‘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.
