Lucinda Williams closes her ninth studio album, 2008's Little Honey, with a cover of AC/DC's "It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll)." It's a slower, more sultry version, and she sings the lyrics with a voice full of concrete and barbed wire that suggests she knows just how long that way is.

And she does. The Lake Charles, Louisiana, singer-songwriter is now 56 years old. At an age when some artists are grasping at late-career straws, Williams is hitting her creative peak and is as vital and popular as ever. She brings her stage show to Paolo Soleri Amphitheater on Monday, June 1. The trio known as The Flatlanders — whom Williams says she first met in Austin back in 1981 — open the gig.

"Before I recorded West [her 2007 album], I went through this period of writing that was just probably the most prolific time of my entire life," Williams told Pasatiempo of the songwriting process that led to Little Honey. "And I ended up with about 25 songs. And I have a bunch of new stuff now started for the next record. I don't know, I feel like the older I get, the more experienced I become as a songwriter, and I feel like I'm more confident now. And it's a lot easier to write now. Just like anything, the more you do it, the better you get at it."

It wasn't always this way. Williams only put out four albums in the 1980s and '90s, but those albums earned her status as a cult figure and a critic's darling. She finally broke through to a wider audience with her celebrated 1998 record, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. In those decades, she actually wrote a lot of material that she shelved, and she even famously scrapped Car Wheels midproduction and started over to get the recording just right. Now she looks back on some of that work with newfound appreciation, and she recorded a few of those old songs — such as "Circles and X's" and "If Wishes Were Horses" — for Little Honey.

"I started taking a different approach to some of my earlier material after I heard Laura Cantrell's record [Humming by the Flowered Vine, 2005], where she did a song of mine called 'Letters.' And I was really blown away when I heard that, because 'Letters' was one of these songs that was on a demo, and that has got to be at least 30 years old. I never thought that song would see the light of day, and there it is on this album she recorded. I just went, 'Wow!' And it made me think, 'God, I've got other ones like that, too. Maybe I should go back and look at them.'

"I was still always writing and everything [during those years between albums in the '80s and '90s], but I don't think I was confident enough to feel like everything was good enough, and so I had a lot of stuff that I just didn't put out. 'Circles and X's' actually took me a long time to finish. And some songs are like that, where I'll have part of the refrain, but then I won't have all the verses written, and then for whatever reason, 10 years later I'll finish it. Then other songs, like 'If Wishes Were Horses,' I just never thought I wanted to record or anything. I thought, 'I don't know. It's not as good as my newer songs.'"

A major turning point in Williams' artistic growth was her 2001 follow-up, Essence. While Car Wheels is almost a collection of country and blues short stories, Essence is far sparser, with simpler lyrics and vast musical landscapes in between the words. Even the titles of the albums point to the difference. The mouthy Car Wheels on a Gravel Road directly evokes sensory memories (note the use of "car wheels" instead of "tires" to subtly invoke a child's perspective). The songs on Essence do what the title implies, using minimal, repetitive language and thick musical atmosphere to get to the essence of such sensations.

"It was the first time I let the music kind of take over a little bit on some of the songs," Williams said. "I wrote that album right after Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind came out. I loved that album of his — it was the simplicity, the music, and the production of it and everything. I was living in Nashville at the time, and I remember reading a review said, 'We expect more from Bob Dylan. The lyrics really aren't that good.' And I remember looking back over his whole career and understanding that he's kind of already painted his masterpiece. He did all that with his early albums, with Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde and all those great narrative, poetry-type songs. And as I've followed his career, I've seen where he's going. His earlier stuff is a lot more heady, and Time Out of Mind is more musical, more beautiful. So I kind of saw a parallel there between my Car Wheels record and my Essence record."

Williams' subsequent albums all reflect more of Essence's aesthetic — with a focus on fleshing out the music rather than stretching out the lyric sheet — culminating in Little Honey, which sounds more like a "band" album than anything else she's done. She trusted her road band, Buick 6, to expand upon her song structures; Little Honey could easily be a record by the Rolling Stones or the Black Crowes rather than that of a singular singer-songwriter. As a result, it comes off with a certain bar-band exuberance that's missing from some of her earlier work. However, you shouldn't call it her "happy album," as some critics have.

"The only challenges with those songs on Little Honey that I wrote three or four years ago was that everybody — when I was doing these interviews — kept calling it my 'happy album.' Like with 'Real Love,' they just assumed I wrote it about Tom [Overby, her manager and co-producer, to whom she recently got engaged]. And the truth is, I wrote it before I met Tom, about somebody else," she said, laughing. "But everybody assumed when Little Honey came out that all those songs were new songs, so they equated the songs with where I am in my life now. So I had to explain to everybody that no, a lot of those songs were written before, and a couple of them were about 20 years old."

Williams aims to continue her creative rebirth with several projects, including a cover album. But don't expect another AC/DC track. She hopes to represent songs by more obscure songwriters — in part to give them a career boost, like the one she got when Mary Chapin Carpenter covered her "Passionate Kisses" in 1992. "Like this artist by the name of Maria Taylor," Williams said. "She did a record that came out on Conor Oberst's label, and her stuff is just amazing. I'd like to do one of her songs. It would also help out the other artists, and I think that would fun. I haven't really done too many other people's songs. And we've been talking about the idea of doing a blues record of obscure blues songs. I don't know. The possibilities are endless."

details
Lucinda Williams, The Flatlanders and Ryan Bingham open
6:30 p.m. Monday, June 1
Paolo Soleri Amphitheater, 1501 Cerrillos Road
Tickets $39 & $61; available from
the Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St., 988-1234