Some of my songs and some of his poems, you can just see that he taught me a lot. If you delve into it a little bit more, dig a little deeper, you can see. Sometimes it kind of amazes me – I was looking at a couple of his poems recently, I can’t remember which ones they were, but I was kind of like, ‘Wow.’ I didn’t realize that my writing was so close to his poetry, but it really is. Well, I mean, you can read his poetry and see the connection. How has his poetry helped shape your own body of work? Your father’s poem near the end of the book – The Caterpillar – floored me. But it just inspires that creative part of me. And the song won’t necessarily be about what I’m doing right at that moment. I feel inspired and I get in the mood and come up with a song. It’s hard to describe what that feeling is, but it just comes over me. I’ve written a lot of songs in hotel rooms. It always stimulates that writing thing in me. No one can really get to you, but life goes on. Taking a long-distance train ride is like being suspended in time. I can just hang out in my motel room or hotel room or whatever and watch the world go by without having to interact. I don’t have any responsibilities or commitments, appointments or anything. I can be there and just sort of be alone. And I like the feeling of being in a town or city where I don’t know a lot of people. Now that I think about it, it’s a way to sort of be by myself, be alone, and yet take in all of this world outside. And I’ve always loved taking trips on a train, where I can just sit and look out the window and write. It seems to be the nature of things right now – motion. Because everybody’s leaving all the time, I guess. I hadn’t really thought about it that much. Have you figured out how to navigate the tension between saying goodbye to people you care about and the desire to keep moving? It started feeling like, ‘Oh, god, this is gonna look really stupid and silly.’ Like the story about the guy I was interested in and got all the candles and incense and music and invited him over to my hotel room, and he comes in and it just goes right over his head. I felt really shy about that after I’d been writing that over and over again. And: ‘I had a crush on him and a crush on that one’ – the ideal man, the poet on the motorcycle. This one and that one and this other one. I remember feeling kind of embarrassed, because I kept writing about all these guys I knew. Was there anything new that you learned about yourself or your work writing the book? Things that were kind of, I thought, ‘Wow.’ I was surprised they put that in there because it was so private. I mean, some of them said things in their books that I would never. I read a lot of other people’s memoirs before I started writing mine, just to see how they did theirs. Of course, it depends on what kind of book you want to put out. You kind of have to walk that line a little bit. I was doing that, except when you’re writing a book that all these people you don’t know are going to be reading, you don’t want to pull the covers back too much. Well, just like it probably would be for you or anybody, you know? It’s like writing in a journal. You dedicate so much space in the book to people who inspired and helped you – your ‘guardian angels.’ What was it like to reflect so deeply again on all those relationships? ‘You’ve gotta read this’: The books Globe staffers are loving this week And she just released her clear-eyed new memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, in which she shares intimate thoughts and details about her childhood, her craft, her “guardian angels” and – endearingly – her myriad crushes. She just announced a new record, Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart (June 30), featuring appearances by Bruce Springsteen, Margo Price and Angel Olsen. She has a packed touring schedule, with a stop in Vancouver slated for August. Since healing from her November, 2020, stroke, the indomitable country-rock singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams, who turned 70 in January, has been back at it in a major way.
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