Lucinda Williams isn't easily intimidated, but it would be hard for any musician not to shudder at the task before her.
The mission? Record an album of Beatles songs — only one of the best-known catalogs in popular music — in the same London studio where most of the originals were made. She and her band had just three days.
The result, “Lucinda Williams sings the Beatles from Abbey Road,” becomes public on Friday. It's the seventh in her series of “Lu's Jukebox” projects and the first one that will be made available on streaming services.
The Nashville-based singer-songwriter delivers her take on 12 Beatles songs, most of them from the band's later period. She takes on hits like the Paul McCartney ballads “Let it Be” and “The Long and Winding Road," while also choosing the more obscure “White Album” cuts “Yer Blues” and “I'm So Tired.”
“It felt like the Holy Grail,” she said. “This is where the Beatles recorded. And we're going to go in there where they made all of these majestic, classic, amazing songs?”
Abbey Road was the idea of her manager-husband, Tom Overby, and they blocked out a small amount of time before a British tour earlier this year. Her Beatles fan producer, Ray Kennedy, said he believed Williams was the first major artist to use the London studio to remake the band's work.
And, yes, it was intimidating. Fortunately, it was a modern, working studio and did not feel like working in a museum. One quirk was the control room was on a different floor than where the musicians were, and Williams repeatedly climbed the stairs to hear playbacks. “The engineers all looked at me, like, ‘what are you doing here,'” she said.
Stripping down songs for the band to build up again revealed complexities they hadn't anticipated. She particularly enjoyed John Lennon's “Yer Blues.” “The depth and the edginess and the grittiness of it kind of surprised me," she said.
They stuck to the basics of her rock band's sound. The orchestral flourishes of “The Long and Winding Road,” for example, are replaced by an organ and pedal-steel guitar.
“My greatest fear was, I didn't want to sound like a cover band doing Beatles songs,” she said. “And everyone I've talked to about it said you don't have to worry about that, that you achieved your goal of staying true to the songs while still sounding like you.”
During the pandemic, Williams made six “Lu's Jukebox” projects, themed in-studio concerts. They included Tom Petty and Bob Dylan songs, albums of Southern soul, '60s country classics and holiday music. She made a disc of Rolling Stones material only days before having a stroke in November 2020.
Sold largely by mail order, they haven't been available to stream, although a spokesperson said they're likely to be made available in that format in the future.