Three years ago, a stroke left medical professionals wondering whether Lucinda Williams would ever walk again. With dogged resilience, however, she returns this spring with her long-awaited memoir and her 16th album – whose guests include Bruce Springsteen, Margo Price and Angel Olsen.
You wouldn’t consider it today, fresh from a triumphant European tour, but two years ago it seemed like Williams might never walk or pick up a guitar again. Back in November 2020, her partner Tom Oversby found her collapsed on the bathroom floor of their Nashville home. He rushed her to Vanderbilt Medical Centre where medics discovered a blood clot on the right side of her brain. The stroke affected the motor skills along the left half of her body; only timely intervention and the long, arduous process of rehab prevented more lasting and profound disability.
“It was kind of biblical, really,” she laughs now, recalling the shocking events of that year. “We’d been staying so much in Nashville while we were on tour it made sense to buy a place there. A couple of weeks after we closed on the house a tornado hit and took off part of the roof and blew up the porch. A few weeks after that, the pandemic came along. And then, just…
