Runnin' Down a Dream: A Tribute to Tom Petty Lucinda Williams

• 1 Rebels 04:57
• 2 Runnin' Down a Dream 04:40
• 3 Gainesville 04:12
• 4 Louisiana Rain 04:49
• 5 I Won't Back Down 03:12
• 6 A Face in the Crowd 04:08
• 7 Wildflowers 03:27
• 8 You Wreck Me 03:25
• 9 Room at the Top 05:53
• 10 You Don't Know How It Feels 03:56
• 11 Down South 03:30
• 12 Southern Accents 04:21
• 13 Stolen Moments 04:53
• Total Runtime 55:23

Info for Runnin' Down a Dream: A Tribute to Tom Petty

Runnin' Down a Dream opened Lu's Jukebox in 2021, the series in which Lucinda Williams and her band played themed sets of other artists' songs. The recordings grew out of ticketed livestream shows in late 2020, with part of the ticket money going to independent music venues shut down by the pandemic. For this first instalment Williams drew on the whole of Tom Petty's career: alongside well-known titles such as I Won't Back Down, Runnin' Down a Dream and You Don't Know How It Feels there are less frequently covered songs like Gainesville, Louisiana Rain and Southern Accents. The band recorded largely live at Ray Kennedy's Room & Board Studio in Nashville, which keeps the versions close to a club show.

"Lucinda Williams is a daughter of the American South, born in Louisiana, who is proud of her heritage while also understanding the contradictions and the baggage that come with that. Tom Petty was a native Floridian who also loved the South without harboring illusions about it, and so it makes sense that Williams would be a Petty fan, and not simply as one gifted songwriter respecting another. As part of her Lu's Jukebox series, designed to help independent music venues shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, Williams has cut a set of her favorite Tom Petty tunes, and Runnin' Down a Dream: A Tribute to Tom Petty is long on songs about Southern life, including "Gainesville," "Down South," "Rebels," "Southern Accents," and "Louisiana Rain." It's on these songs that she seems most committed, with a sense of shared experience informing her vocals and adding depth to her delivery. That said, Williams sounds very much at home on all of the 13 songs she covers; "You Wreck Me" feels like it was written with her defiant vulnerability in mind; she brings a sweet and subtle funk to "Wildflowers," and she and her band make the most of the killer groove at the heart of "You Don't Know How It Feels." Williams recorded this material live in the studio with her road band backing her up, and that was the right approach for this music -- if the wobble in her voice is more pronounced than it once was, it works like a charm in this context, and the players find their way through the melodies with assurance, control, and joyous force. The simplicity of Runnin' Down a Dream is one of its virtues; these covers were documented with love and without overthinking the process, and hearing Williams explore the world inside Petty's songs will engage fans of either artist." (Mark Deming, AMG)

Lucinda Williams, vocals
Stuart Mathis, guitar
Joshua Grange, guitar, keyboards
Steve Mackey, bass guitar
Fred Eltringham, drums
Lauren Farrah, backing vocals

Lucinda Williams
was born in 1953 in Lake Charles, Louisiana, to a professor of literature and a pianist. Lucinda’s earliest influences in music encouraged her to learn to play the guitar and sing, and by the time she was in her early twenties, she was performing in bars and clubs in the Houston area. Williams’s debut album, Ramblin’, was recorded and released in the late 1970’s, but it did not garner much attention. Neither did the follow-up, Happy Woman Blues, but Lucinda Williams was not discouraged.

Lucinda moved to California in the early 1980’s and began performing around the Los Angeles area. By the latter part of the decade, she’d signed with a record label and released Lucinda Williams, which spawned the single “Changed the Locks,” the song for Lucinda to earn some major radio play. On the strength of this single, Williams began to build a fan base and by the time she released Sweet Old World in 1992, she’d become far more established. Another single from her record label debut, “Passionate Kisses,” actually became one of her biggest achievements, not for Lucinda’s recording of it herself, but after Mary Chapin Carpenter covered it, the song earned Lucinda Williams a Grammy for Best Country Song in 1994.

Since then, Lucinda Williams has continued to release a number of successful albums, including: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (1998), Essence (2001), World Without Tears (2003), West (2007), and Little Honey (2008.) In addition to her Grammy for “Passionate Kisses,” she has also earned Grammys for the albums Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Essence, World Without Tears, and Little Honey, and for the singles “Can’t Let Go,” “Essence,” “Get Right with God,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Lately,” and “Come On.” Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is considered to be Lucinda Williams’s mainstream breakthrough, in part due to the song “Still I Long for Your Kiss,” which was featured in the blockbuster hit The Horse Whisperer.

Most recently, Lucinda Williams released the album Blessed in 2011. She continues to record and perform.

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