Few roots-leaning songwriters have inspired such intense adoration, or as much emulation, as Lucinda Williams. Since her 1998 masterpiece Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, Williams has served as a template for many Americana hopefuls; if the bristly sensuousness of her songwriting voice is impossible to reproduce, plenty of followers have at least aspired to her leathery alt-country and blues-rock aesthetic and Southern Gothic scene-setting. It’s worth noting that there seem to be just as many men as women among her acolytes.

So often, male songwriters are the ones admired for playing the role of the wanderer, free to inscribe their visions on the landscape and cultivate or sever bonds of emotional attachment as they choose. Meanwhile, songwriting women have been defined by supposedly domesticated, softer and — more to the point — lesser concerns, their natural inclination presumed to be that of spinning slight wounds and worries into major melodramas. Through sheer stubbornness and devotion to her craft, Williams has always resisted such binaries, excelling at humid portraiture of people and places, but also cathartic emotional confrontation, all of which she’s approached with primal urgency as she strains to exert her will over memories, feelings and fate. Witness the vehemence with which she once vowed to ditch a spirit-sapping lover and scour every town in her path until she recovered her joy.

Williams’ new 14-song set, The Ghosts Of Highway 20, is a road album of a sort, as well as a remarkable distillation of her writerly gifts. Traveling an old, familiar byway through the Deep South evidently conjured for her an array of images and impressions. The moony, ominous title track maps the connections between Williams’ imagining of the past as a haunted domain and the ferocity of her songwriting voice. Concrete description of muggy days, “sweet coffee milk” and hellfire warnings lights her way into a clear-eyed appraisal of conflicted childhood experiences in the bittersweet reverie “Louisiana Song.”

Elsewhere, Williams pivots to obstinacy, as she purges her existential pain through devil-may-care, down-home blues (“Bitter Memory”), fantasizes about challenging the cruelness of death (“If My Love Could Kill”) and insists upon romantic perseverance (“Can’t Close The Door On Love”). Even at her most whimsical, as in the gentle pop-folk waltz “Place In My Heart,” she accentuates the tenacity in her affection. “Even though you take my love for granted,” she sings, her drawl dissolving into a brittle vibrato, “I’m pretty strong when I admit it. You might be surprised at what I can manage, so don’t you ever forget.”

In the lyrics — all her own, with the exception of one co-write with her manager-husband Tom Overby, a cover of Bruce Springsteen‘s “Factory,” and an adaptation of an erotic exchange from Woody Guthrie‘s posthumous novel House Of Earth — Williams cultivates economy and startling directness, occasionally establishing and repeating a pattern until it passes from self-indulgence into an almost meditative space. Framing her songs is the ornate interplay of two very different guitarists who’ve contributed to her albums in the past: Bill Frisell, with his spiderwebbed, iridescent guitar figures, and the grittier but no less precise Greg Leisz, who co-produced this collection with Williams and Overby. After the guttural blues growling that pervaded her previous album (Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone) and some earlier recordings, Williams has circled back to a world-weary affect, a consciously burdened delivery style that emphasizes the emotional labor she’s performing in her music. It’s no wonder, really, that folks are willing to follow her down Southern back roads and into the visceral depths of desire.

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So here comes Williams, the perceptive and much-lauded songwriter whose early works helped define alt-country and Americana, with a characteristically ornery response: Double down. She’s got a big batch of new songs — in interviews, she says she recorded many more than the 20 on offer here — and evidently feels they form a unified statement. It’s not hard to imagine her sitting on a grand Southern front porch somewhere far from the cities, sifting through this creative bounty and becoming frustrated by the task of choosing the keepers. “One album is too much? Give ’em two. See how they like that.”

That’s just the first challenge. The wizened opening notes of Disc 1 (total time: 48 minutes) might make even the most loyal Williams worshiper a bit worried about what lies ahead. The song, “Compassion,” marks the first time Lucinda Williams has adapted one of the poems written by her father, the revered poet Miller Williams. At its heart is a Sunday-school-simple message: Give everyone you meet compassion, because you never know about the “wars going on down where the spirit meets the bone.” But she dispenses that homily with a foreboding growl. Backed by pleasant acoustic guitars, Williams sounds dark, weathered, almost defeated — like she could use an extra infusion of compassion, and maybe a hot cup of coffee.

By the time that song ends, listeners may find themselves questioning this extra-large time investment. How deep a dive does one take into this world? How much Lucinda Williams Sings the Hard Luck Songbook does a person need?

Then the band fires up a Tom Petty-style rocker called “Protection,” and it’s a new day. Williams slithers through its opening mantras in that blunt and crystallizing way of hers, sweeping listeners (even skeptical ones) into her plainspoken genius. The song turns on a simple oppositional device: Each verse finds her talking about needing protection from some big adversary, “the enemies of righteousness,” or “the enemies of rock ‘n’ roll,” or “the enemies of love.” On the page, this sounds meta and contrived, but in her rendering, the adversaries don’t register as abstract: She shouts as though she’s picked up the scent of hellhounds approaching. There’s raw backwoods fierceness in her cadences, as well as deep resolve — qualities that start in her trembling voice and from there come to permeate every guitar chord and backbeat.

This is Williams’ wheelhouse. Her best songs (here and on such enduring albums as 1980’s Happy Woman Blues and 1992’s Sweet Old World) frame daily existence as a scrappy and likely unwinnable dogfight between good and evil, and she sings them in a way that plunges listeners into the gritty dirt-under-the-fingernails details.

In her world, the deck is stacked against the gracious. Mal-doers lurk everywhere, soul-level suffering is a given, and just surviving is a victory. Williams’ characters live perpetually under threats real and imagined; sometimes she lets them experience something that sounds suspiciously like joy (“Stowaway in Your Heart”), but more often she extracts some abiding wisdom from the wreckage of failed relationships and mismanaged flings.

Throughout Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, her 11th album, Williams borrows a device common in the recent songwriting of Bruce Springsteen, using a billboard-sized slogan for the refrain (“Burning Bridges”) and then taking it down to human scale in the verses. She follows the downward trajectories of cowardly sad sacks who hurt others as their lives fall apart (one of those narratives, the country weeper “Wrong Number,” glances back at her great early song “Changed the Locks” with the couplet, “He was late on the rent, and the locks were changed.”)

As she’s done so eloquently in the past, Williams captures regret in its many forms and guises: Sometimes she uses beautifully airborne poetic language to convey its corrosion (see “Temporary Nature of Any Precious Thing”), and sometimes, as in “Cold Day in Hell,” she transforms a cliche into a vessel for the expression of a hurt that sounds profound and disquietingly fresh. This fixation on the sour end of the emotional spectrum aligns Williams with the blues, and it’s no accident that some of the most powerful music here draws directly from that realm. To hear what Williams might have sounded like trading verses with Koko Taylor in the swaggering classic “Wang Dang Doodle,” check the delightfully snarly “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

That track, along with a ruminative 10-minute foray into J.J. Cale‘s “Magnolia” and a few other originals on Disc 2 (total time: 55 minutes) suggest that Williams, now 61, has grown savvy about the cracked quality of her modern-day voice. She’s always been able to conjure brokenhearted misery from a single note; now, she can ramp up to fury that quickly, too. And resignation. And let’s face it: In terms of pure expression, no singer in popular music can touch Williams when she’s calling from the lonely outskirts of Despairville. She sounds like it’s her permanent residence, that place down deep where the spirit meets the bone.

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