I love it. I felt like actually shouting it to the world, “I’m 70!” Just because I felt so excited about it. I still felt really good, and it felt like a positive thing to me. I love saying that I’m 70 to people. They usually looked shocked. “Oh, you don’t look it at all!” So I end up getting a compliment out of it.

It’s going well. It takes a hell of a long time, but I’m pretty resilient. The main thing is that I have stiffness and pain in my hand, so I haven’t been able to play the guitar like I did before. When I perform, I usually tell the audience why I’m not playing guitar, and they all applaud. My fans are just the best. They’ve always been very supportive and understanding and patient.

Your mental outlook is so important with this kind of thing. Music helps tremendously. It’s very healing. It helps psychologically, which helps physically. It’s all connected.

Normally I sing and play the guitar; I set the pace, and the band follows me. Now I have to just show them, and it just doesn’t go as smoothly as it would if I was able to play. But I’ve been collaborating with my husband, Tom [Overby], and a friend of ours, Travis Stephens, who plays the guitar. We came up with some good songs.

No, because that’s how I am. When you listen to my songs—some of them are kind of gritty and they’re honest. So I’m used to that part. But writing it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my entire life. I’ve never written a book before. Initially it was my husband just asking me questions and I started talking. Once you do that, it’s kind of like lifting the lid off.

That everything’s not dark all the time. A lot of my songs are dark and sad. I have songs about suicide and people dying and a lot of songs about loss, but I feel like there’s some kind of redemption at the end. And even though I was writing about some difficult things, and you could say my family was dysfunctional and screwed up, at the end of the day, you could still tell that there was love there.

I always wanted to have a hometown like most people do, but I feel like I have two or three of them. One would be Fayetteville, Arkansas. That’s where I went to college and where I spent the majority of time. There’s also New Orleans, where I went to high school and met some of my close friends. It’s like that line in a Neil Young song, when he talks about Ontario, Canada, and he says, “All my changes were there.” That’s how I feel about New Orleans.

Sharon Van Etten is just wonderful. I think she’s a brilliant writer. There’s Nick Drake and Steve Earle—I love his songwriting. And Bob Dylan, of course. I still love him.

I like “Essence” a lot. I get such a rise from the audience when I do that song. And I really like a song called “Overtime.” Willie Nelson recorded it [in a duet with me]. The music and arrangement have sort of a classic style.

Starting out, a song may be about a particular thing or person. You have to be inspired by something. It’s like a seed. Then it grows and blossoms and becomes bigger than the initial thing or person you started writing about.

Lucinda Williams has won three Grammy awards and released 15 albums since her debut in 1979. Time magazine called her America’s best songwriter, and she was listed as one of the “100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time” by Rolling Stone.