“I know we all lost friends and family members and it’s just a helluva thing to be going through, but I want to send out my best wishes to all y’all and let’s just hang in tough,” says Lucinda Williams, offering words of encouragement near the end of her four-song set for Rolling Stone‘s In My Room series.
The new Nashville resident kicks off her performance with a reading of “Are You Alright,” off of her 2007 release, West, an album she co-produced with the late Hal Willner. Then she plays a trio of tracks on her upcoming LP, Good Souls Better Angels, out April 24th. She prefaces “You Can’t Rule Me” by saying it “makes me feel a little more powerful when I sing this song,” and wraps up the searing indictment of President Trump, “Man Without a Soul,” by echoing the track’s refrain: “It’s coming down.” “That’s for damn sure,” she promises.
The capper is the inspiring “When the Way Gets Dark,” a brooding but comforting ballad that pleads, “Don’t give up/Hang on tight/Don’t be afraid … it’s going to be alright/You’re going to be OK.” “Everybody’s having a rough time of it right now,” Williams says, “but we’ll get through it.”
Earlier this week, the singer-songwriter shared some of her daily quarantine routine with Rolling Stone: sleeping late, ordering dinner, and watching a lot of Netflix, including Tiger King. “The weirdness of the people involved probably didn’t throw me off quite as much as maybe other people,” she says. “I love documentaries like that or Making a Murderer.”
