In the Spring of 2025, Lucinda Williams was feeling the weight of America’s political climate. She’d had enough.
In the midst of working on a new album, she and her primary collaborators – her husband and manager Tom Overby, along with guitarist Doug Pettibone – decided to put those songs aside and work on something different: An album of protest music. It’s something Williams had considered for decades, but had yet to pursue.
“I hate to start harping on the 1960s, because then I sound like a typical old person,” she said. “But I was missing those times when people would rally and demonstrate. The songs were a big part of that movement and I wasn’t seeing other artists today writing those types of songs.”
Similar to the protest music of the 1960s, today’s activist songs are centered around advocacy for marginalized groups, political inclusion, and opposition to violence at home and abroad.
“There needed to be protest movements then; we’ve always needed them, in every era,” Williams said.
Protest songs can be tricky – and Williams knows that. She says that’s one of the main reasons it’s taken her this long to make an album like “World’s Gone Wrong.”
“I wanted to write songs like that for a long time, but they had to be good,” she said. “If you’re not careful when you’re writing a protest song, you can slip into that flowery, let’s hold hands and dance in a circle kind of thing.”
“World’s Gone Wrong” does not make that mistake. It’s a collection of nine fiery original songs and one cover that all speak to the current times from Williams’ unique perspective as a southern woman who has plenty to say.
Williams says that protesting runs in her family. Her grandfather grew up in Arkansas and was part of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, a labor union that helped farmers get better working conditions from landowners.
“He was a Methodist preacher who was very progressive and liberal,” she said. “He was a Christian in the true sense of the word.”
Growing up, Williams received encouragement from her father, the poet Miller Williams. She says that one bit of advice he gave her was to never censor herself.
“That’s one of his cardinal rules of creative writing,” she said. “That became my motto which I’ve stuck to all these years.”
“World’s Gone Wrong” features contributions from many of Williams’ favorite modern songwriters like Brittney Spencer and Norah Jones. The song “Low Life” is a collaboration between Williams and the New York-based folk-rock band Big Thief. She says that after doing some shows with the band, they really hit it off and made a pact to collaborate soon.
“One night they got on stage and Adrianne (Lenker) sang a beautiful rendition of my song ‘Minneapolis,'” Williams recalled. “I was so moved by that. I just stood there and watched her. It’s not one of my more popular songs, but she really captured the phrasing and the essence of it.”
“So Much Trouble In The World,” the album’s sole cover song features a contribution from another artist who has been using her voice to protest since the 1960s, Mavis Staples.
Williams says that it was her husband Tom’s idea to bring the song, which was originally performed by Bob Marley & The Wailers, into the mix for “World’s Gone Wrong.”
“He suggested it and I was a little hesitant at first because I didn’t know how I was going to make a Bob Marley song sound any better than it already is,” she said. “I didn’t want people to compare my version to Bob’s.”
The version that ended up on the album is distinctively a Lucinda Williams song. Williams was able to bring the message and energy of the original version and make it her own.
Lucinda Williams performs at the Haw River Ballroom in Saxapahaw on May 15. She’ll be back in the Triangle on July 28 at Red Hat Amphitheater with Bob Dylan.
