Lucinda Williams headlines Kate Wolf

“I guess I’m just a late bloomer in all regards,” says Lucinda Williams.

At the moment, she’s talking about her voice – what one critic recently described as filled with “old scrapes and hollows.” At 59, she’s careful not to brag when she says, “I don’t know how, but my voice is just better now.”

Before that, it was her recent creative streak and how she’s more prolific than ever.

It used to be fans were lucky to get a pair of albums in a decade from the wistful, road-hardened singer who shot to Americana fame with the 1998 breakthrough album, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” But since 2001 she’s recorded five albums (and released a “Live at the Fillmore”).

She chalks it up to “experience and confidence.”

She’s leaving out the part about true love, at least for now.

The last time we spoke, back in 2006, the Louisiana native had just moved into a Spanish-style villa in the West Toluca neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was celebrating her “first house with a pool.”

But the most profound revelation was that she had just written her first “real love song.” Fans would soon be singing along to “Tears of Joy.”

For a change, it wasn’t a song about falling in and out of love. Or a bitter breakup. Not a lusty song about waiting for a man on his back steps. Or cheating after getting cheated on.

Six years later, true love has blossomed – not something the characters in her first two decades of songs would have ever betted on. Tom Overby, her manager and a long-time record executive, is now her husband. To prove it to the world, they got married on stage at a concert in 2009.

So if bad relationships make for good songwriting material, what do you do when you’re in a good relationship? It’s a question music writers have asked her over and over for the last two albums.

“It’s such a ridiculous question, because the proof is in the pudding,” she says. “Look at what I’m doing now. Maybe part of it is because I’m not dealing with the angst of writing all these break-up songs, so it’s kind of liberated me in a way.”

For her latest album, “Blessed,” she set up a Zoom recorder on her kitchen table and hit the record button and sat back with her acoustic guitar and half-cried the earliest remnants of songs in the most raw, stripped-down setting imaginable. A testament to new media – the “Blessed” deluxe version on iTunes includes these candid demos as well.

“I didn’t expect them to come out that good,” she says. “I was just putting them down so I wouldn’t forget them because that’s how I write. For the first time I was able to have this immediate gratification.”

After repeated listens, friends and band members started calling it the “The Kitchen Tape.” When the fully produced “Blessed” album came out last year, critics mostly raved. The Los Angeles Times found it “easy to fall in love with.” Mojo magazine called it “the perfect balance between the sweet and the sour.” Pitchfork saw it as “a transitional album – from lonely to married, from troubled to contented, from regretful to joyful.”

But it’s not like Williams has suddenly tapped into a happy vein and started writing songs about puppies chasing butterflies.

The song “Buttercup” finally stands up to an abusive old flame. “Seeing Black” tackles suicide, brought on by the death of Vic Chesnutt (who once coined a tune called “Lucinda Williams”). “Copenhagen” tries to cope with mortality under late October Danish skies.

“There’s still plenty of dark stuff to write about,” she says with a laugh. “It’s all around us – families, childhood. It never goes away. There will always be a wealth of material there.”

Bay Area freelancer John Beck writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat. You can reach him at 280-8014, john@sideshowvideo.com and follow on Twitter @becksay.

ON STAGE
What: Kate Wolf Music Festival
When: Friday (6/29) through Sunday (7/1)
Highlights:
Friday — Texas Tornadoes, Leftover Salmon, Poor Man’s Whiskey
Saturday — k.d. lang and the Siss Boom Bang, Tim and Nicki Bluhm, Ferron
Sunday — Lucinda Williams, Richard Thompson, Loudon Wainwright III, Justin Townes Earle
Where: Black Oak Ranch, Laytonville
Tickets: $80/single day, $195/three-day pass
Information: www.katewolfmusicfestival.com