Lucinda Williams is set to deliver one of the most politically charged and emotionally raw albums of her career with World’s Gone Wrong, arriving 23 January 2026 through her own Highway 20 Records label. The record continues Williams’ lifelong habit of holding up a mirror to American life – this time reflecting on division, resilience and the fight to stay human when the world feels anything but.
The three-time Grammy winner’s 17th studio album features collaborations with Mavis Staples, Norah Jones and Brittney Spencer – a trio of voices who embody soul, grace and strength, perfectly matched to Williams’ unflinching lyricism.
The title track, “The World’s Gone Wrong”, written and recorded during the chaotic spring of 2025, opens the album with Brittney Spencer lending soaring harmonies to Williams’ gravel-edged urgency. The chorus plea, “Come on baby we gotta stay strong”, becomes both mantra and battle cry for hard times.
In a live performance video already circulating online, Williams and her band – featuring longtime collaborator Ray Kennedy – deliver the song like a sermon from the edge of the apocalypse.
“World’s Gone Wrong is about survival,” Williams said recently. “The music feels bruised, but there’s still beauty in the bruises.”
Across nine original songs, Williams once again blurs the lines between blues, country and rock. Her cover of Bob Marley’s So Much Trouble In The World pairs her gritty drawl with the legendary Mavis Staples in a searing duet that feels both timeless and of-the-moment. Elsewhere, the haunting “How Much Did You Get For Your Soul” revisits the moral struggle she first explored on 2020’s Good Souls Better Angels, while “Freedom Speaks” imagines liberty itself as a weary voice pushing back against apathy and injustice.
The album closes with “We’ve Come Too Far To Turn Around”, a piano-driven hymn featuring Norah Jones. The two trade verses like old friends sharing scars, their harmonies gliding through the wreckage toward redemption.
Williams has been writing songs of resistance and redemption for nearly five decades. Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1953, she grew up surrounded by poetry and Southern Gothic storytelling through her father, poet Miller Williams. Her early albums Ramblin’ On My Mind (1979) and Happy Woman Blues (1980) were steeped in Delta tradition before her 1988 self-titled record defined the emerging Americana sound.
She achieved mainstream recognition with 1998’s Car Wheels On A Gravel Road – now considered a landmark of modern roots music and ranked among Rolling Stone’s greatest albums of all time. Over the decades, her output has remained defiantly authentic, from Essence and World Without Tears to the more recent Stories From A Rock n Roll Heart (2023).
Despite a stroke in 2020 that temporarily took away her ability to play guitar, Williams returned to the stage stronger than ever. Her storytelling now carries an even deeper gravity – a lived-in wisdom that gives World’s Gone Wrong its soul.
Co-produced by Williams’ husband Tom Overby and Ray Kennedy, the album was recorded in Nashville at Kennedy’s Room & Board Studio.
“World’s Gone Wrong isn’t just a record,” Kennedy said. “It’s Lucinda standing tall in a burning world and daring it to burn brighter.”
Tracklist – World’s Gone Wrong (2026)
The World’s Gone Wrong (feat. Brittney Spencer)
So Much Trouble In The World (feat. Mavis Staples)
How Much Did You Get For Your Soul
Freedom Speaks
Streets Of Stone
Burning Down The Rain
What We Leave Behind
Devil’s In The Details
We’ve Come Too Far To Turn Around (feat. Norah Jones)
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