Some days are more frustrating than others for Lucinda Williams as she continues her recovery from a 2020 stroke.

Earlier this week, the three-time Grammy winner was sitting on her tour bus admiring the beautiful weather through the window, but she longed for more.

“I just want to be able to go out and take a walk. I mean, I can walk but not easily,” Williams said Monday from Iowa. “I told my husband Tom (Overby), I never thought there’d be the day when I would say I was wanting to go out and walk and wasn’t really able to enjoy just a nice leisurely stroll in the sunshine.”

While Williams continues to make progress from the stroke that impaired the left side of her body — her estimate is that she’s at about 80% to 85% — she’s continuing to perform. Her “Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets: The Story of a Life in Songs” tour — named after her memoir published last year — will visit the Byham Theater in Pittsburgh on June 18.

The stroke has made playing guitar difficult, so she’s focusing on singing only on this tour.

“It feels like an arthritic thing. That’s kind of how it feels like when I try to bend my fingers a certain way to make the chords,” she said. “It’s kind of a cross between this arthritis feeling and combined with like, when you very first start playing guitar and it hurts your fingers to press the strings down. And all the stuff that I knew automatically, that I didn’t have to think about, that’s all changed.”

Calling it “a drag” to not play guitar, she lauded her guitarists, Doug Pettibone and Mark Ford (formerly of the Black Crowes), and how they’ve managed the transition.

”That was probably the hardest part, me not being able to accompany myself on a song because I have a certain way of playing when I’m singing when it’s just me,” she said. “You try to explain that to somebody else because so much of it’s just instinctive on my part, but they’ve been able to, they can do it, especially Mark.”

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Forced to lean more on her band, Williams said it’s actually been liberating and she’s enjoyed being able to focus more on just singing. And she found herself wondering what to do with her hands.

”Yeah, that’s kind of a hard one because I was always shy on stage,” she said. “I still get shy and you feel kind of awkward at first because you’re not holding a guitar or anything, but I don’t know, you just make it work somehow. You have to just get past that.”

Considered an alt country and Americana pioneer, Williams is known for songs like “Passionate Kisses,” which earned her a Grammy as the songwriter when it was reworked by Mary Chapin Carpenter, and “Get Right With God,” which won a Grammy for best female rock vocal performance. Her 1998 album, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” received widespread acclaim and a Grammy as the best contemporary folk album.

Williams has remained prolific with her output, including last year’s “Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart.” The album pays tribute to, among others, Tom Petty in “Stolen Moments” and the Replacements’ Bob Stinson in “Hum’s Liquor.”

“When I started writing songs, I started at some point focusing more on looking back at my childhood and everything and I continued that for a while — I’m not really sure why — but maybe it’s an age thing,” she said. “The older you get, the more you look back or something. But I guess I’m still kind of doing that.”

Describing her childhood growing up in the South as “fertile ground” for material, Williams is revisiting those days on her current tour. The storytelling aspect of her songs intertwined with stories from her book came easily.

“It just seemed kind of natural to link it together with the book and songs and everything. I was already talking about the songs a lot before,” she said. “I would sing one, and then Tom came up with the idea of doing a book show where I sit down and talk about a song and what’s behind the song and then I do the song.

“We also show some photographs on the screen behind me. Either photographs or a little bit of home movie footage of my family packing, my dad trying to pack the station wagon as we were leaving on one of our many troops. And the station wagon was so overloaded that you could see the back of it kind of going up and down. And my brother was hanging out one of the car windows waving goodbye and all that. People just love it. They really respond a lot to these book shows.”

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