Lucinda Williams is furious, and who can blame her?

It was only one week before our collective quarantine that Lucinda Williams’ new house in Nashville, Tenn., had part of its roof blown off by a tornado. “It’s almost biblical.” In life as in song, Williams, 67, is an expert storyteller: It’s not hard to imagine the mess of our current reality cast as a blues-rock rave-up on her 14th album, “Good Souls Better Angels.” She has been releasing records since 1979 — spooling Southern-gothic narratives over the blend of rock and country now known as Americana — but she’s never sounded so fiercely political, and the timing couldn’t be more appropriate. “I always wanted to be able to write really good topical songs like ‘Masters of War’ or ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’,” she says, invoking two Bob Dylan protest classics. “I wasn’t really proud of the country,” Williams said, “and that hasn’t changed much.” Williams’ songs have long grappled with strands of injustice. Williams remembers an Elektra label rep telling her that the problem with her songs — future highlights like “Changed the Locks” and “Pineola” — was that they “didn’t have bridges.” “We got done with the meeting, and I went back to my little apartment and got out my Neil Young and Bob Dylan albums, just to remind myself, ‘OK, don’t get disheartened.’ I listened to two of my musical heroes and said to myself, ‘Well, not all their songs have bridges either.’” It wasn’t until the English indie label Rough Trade came across her demo and released her 1988 self-titled record that she caught a break.