The last time Lucinda Williams performed at the State Theatre, in 2019, she played her totemic 1998 album “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” in its entirety. A lot has happened since then.

In 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak brought live music to a halt. Later that year, Williams’ house was hit by a tornado, and she suffered a stroke that impacted the left side of her body, forcing her into an extensive rehabilitation regimen. In 2023, Williams released one of the strongest albums of her career, “Stories from a Rock N Roll Heart” – an album studded with the kinds of innocently charming blues-bar dirges that Neil Young makes hay with. On Thursday, Williams returned to the State Theatre stage as a survivor of a grueling few years.

She walked out on stage more gingerly than she did in 2019 and is no longer able to play guitar, but she’s still here. So are we. She was in remarkable spirits, smiling often and addressing the crowd warmly. It also seemed like she’s put extra emphasis on her vocals during the recovery process, perhaps to offset her missing guitar work. When she sang songs like “Those Three Days” and “Fruits of My Labor,” from her 2003 album “World Without Tears,” her vocal phrasing was even stronger at age 71 than it was on the studio recording.

Refreshingly, the setlist largely focused on albums she released after “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” painting her as a career artist who created some of her best work after age 50. Even when visiting “Car Wheels,” she shifted her arrangements around to keep the material fresh; the stunning “Lake Charles,” for example, was given extra muscle with a chugging guitar reminiscent of the Rolling Stones and shimmering pedal-steel accompaniment. Her backing band, Buick 6, is full of ringers that flesh her writing out with thick grooves and robust arrangements.

Her songs are always romantic but not always about romantic partners. They radiate a love for self, for life and for music. The songs she performed from “Stories from a Rock N Rock Heart” included material in which she describes wandering the city, missing Tom Petty (“Stolen Moments”) or opening herself up to songwriting inspiration (“Where The Song Will Find Me”). Her most affecting song about the pandemic, “Jukebox,” describes a relationship with the jukebox at her local corner bar with the lonely, sultry desire usually reserved for lovers.

Throughout her life and career, Williams has been drawn to the mystique of smoky bars full of old blues tracks, and she not only describes this setting through her lyrics but recreates its allure through her music, applying the “show, don’t tell” adage to her performance. At the State Theatre, she complemented her original songs with blues covers by Memphis Minnie and Skip James (as well as the Beatles’ blues-rock classic “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”).

The cumulative effect was that of channeling her love for a vanishing America (do classic jukeboxes even still exist?) and keeping that soul alive. Although the crowd skewed older, there were also many college-age attendees, dancing with abandon in the balcony, keeping that spirit going.

Robert Ker is a freelance writer in Portland. He can be reached at bobzker@gmail.com.

CONCERT REVIEW

WHO: Lucinda Williams

WHERE: State Theatre, Portland

WHEN: Thursday, Nov. 14