Lucinda Williams

Barbican, London ★★★★☆

There has always been an emotional vulnerability to the music of Lucinda Williams. Hers are songs that find the tender parts: the taste of sweat, the scent of persimmons, the long-drive thinking of a lover.

Tonight at the Barbican, that fragility feels amplified. A little over two years ago, Williams suffered a stroke, in the wake of which it seemed unlikely she would return to performing. But this evening she stands on stage, launching into a rendition of her 1998 track Can’t Let Go that acquires new resonance.

Across the two hours of her consummate show, the tone is not so much defiance as a new leaning-in to the precariousness of life. Williams’ voice is a thing not of straightforward beauty, but of sorrow, elasticity and dust.

The temporary nature of things, the art of perseverance, are the themes beneath this evening’s songs. She crowns the night with a cover of Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World, and in its lines she finds something that feels as delicate as it does unyielding: “Keep hope alive,” she sings. “Got fuel to burn / Got roads to drive.”

Touring from March