Lucinda Williams’s songs are like a catalog of intimate sufferings, mostly of the romantic kind—suicidal poets, unfulfilled loves, long, sad drives across the South—which she represents in meticulous detail. And there’s always an edge of determination to her thoughtful, scratchy voice, whether she’s singing with anger or utter desperation; you feel the energy of a torrent pushed through a pinhole.

Born in Louisiana in 1953, Williams grew up sitting in on the poetry workshops and lectures of her father, the poet Miller Williams. She spent a few decades traveling around the country, playing in bars and on the street, and developed a following before her first commercial success, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998), which was her fifth album. Since that time, she has released six more albums, has been named “America’s Best Songwriter” by Time magazine, and has been nominated for Grammy Awards in country, pop, folk, rock, and Americana.

A few years ago, Williams married her manager, Tom Overby. The marriage took place onstage after a concert in Minneapolis. (“We had this idea of getting married, and I asked my dad, ‘What do you think about that?’ My dad said, ‘Hank Williams got married onstage.’ And I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Yeah!’ And I said, ‘OK, well, that settles it.”) Since then, she has been pursuing a wider range of topics in her songs, and is currently working on a song about the execution of Texas inmate David Lee Powell, whose sentence she attempted to commute.

—Madeleine Schwartz

I. THE LEAVES FALL AND THEY FALL TO THE GROUND

THE BELIEVER: How did you figure out how to use your voice?

LUCINDA WILLIAMS: When I started out playing guitar and singing, I was about twelve, going on thirteen. The role models for me back then were the folk singers. They all had these high, really nice voices and ranges, like Judy Collins and Joan Baez, and then later, of course, Joni Mitchell and Linda Ronstadt. I decided early on that I was going to learn how to write songs really, really well, because I didn’t want to have to compete as a singer. I didn’t feel that it was my strong point.

It wasn’t until I discovered Bobbie Gentry—she was one of the first singers who had more of a low, raspy voice, and I really connected to that—and then when I discovered some of the blues singers like Memphis Minnie and some of the other Delta blues women singers, with their scratchy, different kind of voices, that I started finding other role models to identify with. I remember being at a restaurant with Emmylou Harris one time, and a couple of other...