Singer, songwriter and musician Lucinda Williams has written a memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, which releases Tuesday, April 25. In the book, Williams is candid about her life growing up in the South, including her relationship with her parents and their struggles with mental health.

Williams also looks back on her music career — both the music-making itself, and the friendships she’s made along the way. Williams has released 14 albums — and her 15th, Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart, is set for release on June 30, 2023. Over the course of her career so far, Williams has been nominated for 17 Grammy Awards and has taken home three of them.

And although Williams is definitively a Southern woman, she has significant ties to Minnesota: It’s where she recorded her album, Essence, and it’s where she married her husband, Tom Overby, onstage at First Avenue in Minneapolis in 2009.

Through a special arrangement with publisher Penguin Random House, The Current has been given permission to publish this excerpt from Lucinda Williams’ Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You. This passage comes from the chapter where she describes the recording of her album, Essence.

Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You is also available as an audiobook read by Lucinda Williams herself. You can use the audio player above to listen to an audio excerpt of Williams reading this passage.

Excerpt from Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You by Lucinda Williams, pages 198 – 200

The recording of Essence happened relatively fast. I made a demo of the songs with the guitarist Bo Ramsey, just the two of us. It was a thrill in more ways than musically because I’d always sort of had a crush on him, so it was fun for me to be around him. I sent the demo to Lost Highway and Luke Lewis flipped out. He said, “This is so good we could release the record just like this.” So we agreed that Bo would produce the album with me. I was elated.

I didn’t want to record with my touring band at that time. We had just spent two years on the road and those guys were incredible, but I felt like we’d perfected the sound that I was now trying to move on from.

Bo and my manager, Frank Callari, suggested a bunch of different musicians and we ended up with a remarkable band for the sessions. We got Dylan’s bassist, Tony Garnier, and his guitarist, Charlie Sexton, and we got the legendary drummer Jim Keltner, and Bo and Ryan Adams played guitar, too. Jim Lauderdale sang harmony vocals on the record, as he had done on Car Wheels.

Before we started recording, Bo and Frank and I went to visit the engineer Jim Dickinson, who had produced the Replacements’ breakthrough record, Pleased to Meet Me. He was living with his wife in a trailer in Coldwater, Mississippi, which is near Memphis. They had bought a bunch of property and put a trailer on it with the intention of building a nice house. But it had been a few years and they hadn’t broken ground yet. There was also a recording studio on the property. We thought we might want to record there, but Jim hadn’t gotten it in working order. I’ve never had a baby, so I can’t really speak to that experience, but I imagine that when a woman has a baby, she has in mind a perfect location for the birthing. That’s sort of like how I feel about making records in certain places, always thinking about the perfect place to make a record. Jim’s place wasn’t it. He also wasn’t prepared for our meeting. He hadn’t listened to my records and didn’t seem to really know who I was. So we thanked him for his time and left.

Bo mentioned a man named Tom Tucker who had a studio called Master Mix in Minneapolis. Bo had worked on a lot of records with Greg Brown in that studio. Tom had also done significant engineering for Prince in Prince’s studio. I loved and respected Bo and I immediately agreed. So we found some time when the whole band could meet there and I sent the duo demo that Bo and I had made in Nashville to all the musicians so they could learn the songs.

Everything seemed easier and better than ever. I drove my Chevy Silverado pickup truck all the way to Minneapolis. I’ve always loved driving across the country by myself. It was October, a beautiful time of year, and I watched the leaves gradually change colors as I made it farther north. I stayed in a motel off the highway about halfway there and made the drive in two days.

We cut the basic tracks of Essence in about ten days. Once we were all in Minneapolis, we were on a tight deadline because Jim Keltner had to go back out on the road with Neil Young and Charlie Sexton and Tony Garnier had to go back out with Dylan. As a result there was some tinkering left to be done after those guys left, a few mistakes that needed to be fixed without the musicians still with us.

Bo and I weren’t sure what to do. Bo suggested that we bring some local Minneapolis musicians he knew into the studio to do some overdubs, but I didn’t want to do that. So we had a little bit of a problem about how to move forward.

Tom Tucker had found a young guy who was a whiz kid at Pro Tools, which was early computer software used by many audio and video editors. This was my first experience with Pro Tools and this kid was brilliant at it. Also, I was able to get Charlie Sexton on the phone and he had a couple of days off from Dylan’s tour, so he flew back to Minneapolis. The combination of those three guys saved the day. It was basically like surgery with Charlie, Tom, and the whiz kid taking different pieces from different takes and putting the puzzle together. It was astounding what they did. I’d never seen anything like it. The resulting sound on the record was exactly what I had envisioned.

I love that album. Today, a lot of people come up to me and tell me that Essence is their favorite one of my records. I try not to pick favorites, but I understand when someone says that.

From the book DON'T TELL ANYBODY THE SECRETS I TOLD YOU by Lucinda Williams. Copyright © 2023 by Lucinda Williams. Published by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.