With a little help from her friends, Lucinda Williams more than gets by with Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart. A testament to the Louisiana-born singer-songwriter’s resilience and talent, it’s her first album since the stroke she experienced in November 2020. Her stellar supporting players include singers Bruce Springsteen, Patti Scialfa, Margo Price, Angel Olsen, Tommy Stinson and Buddy Miller and organist Reese Wynans.

Williams announces her intentions in the album’s opening song, “Let’s Get the Band Together Again.” It’s a rock and roll celebration featuring Price’s tambourine and backing vocals. Two other notable guests, Springsteen and Scialfa, appear on two songs that resonate with Springsteen’s famously everyman aesthetic.

In the poignant “New York Comeback,” Springsteen sings alongside Lucinda Williams enough to nearly make the performance a duet. Springsteen and Scialfa return for title song “Rock N Roll Heart,” the words and music of which could fit perfectly in a Springsteen concert: “Blue collar boy in a no-win town. Has to get out before they take you down. Playing that guitar is all he needs. Follow that dream wherever it leads.”

Among the album’s introspective songs, “Jukebox” pays homage to well-stocked corner bars and jukeboxes everywhere. Doug Pettibone’s mournful steel guitar complements both “Jukebox” and the after-hours longing in “Last Call for the Truth.”

Without naming names, the album’s angry song, “This Is Not My Town,” addresses the sorry state of a nation suffering from seemingly insurmountable division. “Can anybody see what’s going down?” Williams asks in the opening line. “They’re sending in all the clowns … They’re playing one against the other, fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, one against the other.”

Inspired by the late Replacements co-founder Bob Stinson, “Hum’s Liquor” is another of Lucinda Williams’ tender and sad character songs, a portrait of a lost soul in the vein of “Sweet Old World” and “Drunken Angel.”

Williams again proves she’s the daughter of the late poet Miller Williams with the album’s tour de force, the majestic and melancholy “Where the Song Will Find Me.” An orchestral arrangement accompanies Williams’ evocatively poetic lyrics. “Standing in the rain, in the pouring silver drops, I’ll ride the whistling train, and get off at every stop, I want to be where the song can find me.”