doorway of her rented house on a quiet street in Burbank, a pickup truck with Tennessee plates parked in front.

Was the interview really supposed to be tonight, she asks in her slow Southern drawl? Doesn’t it take the mystery out of songs to talk about them? What about just having dinner?

Meeting Williams is like stepping into one of her albums.

In such works as the Grammy-winning “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” there is a constant weighing of options and second-guessing as Williams sifts obsessively through the ashes and flames of old relationships, looking for clues about what went wrong and what keeps going wrong.

Some artists write songs and then go about their lives until it’s time to write more. Williams lives her life and then writes about it -- heartache by heartache.

She’s restless, impulsively searching for new experiences and material. Ultimately, it seems, everything for her -- an interview, a conversation, a night out, a relationship -- is just killing time until the next song.

A late bloomer who didn’t find her stride as a writer until her mid-30s, Williams, 51, can masterfully craft songs, writing about matters of the heart with an almost masochistic honesty, yet never self-pitying or indulgent. While she hasn’t defined a new genre a la Bob Dylan or Ice Cube, Williams has become one of the most respected writers of her generation by applying an unusually artful and refined sensibility to some of America’s oldest and rawest genres, including country, blues and folk.

Most of her songs spring from the country, blues and rock influences she absorbed growing up in the South. These elements connect splendidly in “Those Three Days,” a song about the numbness and humiliation of being discarded by someone after a torrid affair.

That sounds like Williams tends to make bad choices in relationships. “Like, hello,” she says at dinner after last year’s release of the album containing that song.

Asked if she’d rather have a great album or a great relationship, she responds with the speed of someone who has spent lots of time pondering that question: “Great album.”

After a long pause, she adds, softly, “I wish I could say ‘relationship,’ but I can’t be happy without my art. I’ve been in relationships where I wasn’t writing and I felt I was going to die. The trouble is, I have a tendency to think too much about the other person and not enough about myself, so my writing suffers.”

The gap between her success in music and in love comes up often during the evening. Finally, Williams just shakes her head, “Oh, well, one out of two ain’t bad.”

It’s weeks after the dinner and Williams is at her dining room table, thumbing through a 2-inch-thick folder filled with a couple of hundred pages of song ideas and rough drafts -- some written on legal paper, others on napkins, bus tickets or hotel stationery.

Many writers would be too self-conscious to let outsiders see their tentative work pages, afraid that it might take away some of the magic of their music if you knew they had to struggle to achieve what seems so effortless on record. But Williams is too good-hearted to refuse a request to see them -- which might surprise those who’ve never met her, because from a distance, Williams seems intimidating.

It may be the coldness and suspicion in her eyes when she looks into a camera lens, even for her own album cover photos. Or the renegade cowgirl attire that makes it look as though she picked up her fashion sense from hanging around honky-tonks with Keith Richards. Or maybe it’s just the way she dissects herself, and others, so fearlessly in her songs. So it’s disarming to see how often she smiles and how easily she laughs.

“Here’s some lines I wrote probably 30 years ago,” Williams says, holding a piece of loose-leaf paper. “It’s about watching someone through Venetian blinds. I like the idea of it, but it never has worked.”

“Oh, God, look at this,” Williams says, laughing at another piece of paper she has found. “That’s horrible. I don’t know why I ever even wrote some of these lines down.

“Sometimes a song will come right away, but most of the time, you have to go through a lot of drafts. The hard thing is not just settling for something that seems almost right. In the end, there’s an inner feeling you have, and I think it comes with experience.”

Williams continues sifting through the pages, mostly just skimming them. “Some of this is kind of juvenile,” she says, almost blushing. “ ‘Oh, those eyes. They seem so wide.’ I would never use that now. That’s probably from 1977 or something.”

But for all the embarrassing notes and false starts, Williams trusts that she’ll find something here. She doesn’t try to write something every day, only when she feels inspired, which explains why she has sometimes gone years between albums.

“If I was actually writing, I’d probably be sitting here with my guitar and a little tape recorder, going through the folder,” she explains. “Sometimes I look for ideas that get me going, other times I have a song going and I’m just looking for lines that might work.”

While looking through the book, she’ll often strum on a guitar, sometimes searching for music that fits the mood of the images she has focused on, other times piecing together a melody and looking for words that fit with it. One of a songwriter’s great frustrations, she says, is coming up with a great line, but not being able to tie the phrasing to a strong melody.

One rule: Be alone when you’re writing. “The last thing you want when you are writing is to feel self-conscious or intimidated,” she says. “You want the freedom to be fearless so you can dig beneath the surface.”

It’s the poetry gene

Where many singer-songwriters seem to benefit from being self-taught and intuitive, Williams’ music carries the discipline of someone who has learned the rules of poetry and literature.

In fact, it’s not far off the mark to think of Williams as born into writing the way Bobby Bonds’ son, Barry, was born into baseball. Her father isn’t a songwriter, but Miller Williams is an award-winning poet whose work, much like his daughter’s, leans toward spare but deeply emotional and down- to-earth images. A long-time professor at the University of Arkansas, he recited one of his poems at President Clinton’s second inauguration.

As a child, Lucinda was fascinated by the students in her father’s class who would come over to the family’s house to discuss their poetry. As she got older, she fell in love with Southern gothic authors, including Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. She didn’t just read their works -- along with poets Charles Bukowski, John Ciardi and Kenneth Patchen -- she met some.

“Poets don’t hold back,” she says, still flipping through the pages. “They write about everything, from a cat sleeping on a window to a wreck on the highway -- from, you know, suicide to going to the grocery store to get tomatoes for a casserole to trying to meet a guy in a bar.

“The thing you learned right away was to avoid cliches or words that come too easily, or certain words and phrases that you’ve heard in too many songs. You try to say something important and in a way that is different.”

Traveling -- a constant in her life -- instilled a restlessness in her. Miller Williams moved his family throughout the South and to such foreign locales as Mexico City and Santiago, Chile. Which might explain why his daughter has, at various points, called New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Houston and Nashville home.

Restlessness runs through Williams’ songs. The theme surfaced as far back as 1980’s “Happy Woman Blues,” the title song from the first collection of her songs. The tune includes the lines, “Goin’ down the road with a heavy heart / Tryin’ to find lightness in the dark.” She sang with a husky, burned-out quality that magnified the solitary theme of the song.

“There’s something special about being in a new town. Whenever I first arrive somewhere new, I don’t know everybody yet and everybody doesn’t know me. That leaves you with all these possibilities. It’s like a blank slate, which is good for you as a writer.”

Williams pauses, then breaks out in a nervous laugh. “I sound like such an adolescent ... talking about having crushes on guys, but that’s the way it is,” she says. “I’ve heard other songwriters say this too. It’s very conducive to writing to have that fantasy thing in your head.

“You may have met someone a few nights before and you are thinking about them. You are wondering about what they are doing, maybe wondering if they kind of like you and when are you going to see them again. There’s something exciting in the unknown, the uncertainty. It’s kind of like an addiction, I guess.”

Williams was around 12 when she wrote her first song, “The Wind Blows,” a sweet, melodic folk tune in the style of the Kingston Trio’s hit, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

Eventually, she got into blues and country and was so caught up in music that she gave up studying cultural anthropology at the University of Arkansas to pursue a life as a club singer. She played tourist spots in New Orleans and folk clubs in San Francisco, concentrating on others’ songs because that’s what people wanted.

Privately, she experimented with songwriting, drawing upon many of the lessons she had learned from her father and from listening to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

“Dylan was a big influence. You’d hear a song like ‘To Ramona,’ and you’d notice the way he made every word count.” She begins singing the melancholy tune.

Ramona, come closer, shut softly your watery eyes.

“That’s the difference. He didn’t just say shut your eyes, but shut softly your watery eyes. There’s nobody like him.”

Williams was so insecure about her early songs that she didn’t even include any on her first album. Instead, the 1979 Folkways album “Ramblin’ ” featured her singing various blues and country tunes, including works written by or associated with Robert Johnson, Hank Williams and Memphis Minnie.

By the end of the evening, Williams has expressed her admiration for dozens of artists from her youth, from Joan Baez to Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. Her favorite writers also stretch from long-standing Texas rebels Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark through such relative newcomers as Ron Sexsmith and Ryan Adams.

The respect is mutual. Williams, whose albums sell from 300,000 to 700,000 copies in this country, is known as a songwriter’s songwriter. Among the artists who have recorded her songs or praised her: Willie Nelson, Steve Earle, Neil Young, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Emmylou Harris.

As the pages continue to go by at the dinner table, Williams finds pieces of lines that ended up in songs, including rough drafts of songs from “Car Wheels,” the 1998 album that cemented her reputation.

“A lot of times I’ll write down things I see or feel, but sometimes I’ll write down interesting things I hear. Here’s something I remember someone saying, ‘I’m not sick, I’m just tired.’ That could fit into a song someday. And look at this one, ‘She’s been in jail more times than she’s been in church.’ ”

She puts the paper down, then picks it up and looks at the line again. “That’s not bad,” she says.

Agony and ecstasy

Songwriters often talk about songs simply flowing through them, as if they were almost innocent parties in the creative process.

John Lennon spoke about getting so frustrated trying to write that he turned on himself, thinking himself worthless as an artist. That’s when “Nowhere Man” came to him: “He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody.”

Williams has had songs virtually appear, but that’s the exception. A perfectionist, she often spends years honing a line and has reworked an arrangement for months before signing off on it.

She once second-guessed herself endlessly in the recording studio as well, especially during the making of “Car Wheels.” Not wanting to repeat that agony, she has begun to loosen up in the studio, leaving the material, if anything, feeling a bit more intimate and personal.

There aren’t any dates on the sheets in her folder, so it’s hard to trace the exact evolution of various songs, but you can get an idea of how she works by isolating the pages devoted to the melancholy “Blue.”

The song, which appeared on her “Essence” album in 2001, is a ballad about a woman so accustomed to loneliness that she finds her only comfort in accepting it as her natural state, and the melody is as elegant and smart as something Cole Porter might have written.

On one piece of paper, the song begins with “Blue,” the symbol of her loneliness, as a person:

Blue said he promised

To take me downtown

So if you look for us

We can often be found.

A similar version included this verse:

He’s with me when I wake

And at the end of the day

He watches me break

And never runs away.

Neither made the final song. A breakthrough came when Williams changed “Blue” to an emotional state, though this version didn’t even include the word “Blue.”

You can go to church

Or you can go to a therapist

You can go to an all-night diner

And talk things over with a waitress.

In a subsequent version, the only image that remains is the opening one:

Some find a church

Some find a bar stool

I just go to blue.

As she proceeds -- and months might have passed between maybe a dozen versions -- she becomes increasingly specific. The church becomes a priest:

Some go to a priest

Some go to a bar

Some just leave town

From where ever they are.

She finally settled on:

So go to confession

Whatever gets you through

You can count your blessings

I’ll just count on blue.

The storyteller’s art

If “Blue” is an example of Williams knowing where she wants to go with a lyric, the song “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” was a bit of a journey into the unknown. Unlike the economy of “Blue,” this country narrative has more of a novelist’s eye for character and detail.

Williams likes to inject a lot of atmosphere in her stories. She doesn’t just tell you that someone is driving along listening to the radio. She tells you everything from where she’s going to what’s on the radio. In the fragile “Car Wheels,” Williams writes of a woman sitting in a kitchen in Macon, Ga., listening to Loretta Lynn on the radio, the smell of coffee, eggs and bacon in the room.

She’s thinking about something or someone missing from her life, and she finally throws open the screen door in search of it or him. With her little girl, she jumps into a car and begins a journey. The music has the rural, folk-country tone of a black-and-white photo.

Cotton fields stretching miles and miles

Hank’s voice on the radio

Telephone poles, trees and wires fly on by

Car wheels on a gravel road.

The final verse zeroes in on the little girl, the first clue that the story may be more about her than the troubled woman.

Child in the backseat, about four or five years

Lookin’ out the window

Little bit of dirt mixed with tears

Car wheels on a gravel road.

Williams doesn’t have notes that trace the evolution of the song, but she remembers piecing it together. “When I start on a song, I know what I am trying to say usually,” she says.

“A lot of times I see songs that just seem like a lot of different ideas kind of thrown in there, but nothing cohesive. It’s like someone went, ‘Here’s an interesting line, and here’s an interesting line,’ and on, but the song doesn’t add up to anything. You want to tell a story that makes sense.”

For all her restlessness, Williams has been especially close to her parents, who were divorced decades ago. Her mother, Lucille Morgan, died in March, but her father remains a rock of support.

In “Car Wheels,” she drew upon her childhood. Williams had the title for a long time and finally started thinking of “this Southern depiction of when I was growing up.” She believed she was writing about a time and a place. So she was surprised when her father said he thought she was the little girl in the song.

“I thought I was writing from the third person, but my dad came up to me and said how sorry he was,” Williams says. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Don’t you realize that’s you in the song, the little girl in the back seat.’ He was sorry I had to go through

Thinking about the girl in the song, she adds, “When I look at the song now, I do see she was sad. I guess like a lot of children, she feels misunderstood. It was the strangest feeling when he told me it was me.”

It’s not the only time Williams’ father has helped her understand or assess her work. She often submits drafts to him for suggestions. On an early copy of the song “Lake Charles,” from the “Car Wheels” album, Williams’ father wrote, “Show him ill at ease in L.A. or N.Y.” and “How he died.”

The only suggestion he had for the songs on her latest album, 2003’s “World Without Tears,” was that she change the album title -- it was originally going to be “Fruits of My Labor.” He had only praise for the songs themselves, causing Williams to quip to him about their long pupil-teacher relationship, “Does that mean I’ve graduated?”

Heart on her sleeve

Williams may be established as a songwriter, but she continues to search for a lasting relationship. It’s a complicated subject, one that runs through interviews just as it runs through her songs.

“I’m not going to give in to the idea that I have to suffer for the rest of my life to write songs,” she says during the dinner at a restaurant in North Hollywood. “I know it can work. I’ve seen it in people. There is a lifetime of pain you can draw upon. You don’t have to keep being in pain. You have the same insecurities and fears.

“I want to be with someone. I just don’t need a formal relationship. I guess I want my cake and eat it too. Basically, I want someone I can depend on, but I don’t want a co-dependency thing, with me getting lost in a relationship.”

At the same time, Williams seems hopelessly romantic. It’s that fairy-tale optimism that seems to open her up to the disappointment and despair that she chronicles in so many songs.

In “Overtime,” the song from her new album that Willie Nelson has recorded for one of his future albums, Williams takes comfort in the healing hands of time.

I guess out of the blue

You won’t cross my mind

And I’ll get over you.

Overtime.

In the album’s title song, she even tries to find strength in hardship.

If we lived in a world without tears

How would misery know

Which back door to walk through

How would trouble know

Which mind to live inside of

How would sorrow find a home.

Though almost all her music is cloaked in dark, disheartened tones, Williams doesn’t think of herself as a victim. There are some sunny signs in her life since last year’s interviews. She has a live album coming out this fall and is renting a house in Toluca Lake. She’s also been in a relationship for six months.

Back during the interviews, however, there was less optimism.

“You want to know what usually happens?” she says, amused. “I guess I’ve had more people walk out on me than I’ve walked out on them. A friend said I ought to take a year off from men altogether, but I haven’t been able to do it.”

At the end of one interview, Williams was on the phone, making plans to go out to a club. She said some friends were playing and she promised to stop by. Besides, she added with a conspiratorial wink, who knows who she’ll meet. Another song may be waiting just over the hill.

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Four essential albums

After devoting her debut album to songs by Hank Williams, Robert Johnson and others, Williams began showcasing her material in “Happy Woman Blues” in 1980, but her talent really took hold on these later albums.

1. “Sweet Old World” 1992 (Chameleon). In the title number and such tunes as “Pineola,” Williams mixes craftsmanship and passion. She doesn’t just draw you into her world, but creates scenes so embracing that you drop your defenses and join her in a moment of shared sorrow.

2. “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” 1998 (Mercury). This album is a dazzling series of tales about emotional search, though her writing is so disciplined in places that it loses some of the intensity of her other CDs.

3. “Essence” 2001 (Lost Highway). Stepping away from the strict storytelling of “Car Wheels,” Williams speaks more directly and, it would appear, more personally. Williams also trades in some of her earlier country, blues and folk strains for a touch of pop eloquence.

4. “World Without Tears” 2003 (Lost Highway). Williams tries on her rock ‘n’ roll shoes in the key moments of this frequently raw exercise. That brings a fresh spark to the songs, which continue to pursue the nakedly personal path of “Essence.”

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Five songs for the ages

Lucinda Williams’ songs can be gloriously complex or deceptively simple, but the best share a character and revelation that stick with you. These five, listed in order of preference, illustrate the range and depth of her work.

1. “Blue” 2001. The sparse ballad not only captures loneliness and depression, but the economy of language underscores how your emotions can sap your strength and hope.

2. “Sweet Old World” 1992. In this tear-stained, mid-tempo country narrative about the suicide of a friend, Williams lists some of the tender moments in life that the friend will never again experience: The breath from your own lips/ The touch of fingertips/ A sweet and tender kiss/ The sound of a midnight train/ Wearing someone’s ring/ Someone calling your name.

3. “Those Three Days” 2003. A desolate, country-rock morning-after song -- all the more harrowing because it wasn’t just the morning after a casual encounter, but a weekend filled with such passion and promise that you don’t know if you’ll ever trust your heart again.

4. “Right in Time” 1998. Williams’ poetic eye is at work in every line of this folk-country shuffle about missing someone whose hold is so strong she equates it to a tattoo: Pierce the skin and the blood runs through/ Oh my baby.

5. “Lonely Girls” 2001. Like “Blue,” this is another marvelous example of economy -- a minimalist ballad whose opening line captures the moment, oh-so-late at night when loneliness asserts itself the most forcefully: Heavy blankets cover lonely girls.

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Next: Merle Haggard, the country singer who writes about the common man with uncommon grace.

Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn can be reached by e-mail at robert.hilburn@latimes.com.