Lucinda Williams. Photo by Danny Clinch

Lucinda Williams has been busy.

Last year, the singer-songwriter released the album “Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart,” along with the book “Don’t Tell Anyone the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir.”

Next up is “Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles from Abbey Road,” out on Dec. 6. Two singles, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Something,” are already out. Williams and her band were granted access to the famed Abbey Road Studios in London, where the Beatles recorded most of their albums.

Williams, 71, will be performing in Portland on Thursday, and the show will include songs from her four-decade career, including some tunes from the 1998 Grammy-winning “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” and hopefully a few Beatles songs.

Four years ago this week, Williams suffered a stroke and spent several months rehabilitating.

She still is unable to play the guitar but said, in an interview from her home in Nashville, that her vocals weren’t impacted.

Cover of Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road. Image courtesy of Highway 20 Records

“Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles from Abbey Road” is the latest of Lu’s Jukebox Series covers albums, which Williams started releasing during the pandemic. Other volumes include the music of Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones.

“I grew up a Beatles fan, so was probably about 10 years old, which would probably have been the perfect age to first discover them and hear them because it would have been about 1963,” said Williams.

Coming up with favorite Beatles songs was no easy task because Williams likes so many.

“I started trying to put together a list of the ones that just popped into my head that I remembered loving. Then I was able to narrow it down more based on how it went when I sat down to try to work them out and sing them and figure out the key and see how it felt singing them.”

Ultimately, she recorded a dozen, including “Don’t Let Me Down, “I’m So Tired,” “With A Little Help From My Friends,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and eight others.

“I remember that ‘Yer Blues’ really took me by surprise, kind of caught me off guard almost because it’s so heavy and intense and dark, and that’s not how I remember most of the Beatles’ songs. I always thought of them as lighthearted and all about love and peace and roses and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ kind of thing,” said Williams.

Williams is absolutely right. “Yer Blues,” the John Lennon-penned song, is gritty, bluesy and mentions wanting to die of loneliness multiple times. “I feel so suicidal, just like Dylan’s Mr. Jones,” wails Lennon.

Williams sinks her teeth into the song with a blazing band behind her, making it one of the album’s strongest offerings. Notes are held as Williams swaggers her way through the track.

The gravity of working in the holy grail of recording studios was not lost on Williams or her band.

Over the course of three days, Williams had several moments of realization.

“You’d just be going along your usual way when you’re in a studio, and then suddenly it would just sweep across your mind that ‘Wow, I could be singing in the same mic that Paul McCartney sang in or John.’ ”

Williams said that, although she and the band kicked into musician mode and were on a tight schedule, it was hard to forget the significance of the space. “There would be those little fleeting thoughts of where you actually are and what went on there.”

Williams’ husband and manager, Tom Overby, said that everyone involved with the sessions felt the spirit of being in the space, which helped to motivate and propel the project forward.

” You know you’re in somewhere special, and Abbey (Road) was definitely it.”

At the time of the interview, Overby said the band was heading into rehearsals and was hoping to work some of the Beatles tunes into the Portland show.

Fans should keep their fingers crossed, because, Williams’ unmistakable Louisiana-born southern drawl infuses iconic songs like “The Long and Winding Road,” “Something” and “Let It Be” with a bolt of lightning.

Lucinda Williams
8 p.m. Thursday. State Theatre, 609 Congress St., Portland, $45 to $65 reserved seating. statetheatreportland.com