‘Thanks for being receptive to my complaining,” Lucinda Williams says late on, deadpan, after a run of songs circling power and consequence. Outside, Storm Chandra keeps the streets jumpy. Inside Belfast’s Limelight, a sold-out crowd sits on fold-up seats for a show shifted from Mandela Hall at short notice, the room oddly calm for a venue known for sweat and shoving.
Williams is a lodestar in the broad galaxy of music still called Americana, and two days after turning 73, she has the authority of a multiple Grammy winner who writes with urgency. She is living with the after-effects of a stroke, stepping on and off stage with care, yet once she’s behind the mic she radiates resolve. If anything, the voice sounds newly burnished; the phrasing more deliberate, the vibrato catching the light.
She opens with the title track from her just-released 16th album, World’s Gone Wrong, and it lands as protest carried on groove: harmonies locked, slide guitar set like a slow warning. “We the people … people have the power,” she adds, nodding to Patti Smith, and the band answers with patient force. Ex-Black Crowes guitarist Marc Ford plays blues lines with slow-bend eloquence that never crowds her phrasing. Brady Blade steers the set, his cymbals creating a washed, phased shimmer as the music tilts skyward.
The best moments come when the writing trusts small detail. Right in Time turns the everyday into charged intimacy – kettle boiling, jewellery coming off – before she smiles: “I guess some of my songs are a little suggestive.” Car Wheels on a Gravel Road burrows into memory via smell and radio, its simplicity doing the damage. Later, You Can’t Rule Me is a peak, delta boogie pushed into double-time. There is a slight sameiness in the run of new protest songs about economic strain, racial injustice, and who gets to wield power, granted, but Williams persuasively argues these issues are “at the forefront,” and everyone needs relief.
A cover of Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World turns the room into a bellowed closing singalong. Williams, delighted, catches herself: “It’s great to be in Dublin … oh wait – Belfast. Will you forgive me?” The roar says yes.
• Lucinda Williams plays Town Hall, Birmingham, 29 January; then touring UK until 7 February
