Lucinda Williams, Shepherd's Bush Empire, London

Southern rebel returns to London stage with the confidence her songs deserve

Much has happened to Lucinda Williams since her last London appearance four years ago. Her last album, Essence, added another Grammy Award to an already crowded mantelpiece. She experienced tragedy when her drummer died from cancer and she has just released a new album, World Without Tears, which has garnered the most outstanding reviews of her career.

For a 50-year-old singer songwriter who has inspired a 15,000-word profile in New Yorker and whose 1998 collection Car Wheels On A Gravel Road was hailed as "the blonde on blonde of the 1990s'' by producer Joe Boyd, that's quite some achievement.

The slight and unassuming figure who takes the stage in jeans, cowboy boots and black vest belies the years of hard work, practice and sacrifice that has fed into her songs. Strapping on an acoustic guitar, she strikes into the Southern Gothic romance of "Drunken Angel". It is a common thread in the set that follows. Lucinda using her vernacular and Southern twang to romanticise, and indeed, romance a hard-living lost boy. Stage lights sparkle off her dyed blonde hair and silver jewellery and guitar strap as she sings to an old lover "passed out on the street". The influence of Charles Bukowski, a visitor in the Williams' family home (her father Miller Williams was a respected poet) is apparent.

In "Ventura" she becomes a modern-day Blanche Dubois transplanted to the West Coast musing over food stuffs in her kitchen, the lure of the ocean and the aching pang of unrequited love.

There are early tour nerves apparent but this is a wholly different performer to the nervous solo act who first appeared on a London stage more than a decade ago, nervous, apologetic and withdrawn. The backing of her three-piece band – Doug Pettibone, guitar, Jim Christie who doubles on drums and keyboards often simultaneously and bassist Taras Prodaniuk – undoubtedly helps. These are the same musicians who enabled her to jettison the perfectionist approach which has resulted in her meagre recorded output. Their precision and subtlety is perfectly attuned to the undercurrents and poetic resonance in songs such as "Fruits Of My Labour" and "Righteously".

But the main change has taken place with Williams herself. Over the years, she has not only built up the confidence to present herself on stage, with a forcefulness deserving of her scrupulously constructed songs, but has also learned how to shape song choices into a compelling narrative thrust. The crowd of predominantly aged baby-boomers holds her in considerable reverence.

The expansiveness of her craft radiated throughout, from the drowsy cat-stretch eroticism in "Fruits Of My Labour" to the death confronting "Pineola", like Lynryd Skynrd meets Flannery O'Connor.

At the close, she returns to her primal blues roots with a Skip James standard and wears her Southern rebel credentials proudly when she introduces the slightly cumbersome "American Dream", telling the audience that like the Dixie Chicks she is ashamed of George Bush too.