Lucinda Williams glances up from her coffee. "Hi. Pleased to meet you," she drawls in an intoxicating, full-flavoured southern accent. "This is Richard." Richard - leather jacket, baseball cap, shoulders, two days' worth of stubble - is the rugged, silent, protective type, a useful guy to have on your side during macho physical pursuits. I've never seen him before in my life, but I recognise him immediately, from a Lucinda Williams song (The Night's Too Long, from 1988). I could impress him with my knowledge - "I know you! You're the guy with the leather jacket who likes his living rough and snogs Sylvia, the small-town waitress, aren't you?" - or I could conduct the rest of the interview with my nose in one piece. Not wishing to push my luck, I decide on the nose.
I'm fortunate to be here in the first place, after all. Lucinda Williams, who is currently America's greatest female songwriter and folk-rock's biggest enigma, agrees to interviews almost as infrequently as she makes her albums (she's recorded just five LPs in 20 years, one of them - 1978's Ramblin' On My Mind - all cover versions). A little bit of southern-fried blues, a little bit of protest-folk, a little bit of bad-girl rock 'n' roll, she is Nanci Griffith with boxing gloves, Joan Baez with a motorbike and Sheryl Crow without an image consultant, all at the same time. Yet, throughout her career, Williams has had a habit of disappearing into lengthy exile just as her music threatens to reach a wider audience, allowing collegiate whiners such as Crow or Jewel to step in and make a quick buck from a watered-down version of the Williams sound.
Preparing to meet her, I talk to various sources within the music industry who've heard she's "shy", "difficult" and "suspicious" - which seems odd, because on her records she comes across as open, sweet and honest. Replace "difficult" with "small" and, today - in the bar of a London hotel, accompanied by bass-playing boyfriend Richard Price - she's a bit of all six.
Her songs often feature assertive women who transcend their parochial surroundings, who are determined to fulfil their potential - "I'll shout it out to the night/ Give me what I deserve/ 'cause it's my right!" - against all the odds. There's Sylvia the waitress, in The Night's Too Long, determined to get what she "wants"; or the vexed hero of 1998's Joy who intends to retrieve her "joy" (whatever that is), no matter how hard she has to look: Williams's songs are primed to galvanise women stuck in insignificant lives while simultaneously dredging out a hidden feminine side in apprentice Homer Simpsons all over the southern United States. What sort of feedback does she get from female fans? "Oh, I get lots of letters saying: `Go girl! You're out there, sticking to your guns'.
"But being a role model isn't something I think about a lot; it's just part of my nature. I've always been a rebel."
Do you perceive yourself as a tough character?
"I think the way I present myself in my music is, but once you get to know me, I'm kind of shy, real sensitive . . . probably oversensitive. I'm basically a strong person, but I do have trouble asserting myself some of the time, which is why I sometimes butt heads in the studio."
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Williams's fifth album, is a 1990s new-country masterpiece which took three years and three different producers to make (Williams was striving for a rawer sound after 1992's somewhat saccharine Sweet Old World), although you'd never guess, since it sounds like it was bashed out in the back of a van during a week-long tour of the American south. There are 14 towns spread through Williams's most colourful album yet, accompanied by a constant sensation of motion, and a friendly radio song - be it ZZ Top, Hank Williams or Howlin' Wolf - is never far away. The detail is immense. A visit to these places - Macon, Rosedale, Lake Charles, Lake Ponchatrain - could never quite live up to the semi-real landscape which Williams's super-expressive voice creates inside our heads.
"I see the whole thing like a pitch for a little movie," explains Williams. "Keeping things descriptive is very important to me. When you're writing, you should always put the name of the town in the songs, instead of just being generic and saying, `I was walking down the street.' What street? What town? What state?"
As a rootless child, Williams remembers staring out of the back window of her father's car (her parents divorced while she was very young), on the way to yet another new home, fantasising about following in the footsteps of her father's heroine, Flannery O'Connor, and writing the Great Southern Novel. "I was a very imaginative child, always writing, always watching. I grew up with storytellers." Through her father, poet Miller Williams, she met the likes of O'Connor, Charles Bukowski and Allen Ginsberg.
By the time she was in her late teens, Williams wanted to be Joan Baez and hang out with "thinkers". Her friends were fleeing the south for the glamour of Los Angeles, and Williams followed, but she always felt the tug of her homeland. Instead of leaving the south behind, she went back and confronted it head-on.
"You always feel a little bit like the underdog coming from the south," she says. "There's the whole stigma, the stereotypes, and the more you go against them, the stronger you get. I think this album is me learning to embrace my southernness. It's a very rich breeding ground. Most of the music you're familiar with started there, if not all of it."
As a gesture of defiance, she now lives in Nashville (two doors down from Emmylou Harris) in the heart of the American country music industry, of which she is the absolute antithesis. What's that like? "Oh, I don't think most of them even know I'm a singer; they just think I'm another writer." Williams's songs have been covered by Tom Petty (Changed The Locks) and Mary Chapin Carpenter (Passionate Kisses, for which both Williams and Carpenter won Grammys). When she was introduced at a gig in Nashville as "The woman who wrote Changed The Locks for Tom Petty!", she clamped the compere's arm, steered him to one side and corrected him: "I didn't write it for him, I wrote it for me."
Forget girl power; this is woman power - the kind that drinks the boys under the table, burps, then finishes them off in an arm-wrestling contest. It shouldn't seem surprising, but it does because of the dearth of strong female role models in mainstream music at the moment, a drought that Williams blames on "the emphasis the music business puts on instant gratification.
"A lot of women songwriters simply haven't paid their dues in the same way people like Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Judy Collins did; they haven't had to take the same risks."
Williams, on the other hand, has had to put up a fight to become a great artist, weathering more than a decade without a record contract. Her voice - once described as "three parts honey, two parts bourbon" - tells stories of tragic, self-destructive friends, beat-up cars and restless lives from the bar at the end of the universe. The line halfway through Car Wheels's title track - "a little bit of dirt mixed with tears" - says it all.
Three of the best tracks on Car Wheels - 2 Kool 2 Be Forgotten, Drunken Angel, and Lake Charles - all face the death of Williams's friends head-on. "You've got to confront your demons to be able to write well," Williams insists. "I have to do it for my own sanity; it's therapeutic. But I actually write better when I'm feeling a little contented. When I'm feeling lousy, I just want to watch TV."
The thing that makes a Lucinda Williams song brilliant, apart from its rich detail and coarse-grained passion, is its honesty. Which other songwriter in their forties would open up her album with a lonely song - Right In Time - about masturbation?
Time's almost up. I look across at Richard, Lucinda's boyfriend: his face tells me nothing. Have I asked the right questions? Have I dug a little too deep? Probably not, but I decide against comparing Williams and Price to Sylvia the waitress and her friend with the leather jacket. It's been a generous chat, and it has to end here. Lucinda Williams tells us so much about Lucinda Williams in her songs; asking for too much more would be downright greedy.