Lucinda Williams, Shepherds Bush Empire, London, ****

A fine Southern Gothic romance

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 titled 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 The New Yorker, and whose 1998 collection Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was hailed as "the Blonde on Blonde of the 1990s" by the 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". The song's quality is a common thread in the set that follows. Lucinda uses her vernacular and Southern twang to romanticise, and indeed to romance a hard-living lost boy. Stage lights sparkle off her dyed blonde hair, 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 transformed, wholly different performer to the nervous solo act who first appeared on a London stage over a decade ago, apologetic and withdrawn. The backing of her three-piece band – Doug Pettibone, guitar, Jim Christie, who doubles on drums and keyboards, often simultaneously, and the bassist Taras Prodaniuk – undoubtedly helps. These are the musicians who enabled her to jettison the perfectionist approach that 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 the swaggering "Righteously".

But the main change has taken place with Williams herself. Over the past decade, the biggest rising market for the record industry has been the over-45s, so in one respect late-starter Lucinda has arrived just in time. 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 she has also learnt how to shape song choices into a compelling narrative thrust.

The crowd of predominantly aged baby boomers holds her in considerable reverence, a quality that she appreciably acknowledges. However, her composure is rattled on the misfiring introduction to "Change the Locks". She admits that the presence of The Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde in the audience had caused her to be nervous, but a heckler ignites her anger, which is then appropriately fed into the delivery of a song that excoriates a banished partner.

The expansiveness of her craft radiates throughout the evening, from the drowsy, cat-stretch eroticism in "Fruits of my Labour" to the death-confronting "Pineola", like Lynryd Skynrd meets Flannery O'Connor. Held in reserve, Pettibone's guitar eruptions on the deranged "Atonement" and on the anthemic "Real Live Bleeding Fingers And Broken Guitar Strings" deliver maximum impact.

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 was ashamed of George Bush, too.