When Lucinda Williams was growing up, the family moved a dozen times as her father, the Arkansas-born poet and professor Miller Williams, followed work, sometimes to far-flung locales. That transient upbringing foreshadowed her career as a touring musician—but it also gave her a unique perspective on defining cultural events of the time, like Beatlemania.
“It’s interesting how the Beatles craze was reaching homes all over the world,” says Williams, who was ten years old and living in Santiago, Chile, when she first heard the Fab Four. “I was one of those kids who was crazy about the Beatles, so I carried it with me after we left, and when I got back to the States, it was just more Beatlemania.” But as her own music career took off in the eighties and nineties, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter avoided playing Beatles songs at all costs. “I just kinda let them be,” she quips, “because so many people were covering their songs, and that never really stopped.”
It wasn’t until her Covid-era covers series, dubbed Lu’s Jukebox, that she began to entertain the idea of revisiting her idols’ songs. After recording full albums of her interpretations of songs by Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, as well as collections of Southern soul and sixties country hits, she started to consider what it might look like.
Out today, Lucinda Williams Sings the Beatles from Abbey Road—recorded at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in London, where the Beatles recorded most of their entire output—includes Williams’s takes on a dozen tunes from across the band’s oeuvre. She hits classics like “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “Let It Be” alongside lesser-known songs like “Rain,” a B-side to the “Paperback Writer” single. She also delivers a stunning version of “Something,” from the Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road, the last music the band recorded together.
Although the former Telecaster-wielding Williams has opted not to play guitar since her stroke in 2020, journeymen guitarists Doug Pettibone and Marc Ford have filled the role amply in her live shows and throughout the album. On “The Long and Winding Road,” for example, Pettibone’s pedal steel stands in for Phil Spector’s orchestral wall of sound, as Williams’s aching, languid vibrato and trademark vocal phrasing unfold. “I think it’s been a positive thing, because I can just focus on my singing and I don’t have to worry about anything else,” she says. “It’s been kind of liberating.”
Below, watch the video for “I’ve Got a Feeling,” filmed at Abbey Road, and read on to hear more from Williams about how the album came together.
Lucinda Williams Sings the Beatles from Abbey Road is available to order here.
When artists cover Beatles songs, they’re going to be scrutinized. How did you make sure your interpretations brought something original?
We try to put as much of ourselves into the music, so it sounds original. My biggest fear before we went in to record those songs was sounding like a cover band doing Beatles songs. I think it just happened organically as we played through them and as I sang them. If I’m doing somebody else’s song, I can’t do it without it sounding like me.
Your collection is heavy on late-period Beatles and deep cuts. It must have been hard to decide what songs to include.
That was challenging. The first list was just off my head, the ones I remembered, but I didn’t want to miss anything really good, [so] I went through some albums and rediscovered some that I forgot. “Yer Blues,” that one really grabbed me as soon as I heard it. I sang along with it and said, “Yeah, this is one I can do.” It was so bluesy and groovy. But it took a while to narrow it all down, and then I had to figure out what key they needed to be in for my voice, and then actually sit with them and see how I felt singing them.
Abbey Road Studios might be the most famous recording studio in the world. How did you manage to record there?
There are certain rules involved, like you can’t just walk in there, you have to have permission to go. There was a little bit of a challenge just getting the studio booked, because the initial person we talked to didn’t know who I was, had never heard of me. But we had [coproducer and engineer] Ray Kennedy—it turns out he’s a complete Beatles fanatic, almost a Beatles historian—and I think he had a connection with somebody there, and we finally got some studio time.
Were you nervous recording Beatles tunes where they were actually created?
Yes [laughs]. I was somewhat terrified at the beginning when we even discussed the concept of it, but I just decided to open myself up to it. And I’m glad I did now—I was just worried about doing the songs justice. The idea of recording at Abbey Road was scary, because it felt like the holy grail or something, this special kind of magical place, but it felt pretty natural once we got in there.
