Lucinda Williams Announces Beatles Cover Album

Lucinda Williams will release a new cover album, Lucinda Williams Sings the Beatles From Abbey Road, on Dec. 6, 2024.

Williams recorded the 12-track LP at the titular London studio where the Beatles recorded their 1969 opus of the same name.

A complete track listing can be viewed below, along with the first song to be released, a cover of George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."

Lucinda Williams Sings the Beatles From Abbey Road is not the first time the singer-songwriter has paid extensive tribute to a single artist. Her Lu's Jukebox series kicked off in October 2020, leading to themed concerts and physical albums dedicated to Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and others.

READ MORE: How the Beatles and 'Abbey Road' Influenced Beastie Boys

Lucinda Williams' Stroke Recovery

In November 2020, a month after Williams launched her Jukebox series, she suffered a debilitating stroke, which led to a week in intensive care and many months of rehabilitation.

"The brain and body have a remarkable capacity to heal themselves, but I still shuffle when I walk," she explained to The Guardian last year. "I haven't been able to play guitar, which is the big thing. My husband keeps telling me I need to play through the pain. The actual playing is good exercise. I'm still doing shows with my band, just differently, and I can sing fine. Some people tell me I'm singing better than before I had the stroke."

Despite these health difficulties, Williams has various American tour dates scheduled for the rest of this year.

'Lucinda Williams Sings the Beatles From Abbey Road' Track Listing:
1. "Don't Let Me Down"
2. "I'm Looking Through You"
3. "Can't Buy Me Love"
4. "Rain"
5. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"
6. "Let It Be"
7. "Yer Blues"
8. "I've Got a Feeling"
9. "I'm So Tired"
10. "Something"
11. "With a Little Help From My Friends"
12. "The Long and Winding Road"

'Please Please Me' (1963)

Producer George Martin wanted to use this opportunity to bring together two pet projects: his new band and his love for the London Zoo. An honorary fellow with the city zoological society, Martin probably also saw the humor in having the Beatles pose in front of the zoo's insect house. Unfortunately, the London Zoological Society didn't. So, photographer Angus McBean was asked to come up with a different idea. He quickly arranged the group inside EMI headquarters in London's Manchester Square, looking down into the stairwell. "It was done in an almighty rush, like the music," Martin wrote in 1994's With a Little Help from My Friends. "Thereafter, though, the Beatles' own creativity came bursting to the fore."

'With the Beatles' (1963)

Manager Brian Epstein brought Robert Freeman into the Beatles' orbit after becoming enamored with his black-and-white pictures of John Coltrane. For inspiration, they showed Freeman a series of early '60s-era photos taken by their friend Astrid Kirchherr in which they were shown in half light. Freeman achieved a similar effect in the most offhanded of ways, shooting them in the dining room of a hotel in the coastal town of Bournemouth, where the Beatles were playing a summer residency. "People think he must have worked at [it] forever and ever," Paul McCartney said in 2001's The Beatles Diary Volume 1: The Beatles Years. "But it was an hour. He sat down, took a couple of rolls, and he had it." The U.S.-only counterpart Meet the Beatles used the same image, but wrecked the concept by colorizing it. In what would become an unhappy theme during the run up to 1966's Yesterday ... and Today, Capitol also butchered the song order.

'A Hard Day's Night' (1964)

Freeman arrived with an inspired idea that brought a sense of movement to the cover of A Hard Day's Night, while also visually connecting the album with its movie tie-in. He took four rows of headshots, each with a different expression, as if they were frames of film. The images were surrounded by a blue frame in the U.K. edition, but with a red one in other countries, including America. The U.S. edition was also crudely edited: The Beatles appeared in just four large images, rather than 20, completely ruining Freeman's original idea.

'Beatles for Sale' (1964)

This weary image perfectly captured the mood as Beatlemania began to grind down the band. They gathered with Freeman this time at London's Hyde Park and completed the shoot within an hour and a half in the fall of 1964. They didn't even change clothes. "The photographer would always be able to say to us, 'Just show up,'" McCartney later recalled in Anthology, "because we all wore the same kind of gear all the time. Black stuff – white shirts and big black scarves." The final shot was achieved as an assistant held up a leafy branch, creating an atmosphere of closeness. The autumnal setting and golden 7PM sunlight did the rest.

'Help!' (1965)

The Beatles took time while shooting the final scenes from their second movie at Twickenham Studios to shoot their next album cover. Inspired by a scene from the film when the band was goofing around the snow in the Austrian Alps, Freeman hit upon the idea of spelling out the title in semaphore, with each member making a letter. "But when we came to do the shot, the arrangement of the arms with those letters didn't look good," Freeman wrote in 1990's The Beatles, A Private View "So we decided to improvise and ended up with the best graphic positioning of the arms." That's how the Beatles, still in their movie wardrobe, ended up spelling out NUJV, instead of HELP.

'Rubber Soul' (1965)

Freeman had a lot to work with after shooting the Beatles, all in suede jackets, deep in the woods near John Lennon's Kenwood estate in Weybridge. Then something interesting happened when they all got together a few days later to select an image to use on the cover of Rubber Soul. Freeman was projecting slides on an album-sized cutout of white cardboard, so everyone could envision what they'd look like as a finished product. Then the cardboard shifted. Everyone decided they loved the newly distorted effect. "It was stretched, and we went, 'That's it, Rubber So-o-oul," McCartney said in Anthology. "'Hey hey, can you do it like that?'"

'Yesterday ... and Today' (1966)

As with earlier Capitol Records cut-and-paste jobs like Beatles '65 and Something New, Yesterday ... and Today collected songs withheld from recent EMI albums and non-album singles to create an entirely new album. By 1966, however, the Beatles were getting fed up with the practice. At least that how it read when the album appeared with photographer Robert Whitaker's grisly cover image of the Beatles, dressed in white coats amid decapitated dolls and raw meat. The LP was quickly withdrawn amid the scandal, and the so-called "butcher cover" was replaced with a stodgy shot of the group posed around a steam trunk. The original image has since become a prized collectors item.

'Revolver' (1966)

Robert Freeman came up with an initial idea involving a montage of the Beatles' four faces, but that was ultimately shelved in favor of a design by Klaus Voormann, an old friend from the Hamburg days. Voormann drew the Beatles' faces from memory, though he struggled with one. "George's face was very difficult to draw," Voormann later told Martin O'Gorman. "It was easier with John, Paul and Ringo, but George was always the problem. I could not get his face right, so eventually I took a newspaper and cut those eyes and mouth out." Voormann then met Lennon and McCartney at Lennon's Kenwood home where they sifted through more old magazine and newspaper articles looking for images to complete the cover. Each was then superimposed on Voormann's line drawing.

'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' (1967)

McCartney's friend Robert Fraser, a gallery dealer, first suggested growing Pop Art artist Peter Blake as a possible collaborator. Together, McCartney and Blake hit upon the idea of a life-sized constructed collage. "We thought that if we did that, we could have anyone in the crowd," Blake later remembered. "That opened up a whole magical area." Each member made suggestions for the invented audience behind them, picking heroes, gurus and stars, but the Beatles came up short. (In fact, Ringo Starr picked only one or two, reportedly waving them off by saying, "Whatever the others say is fine by me.") That left Blake and his American-born wife Jann Waworth to fill out the collage. "The only women chosen were by Peter and I," Waworth told Deseret News in 2007.

'Magical Mystery Tour' (1967)

Fearful that the Beatles might split after their longtime manager died, an overwhelmed McCartney took the lead on the ill-conceived, thrown-together follow-up to Sgt. Pepper's – right down to its equally slapdash album cover. "The Mystery Tour packaging was all Paul's idea,” Beatles press officer Tony Barrow subsequently confirmed. "Everything happened in a mad rush after Brian Epstein died, because Paul was worried that the band would simply fall apart without some guidance." McCartney didn't get around to the album art until a matter of weeks before the record was due in stores. Peter Max, another emerging Pop Art devotee, was belatedly brought in to create psychedelic graphics around an image of the Beatles in costumes from their "I Am the Walrus" video.

'The Beatles' (1968)

The Beatles had talked about releasing an album with no title or artist credit as far back as 1964's With the Beatles. Four years later, they went one step further by putting out a record with nothing on it at all. (Well, except for a unique serial number that was meant "to create the ironic situation of a numbered edition of something like 5 million copies," Pop Art standout Richard Hamilton later admitted.) Hamilton's design initially featured only an embossed version of the band's name in Helvetica type, in stark contrast with the Beatles' previous four elaborately decorated releases. Later editions included "The Beatles" in gray, while the value of lower-numbered copies skyrocketed. Starr's personal copy, numbered 0000001, sold for a whopping $790,000 at auction in 2015.

'Yellow Submarine' (1969)

This cover's whimsically hallucinogenic imagery was created by Heinz Edelmann, another Pop Art fan who also oversaw the movie version of 'Yellow Submarine.' He got almost no direction from the Beatles themselves. "There wasn't much chance, because it should be remembered at that time, the Maharishi thing began," Edelmann told Bob Hieronimus in 1993. "They were in India in early '68 and only came back when the film was close to completion. And before that, the Beatles were involved in their own Magical Mystery Tour." The U.K. pressings included the words "Nothing is real," from "Strawberry Fields Forever." The old U.S. versions, for some reason, did not.

'Get Back' (1969)

Following the proposed album title's theme, the Beatles reassembled with Please Please Me photographer Angus McBean to create an image that would echo their first album shoot at EMI. (Asked about the differences, just six years later, McBean quipped, "Very hairy, indeed.") Then everything went to hell in a handbasket. A mid-1969 release date for Get Back came and went, as everyone argued over mixes, but not before promo copies – complete with cover art – were produced. Eventually, the Beatles moved on to work on the album that would become Abbey Road. McBean's image sat unused until 1973, when it was resurrected for the Beatles' 1967-70 "The Blue Album" retrospective.

'Abbey Road' (1969)

Iain Macmillan stepped onto a small ladder at about 11:30AM on Aug. 8, 1969, in the middle of Abbey Road and changed London tourism forever. A friend of Lennon's, he took just six pictures of the Beatles, as they passed through a crosswalk outside the studio where their last album was nearing completion. They chose the fifth, the only one where the Beatles are in step and (in an ironic twist) walking away. The cover image is one of four shots where McCartney is barefooted; in the other two he has on sandals. It's also the only one where you can see his cigarette. The project had initially been called "Everest," after the brand of smokes that engineer Geoff Emerick favored. There was talk of taking a picture with Mount Everest in the background, but that was quickly scrapped. Someone suggested just stepping outside. With that, Macmillan inadvertently created a new photo op for generations of Beatles fans.

'Hey Jude' (1970)

Another Capitol compilation of leftovers, non-album singles and B-sides, Hey Jude made history in a different way. The album, which was at one point quite appropriately called The Beatles Again, was meant to serve as a buffer while the long-delayed Get Back project was finally nearing completion as the newly renamed Let It Be. Their only involvement was an August 1969 shoot for the cover, which ended up being the last time the Beatles were photographed together as a band. They gathered at Lennon's newly acquired Tittenhurst Park home, two days after their final recording session together as a foursome to do final mixing and editing on "I Want You (She’s So Heavy)." Both Ethan Russell and Monte Fresco shot pictures that day; one of Russell's images made the cover of Hey Jude. That's George Harrison's hat on the statue.

'Let It Be' (1970)

When a reconfigured Let It Be finally appeared on store shelves in May 1970, Angus McBean's fun throwback photo was out of date – in more ways than one. The Beatles, quite literally, had scattered: McCartney's first solo record was already out. So, the old picture wouldn't work, and a new photo session wasn't happening. That left package designer John Kosh to assemble a cover that actually said more about where the Beatles were in this moment than any fresher image ever could. Let It Be features four individual images of the Beatles, taken by Ethan A. Russell during sessions back in January 1969, separated by a funereal black background. They were paired with the album title and nothing more.

Next: Why the Beatles’ First Session at Abbey Road Was Forgettable