Seeking a Dylan for the Trump era, Lucinda Williams decided to give it a shot herself: 'Somebody had to do it'

Lucinda Williams — courtesy of the artist

When the current chapter of political chaos began swirling around us two years ago, famed singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams knew something important was missing. The kind of music that had marked the political activism of her youth was not there. She decided that, as a songwriter, that was a thing she could do something about.

Williams told Little Village about this feeling of responsibility in a phone interview between stops on her current “World’s Gone Wrong” tour, which sees her in Iowa City this week for the Iowa City Songwriters Festival. “It was when Trump was first in office, it was just, you know, chaos. [He’d have] everybody kind of standing back in awe and disbelief, because he would either say something crazy, or do something crazy, almost on a daily basis.”

Williams wanted to address what was going on politically, but was also reluctant to write songs that were unrealistically optimistic. “It’s easy actually to start to slip into a kind of overly romantic kind of romanticized. Like, everybody hold hands and join in a circle.”

“So it was just pervasive, you couldn’t get away from it. I was surrounded by that kind of environment, that atmosphere. But then also I had been wanting for a long time to write songs like the way Bob Dylan did, and some of the other greats. You know, folk singers back in the day would write about what was going on. And Bob Dylan — to me, he was the best at that. But they’re not easy subjects to tackle when you’re writing songs.”

Williams wanted her songs to be tough and make a point without falling prey to cliches, quoting Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” as a brilliant example of of that kind of writing: “‘You hide in your mansions, while young people’s blood flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud.’ I mean, that’s great songwriting.”

“I felt like when I was trying to write those songs, that they weren’t being written anymore and somebody had to do it. Somebody had to step up and take over almost. And I was also just wondering where everybody was. Before, when we would have these problems going on, people seemed to be more active, you know, as far as freaking out and marching and demonstrating and all that, and the music went right along with all that.”

“All of a sudden, there just seemed to be this big gap. Like nothing was happening. You didn’t see marches or demonstrations, you didn’t hear artists speaking out. And the music was not responding, or the musicians weren’t responding.”

Stepping up to provide that response is a role that Williams embraced; she wanted to recreate “that feeling that I remembered… because there were songs then that everybody knew, everybody knew the words and the melody and we’d all stand, at the risk of sounding kumbaya, but we would do that. We would kumbaya, but it would be songs like ‘We Shall Overcome’ … That’s part of what I try to do when I write a song, especially like these kinds of songs, is have some kind of positive light at the end of the tunnel.”

The songs Williams offers on her 2026 album The World’s Gone Wrong are far from optimistic. With her usual economy of words, Williams said she put herself in the role of the listener, which is a skill she says she learned from her father, poet Miller Williams, who also gave her the advice to never censor herself.

“I try to imagine what it’s like for the listener, and my dad was always talking about that, too, because I feel like some songwriters don’t do that enough. Sometimes it’s so personal you know that nobody else can relate to it.”

The album’s opener and title track features a hardworking couple who could easily be the younger version of the protagonists in John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery.” Beaten down by the chaos and decay of the world around them, they go searching for “comfort in a song” and end up dancing to Miles Davis in their kitchen. These songs depict a world where the political landscape has made lives bleaker and harder, a pragmatic realism that doesn’t quite make for an inspiring fight song for the current age, but does promise that soon “something’s got to give.”

But, as Williams points out on the final track, “for over 400 years, we’ve been on this trail of tears… We will lay down the burden of hate and separation. We have come too far to turn around.”

“We are tired,” she notes, “but we have come too far to turn around.” And sometimes we all just need to be reminded of that.