And I went backstage afterwards, and he told me how sorry he was. And I performed the song, and it was the first time he'd heard it. I was playing at the Bluebird in Nashville, and my father was in the audience. WILLIAMS: (Singing) Telephone poles, trees and wires fly on by - car wheels on a gravel road. That song is - you have to imagine it's life as seen through a child's eyes, trying to get ready to leave to go somewhere and trying to find, you know, the keys and packing the suitcases and everything, the child in the back seat listening to the voices in the front seat. SUMMERS: Can you just tell us a little bit about that song and what that moment meant for you? WILLIAMS: (Singing) Sitting in the kitchen, a house in Macon. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CAR WHEELS ON A GRAVEL ROAD") There's a moment in the book where you talk about the first time your father heard you play the song "Car Wheels On A Gravel Road." SUMMERS: That experience of moving around so much - it made it into your music. My dad would teach for a year or two at a certain college and then move on to another college. WILLIAMS: Well, my dad was a college professor, so I was an academic brat. And if I'm counting these correctly, that's 15 places by the time you were 20 years old. Lucinda, I want to start by asking you about something that comes up in one of the first pages of your book, and it's a list of the places that you lived. Lucinda Williams has also written a memoir, and she's with me now to talk about it. And now at 70 years old, Williams is still writing songs and performing despite suffering a stroke in 2020. There was critical acclaim and three Grammys. Rough Trade Records signed the artist, and "Changed The Locks" was part of Williams' first big commercial record. In the end, what kind of music Williams created didn't matter. SUMMERS: The back-and-forth shows the challenge Williams faced early in her career. LUCINDA WILLIAMS: (Singing) I changed the lock on my front door so you can't see me anymore. SUMMERS: Then executives in Nashville passed on the song and Williams because, as they said, it was too rock for country. (SOUNDBITE OF LUCINDA WILLIAMS SONG, "CHANGED THE LOCKS") To continue reading, please click Download PDF, above.When singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams was trying to get signed by a major record label, her iconic breakup song "Changed The Locks" was rejected by Los Angeles record executives as too country for rock. A pitched battle between ways of seeing and representing the world-what might be called a struggle over the soul of the sentence-has been fought for at least a half-century now, and skirmishes during the past two decades have brought a victory for complexity that few would have predicted. This shocking reverse of expectation marks a major shift in the how and what of literary fiction in America. Life as presented in fiction has never seemed more ramified, more mined with implication, more multiplex in possibility. Instead, almost to a writer, a new generation of novelists and short-story writers are forging styles of notable complexity and of cultural, if not always psychological, nuance. One might naturally expect American fiction of the last quarter-century to reflect that contraction, and gifted young writers, the products of an accelerated culture of distraction, to map in their prose the rhythms and diction patterns of our times. The sound byte, the instant message-with every year, increments of meaning and expression seem to shrink. The communications revolution-everything from e-mail to the ubiquitous cell phone-has spawned what seems to many an impoverished, phrase-based paradigm. Ours is the great era of infotainment, of the much lamented migration away from serious reading.
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