Even as the Grammy nominations pile up and the Americana sound she helped pioneer becomes increasingly mainstream, Williams has lost none of her underdog cool.
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Lucinda Williams is that rarest of music-industry stories: the ferociously talented cult figure who, eventually, gets to enjoy real-deal success in her own lifetime.
Decades spent tirelessly honing her craft in semi-obscurity finally bore fruit on Williams’ 1998 masterpiece “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” a plainspoken yet poetic weaving of country and heartland rock which cemented her status as one of the great singer-songwriters.
Even as the Grammy nominations pile up and the Americana sound she helped pioneer becomes increasingly mainstream, Williams has lost none of her underdog cool.
Just ask the new generation of indie rockers, like Waxahatchee, Big Thief, and Wednesday, who cite her as an inspiration.
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Friday night at the Chevalier Theatre in Medford, Williams showed little interest in reliving her storied past. Sure, she opened with a pair of “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” cuts, both of which her four-piece band nailed with relaxed precision.
But two songs later, she introduced the title track to her new album “World’s Gone Wrong” with a speech which echoed many of the same points she made in her recent Boston.com interview: explicitly labelling her new material as topical protest songs, expressing surprise that anyone had to ask her what the lyrics were about, wondering why people weren’t marching in the streets (her No Kings invites must have gotten lost in the mail).
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“Someone said, ‘you’re going to love playing in Medford, they’re going to love these songs’”— and right on cue, the crowd cheered its approval.
Perhaps emboldened by an audience as eager to hear anti-Trump polemics as she was to sing them, eight of the next nine songs came from either “World’s Gone Wrong” or her similarly motivated 2020 record “Good Souls Better Angels.”
Unable to play guitar live after a 2020 stroke, Williams stood holding the mic stand with her trademark stoicism, peppering in the occasional between-song dig at the “president who wants to be king.”
The audible wear and tear on her voice, which could come off shaky at times on the older songs, effectively complemented the downcast wisdom of “When the Way Gets Dark” and the righteously fed-up “How Much Did You Get for Your Soul.”
That last one prompted an anecdote about a reporter who sounded “intimidated” when asking if it was about Trump; Williams then half-jokingly wondered if she would end up like Stephen Colbert.
This administration’s heavy-handed suppression of dissent might be weighing on Williams’ mind, but it certainly isn’t stopping her from speaking out.
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Musically, the evening started slow, as Williams front-loaded the setlist with melancholy ballads like “Drunken Angel” and “Fruits of My Labor.”
An abrupt sonic shift came with a cover of Bob Marley’s “So Much Trouble in the World,” on which the band proved its worth by laying down a tasteful, reverb-drenched groove which elicited none of the second-hand embarrassment that so often accompanies white people trying to play reggae.
The chunky blues-rock of the next song, Memphis Minnie’s “You Can’t Rule Me,” put Williams and her group back into their comfort zone, where they would mostly stay for the rest of the night.
While the cranked-up guitars sometimes overpowered the vocals and skirted the edges of bar-band cliché, their steady vamping heightened the seething, almost mantra-like quality of “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” and “Foolishness.”
By the end of the set, Williams and her band seemed to have loosened up a bit, jamming on a faithful version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and closing with a take on “Car Wheels” classic “Joy.”
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Live, “Joy” used to transform into an eight-minute whirlwind of harsh screams and stinging guitar solos, but now that that anger has been redirected from disappointing exes to bigger targets, it’s just another crowd-pleasing rocker.
Williams still had some fight left in her, though, returning for the encore with what might be her best protest song, “We’ve Come Too Far to Turn Around.”
With its gospel-like melody and lyrics that stare down the atrocities in our nation’s past and present while still resolving to rise above, it felt like a standard Williams could have learned at a civil rights action in the 1960s.
Most singers would have finished things out with a surefire hit or two from their back catalog, but Lucinda Williams had other plans.
After digging deeper into her love of American roots music with an acoustic, pedal steel-accented cover of Skip James’ “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues,” she led her band on a rousing run through Neil Young’s eternal anthem “Rockin’ in the Free World,” which brought the crowd to its feet.
Her final message before leaving the stage: “Music is a good weapon.”
Setlist for Lucinda Williams at Chevalier Theatre, Medford, Friday, May 22, 2026
- Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
- Drunken Angel
- People Talkin’
- The World’s Gone Wrong
- Low Life
- Fruits of My Labor
- When the Way Gets Dark
- So Much Trouble in the World (Bob Marley & The Wailers cover)
- You Can’t Rule Me (Memphis Minnie cover)
- Freedom Speaks
- Pray the Devil Back to Hell
- How Much Did You Get for Your Soul
- Out of Touch
- While My Guitar Gently Weeps (The Beatles cover)
- Foolishness
- Joy
Encore
- We’ve Come Too Far to Turn Around
- Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues (Skip James cover)
- Rockin’ in the Free World (Neil Young cover)
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