There are days when the thought of slowing down takes root in Lucinda Williams' psyche, and the word "retirement" holds more comfort than curse.
"Yeah, I am there," the 56-year-old raspy-voiced singer-songwriter says, then quickly demurs. "But I can't yet. I could still go for a while; Bob Dylan is still out there doing it."
Williams has been out there doing it for more than three decades, and some might argue she can't quit just yet. She is in an enviable place of musical rebirth with her latest album, the seven-month-old "A Little Honey," which has critics going ga-ga.
" 'Little Honey' proves she's still crushed out on the music," waxed Rolling Stone. Hot Press said the album "provides instruction for those who feel f----- around and fobbed off at 40-something." Spin added the ultimate compliment: "The result is her finest record since 'Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,' the decade-old masterpiece by which her career will always be judged."
"We wanted it to rock out a little more," Williams says in a phone call from her Los Angeles home, where she was enjoying the final days of a five-week spring hiatus. She heads back out this week for a three-week U.S. spin that brings her to Tucson's Rialto Theatre Friday and the Mesa Arts Center Saturday. She heads to Europe for a month of dates later this summer.
"A Little Honey," released in October, is Williams' 10th album, and it comes just a year after 2007's "West" — a record for the alt-country rocker who is notoriously slow when it comes to recording. She has gone years between projects — her breakthrough album "Lucinda Williams" came eight years after 1980's "Happy Woman Blues"; six years separate her seminal 1998 disc "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" from its 1992 predecessor "Sweet Old World."
Her passion is the live show, she explains. She has always been driven by the rush of the crowd, whether it's in a small club or cavernous theater. That is perhaps what drives her to push away thoughts of retirement.
She also is content, she says, perhaps happier than she's been in a long while. She is setting up house in Los Angeles with her fiance, Tom Overby, who once worked at a record label and was an executive at Best Buy; he's now her manager.
Some critics have credited Overby with the uplifting spirit of "A Little Honey," which Williams quickly dispels. With a few exceptions, the record was written during the "West" period that mostly predated Overby.
"When 'A Little Honey' first came out, everybody said 'Oh, it's your happy album. You're all happy now. You're with Tom and you're happy,' " says Williams, who has three Grammys to her credit.
"I had a lot of these songs, like 'Honey Bee' and 'Jailhouse Tears' and 'Rarity' and 'Knowing.' We had enough songs for a two-CD set when we did 'West.' The record label didn't want to do a two-CD package.
"We took those songs and recorded new versions of them with the new band. So it has a whole new sound. A lot of people think that 'Real Love' was written about Tom, but it was written before I met Tom."
Williams and Overby have yet to set a wedding date; their lives are a series of tours and recording sessions that leave little time to plan, she says. When they come off the road, as they did this spring, they spend their time setting up the home they bought a year ago in the hilly Studio City section of Los Angeles.
"We're still getting organized, shopping for furniture and stuff like that," she says. "That's our big project right now. We're just basically getting caught up."
In the fall, Williams wants to mark the 30th anniversary of her recording career with a pair of concert series — one in Los Angeles, the other in New York — that will survey much of her catalogue.
As she chats about those concerts, it dawns on Williams that she is compacting 30 years of her life into a few nights.
"It's hard to believe," she muses. "It's been a great ride all along. The key and the secret, of course, is to enjoy the ride, enjoy the process. . . . But yeah, I like where I am right now. I'm comfortable on a lot of different levels, creatively and in my day-to-day life.
"You know I never really wanted to be a huge star or anything. I think this is a good place to be. Like where John Prine is right now. He's in a kind of cool place, you know. He's working, he does his thing. Emmylou Harris would tell you the same thing. A lot of artists will tell you that. We're in this place where you can kind of maintain a normal life and still go out and do what you do, you know."
If you go
• What: Lucinda Williams in concert.
• When: 8 p.m. Friday.
• Where: Rialto Theatre, 318 E. Congress St., Downtown.
• Tickets: $28 and $33 through www.rialtotheatre.com
• Et cetera: Williams performs at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Mesa Arts Center, 1 E. Main St., Mesa. Details: www.mesaartscenter.com
