Amos Lee Celebrates Songs and ‘Singular’ Talent of Lucinda Williams

Amos Lee’s relationship with Lucinda Williams was personal even before he got to meet her.

He first heard her songs, mostly from her then-new Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, on radio station WXPN in Philadelphia, just as he was starting to write songs himself. But he hesitates to call her an influence.

“My feeling about Lucinda is that she’s really singular as a writer,” Lee says. It’s in the way her songs so truthfully describe her most personal feelings and experiences, he explains, but also in the way they paint the listener right into the scene. And it’s in the way her melodies and rhythms reinforce the mood of the song, often taking almost a meditative feel.

“I think it’s hard to go, ‘Yeah, I’m kind of trying to write like Lucinda,’ he says. “You can’t.”

Her songs have, however, provided a steady source of inspiration for Lee’s own songwriting, and that’s what he wanted to honor with Honeysuckle Switches, his new album of Williams covers out Nov. 24 on Hoagiemouth Records.

“These songs that she wrote over the span of her career inspire me to keep trying to dig,” Lee says, “because she’s constantly digging.”

A Guide Through Grief

In the mid-2000s, as Williams was enjoying midcareer acclaim and becoming known far beyond her blues and country roots, Lee’s music was starting to make its own splash. After working for a few years as an elementary school teacher, he decided to turn his attention fully to music. His debut album was signed to jazz label Blue Note Records, which had recently scored a hit with Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me, and he was tapped to open shows for Jones, B.B. King, and Bob Dylan on his 2005 tour with Merle Haggard. Several of his songs found their way to popular TV shows, weaving him firmly into the cultural conversation.

Lee’s genre-spanning sound was shaped first by his parents’ record collection, which leaned toward ’70s acoustic soul like Bill Withers and Donny Hathaway. Then, in his college years, his palate expanded during shifts working at the Columbia, South Carolina, record store Papa Jazz, where gospel, hip-hop, pop, and R&B all found their way into his mix. He’s also cited a compilation of John Prine songs as formative.

Amos Lee at FreshGrass | Bentonville 2022 (Photo by Hilary Saunders)

By 2011, Lee was hitting his own midcareer stride and was in a position to invite some of his musical heroes to contribute to his fourth album, Mission Bell. Among them was Williams, who duetted with Lee on “Clear Blue Eyes,” a song that exudes empathy for someone else’s suffering.

That ability to use personal experience to say something that can resonate deeply with a stranger takes a page from the Williams playbook, a quality in her songwriting that Lee came to admire as a listener, as a partner on a co-headlining tour in 2011, and as a beneficiary of a song that moved him profoundly just when he needed it most.

“‘Little Angel, Little Brother’ [from Williams’ 1992 album Sweet Old World] has been a defining song in my life for a long time,” Lee says. “It helped me frame a family tragedy in a way that felt more personal to me. And I’ve told her before, when my uncle died, it sounds similarly to how her brother died. It was a huge family tragedy. And these tragedies kind of define our families in some ways. I just love the ability to go into the room with her, admiring him and seeing the curve of his back and listening to him play songs and remembering him in this beautiful way.

“When you lose people you love, there’s this struggle about how to define your grief and how to define your relationship with them,” he adds. “Sometimes you get angry at them, sometimes you are just overwhelmed with sadness. Sometimes it’s both. And I just appreciated, and I do appreciate, the ability for her to guide us through that grief in these songs.”

Honeysuckle Switches features 12 of Lee’s interpretations of Williams’ songs, including “Little Angel, Little Brother,” selected for how they made him feel, and because they made him feel.

“For this process, it was really just about the songs that I felt most connected to while playing them, through the whole song,” Lee says. “Because you can start covering a tune and you get to the bridge and you’re like, ‘Eh, I don’t know.’ These tunes kept me really captivated the whole time. And there was a spirit in the lyric and the phrasing and the melody that always just fed me. To a point where I was like, ‘Yeah, I want to record this. I feel great singing this song.’”

Honeysuckle Switches: The Songs of Lucinda Williams stops in at various points in her career, with songs that sample both her tender side and more edgy territory. “Are You Alright” keeps the arrangement simple, as on Williams’ original, just Lee’s picked guitar and emotion-filled voice to open the album with a song as direct as it is devastating. “I Envy the Wind” adds piano chords to give one of Williams’ best-loved songs a dash of Sunday-morning soul.

Lee takes his own path for “Get Right With God,” giving it a laidback vibe, backing moans, and just the right amount of spooky organ and fuzzed-out guitar. “Compassion” is quiet and haunting, a touch of ’70s warmth helping to make the case that compassion is the right move in any situation, even when it’s hard.

In a way, it’s like hearing these well-loved Williams songs for the first time again. Lee’s performances are beautiful, but their real power is in letting Williams’ lyrics and melodies work their magic, even in a different context. That’s always been Lee’s approach to covers, whether in concert set lists or recordings, including a previous tribute album, last year’s My Ideal: A Tribute to Chet Baker Sings.

“I keep it simple, but I always want to keep it simple in a way that feels genuine to me, and also feels, more importantly, genuine to the song,” Lee says. “Because ultimately the whole point is to serve the song of all times.”

A personal connection, he says, is key. Just as that connection, that moment of emotional recognition, provides the spark between musician and audience, it’s a conduit between one artist and another as well.

“There’s no way that I would cover a tune that I felt like I was just not connecting with or not serving,” he explains. “I just don’t want to do that. So every time I cover something, I just want to find a way to personally connect to it.”

Just don’t ask him to make others’ songs his own, a phrasing he says feels “possessive and a little gross to me.”
“To interpret them with a genuine voice is what I’m after,” he says. “Just to be like, ‘Hey, here’s how I interpret your song. This is how your song flows through me.’”

Showing Love

Lee would have loved to make a tribute album of Lucinda Williams songs earlier, but it took a combination of time, technology, and inspiration to get it over the finish line. Twenty years ago, he points out, it was a lot harder to make home recordings that sounded good.

“Nowadays, honestly, you really can just make a record at home and it sounds fine. Case in point, this record,” he says. “I was sitting around earlier this year and I was playing some of her songs and there was just something about her tunes that was really calling me. I knew that she’d had a stroke and I knew that she was fighting through that and still performing. And that was really inspiring to me.”

Amos Lee (photo by Blake Sourisseau)

As he strummed and sang through her songs in his house, he didn’t know if the outcome would be something just for him, or maybe a few friends, but he walked across the room and hit record. And eventually he knew that he wanted as many people as possible to hear it.

“It was important for me to be like, ‘Hey, while we have these great songwriters, while we’re still here, we want to appreciate them and show our love,’” Lee says. “I just want to show my love to her.”

Honeysuckle Switches gets its title from a pairing of two key words from “Bus to Baton Rouge,” the pensive parting song on Lee’s album, and something of a deep cut on Williams’ 2001 album Essence. The song is about visiting a previous house, a scene in which memories unfold and the narrator recognizes that leaving doesn’t mean you’re free of that history. And in true Williams fashion, the details are both tender and traumatic, embracing both the beauty and the cruelty that houses — and humans — can harbor: “The sweet honeysuckle that grew all around / Were switches when we were bad.”

Such scenes, and such sensitivity, are what draws Lee to the songs he included on Honeysuckle Switches.

“Every single one of these songs, when I played them, they made me cry,” he confesses. “And not just like sad tears or lonely tears or painful. It was just, like, they’re so beautiful that they bring me to tears. And that was a starting place for me, because if I’m going to make anybody else feel something, I better feel it myself.”

Amos Lee’s Honeysuckle Switches: The Songs of Lucinda Williams will be released by Hoagiemouth Records on Nov. 24 — available first at independent record stores for Record Store Day Black Friday.