In the year 2026, news feeds reflect how chaotic and complicated current events have become on a daily basis. It was enough of a concern for Lucinda Williams to record “World Gone Wrong,” an album in which she tapped into the spirit of the protest music of her youth to inspire that same feeling of hope and outrage in the face of what she views as flagrant injustice.
Ahead of her July 29 concert in Wilmington with Bob Dylan, Williams hopes the record will inspire others to speak up and step out of complacency, to stand up against inequities and iniquities when they see them.
“The inspiration would be the madness and craziness in the White House,” Williams said incredulously during an early-May interview. “The chronic and pervasive thing that was and is still happening. You read about it in the newspaper or hear on the news about another crazy insane idea being put forth. It’s happening every day and it starts eating at you. I felt the need to write about and express some feelings about it.”
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Those struggles are apparent in her current batch of nine original cuts stemmed from a desire to avoid songwriting clichés, a lifelong promise she made to herself from the time she was bowled over by Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” as a folk-music-loving 12-year-old in Baton Rouge.
Tapping into creative influences like protest era-Dylan, The Youngbloods, and Peter, Paul and Mary, Williams is rightfully proud of her recent collection of songs — and even more so when she played them for a supportive crowd in Oregon shortly after federal immigration enforcement operations prompted large protests in the city in June 2025. Williams said she was “thrilled” to see people on the streets and encouraged the audience to make music their weapon during the night of her Portland performance.
“I walked on the stage and told the audience that I came armed and loaded because I had all these songs. I played every single one of them and the audience went wild and loved it. For a few minutes there, I had that feeling of unity between myself, the band and this somewhat younger audience,” she said.
When Williams wrote the tracks for “World Gone Wrong,” she said she was trying to “drum up” similar feelings to songs like “We Shall Overcome,” adapted from a turn-of-the-20th-century old gospel hymn to become an anthem for labor strikes in the Forties, and often sung by Pete Seeger and Joan Baez during the American Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties.
Williams’ song “Something’s Gotta Give” includes growling riffs by guitarists Marc Ford and Doug Pettibone and Brittney Spencer’s plaintive harmonizing. The Louisiana native wearily sings: “There’s a darkness / To these days / Things happen out of sight / As the light fades away.”
A blend of punk-blues emanates from “How Much Did You Get For Your Soul?” whose jangle and upbeat cadence juxtaposes its composer pointing out: “The Devil is a master salesman / You weren’t hard to convince / He closed the deal as only he can / And made you feel like a crown prince.”
“The point I’m trying to get across is that things are as bad as you’re hearing. Just from talking to people, this is the U.S.A. and things like that don’t happen over here. Guess what? Yes, they do,” Williams elaborated. “It was always about this kind of thing happening in other countries and not over here. We’re the land of the red, white and blue, peace and freedom and all of that. That’s how it’s supposed to be and it has been in the past, but it’s being threatened.”
With 16 studio efforts and counting, Williams’ canon — including 1998’s Grammy-winning “Car Wheels On a Gravel Road” (being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame this year) — offers plenty for the 73-year-old singer-songwriter to “kick out the jams” with. Williams said with a laugh anyone who comes to her show can also expect a solid rock n roll show, as she won’t only cover tracks from the new album. Certain songs make it into every setlist, including “Lake Charles” and “Drunken Angel.”
“We always end up with a rousing rendition of ‘Joy’ and [Neil Young’s] ‘Rocking in the Free World,’” Williams said. “I love to walk out toward the edge of the stage, pumping my fist and before you know it, the whole audience is up on their feet. I like to get them kind of riled up like that.”
In the midst of continuing to release powerful and socially relevant material, Williams’ efforts haven’t gone unnoticed as the most recent compositional accolades she’s received include being named to the “New York Times” list of “30 Greatest Living American Songwriters” — shaped by input from hundreds of critics and music industry experts. Ever the modest sort, Williams was both pleased and squirmed a bit when the topic was brought up. She said she learned about the honors while with her husband, Tom Overby.
“I felt like: ‘God, really? I’m on this list, too?’ It really took me a few days to kind of digest that,” she said, sharing the list with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Carole King, Kendrick Lamar, Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton.
Also while juggling recognition and creating a new album, the singer-songwriter oversees Lucinda’s, the East Village bar opened with Overby and some partners.
But Williams is never far from thinking about making good musical trouble during these distressing times. Blame it on the man who once called himself “Blind Boy Grunt.”
“The songs I was inspired by in that milieu of protest, or topical songs as I like to call them, are what continue to influence me,” Williams said. “Stuff Bob Dylan was writing, like ‘Masters of War’ or even ‘Blowin’ In the Wind,’ are unlike anything else anybody else was writing at the time. They are still relevant now and are just great, original and unique. I fell in love with that sound and it’s what I try to do — strike that balance between great music and great lyrics.”
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