Lucinda Williams plays her second of two nights at the 9:30 Club tonight, March 4. Tickets, $40, are still available.

Chances to catch Lucinda Williams at a club like the 9:30 don’t come around to often. Sure, she plays plenty of intimate theaters, and a place like Wolf Trap in mid-summer is well-suited to some of her breezier, loping tunes. But about halfway through last night’s set (the first of a two night stand), it was like a switch flipped: Williams and her band all of sudden realized they were not in the Historic State Theatre in Whereverville, USA, but rather in a real rock club, a place built for volume and guitar.

This moment came after she’d slowed the momentum brought by crowd-favorite “Drunken Angel” with a devastatingly gorgeous solo rendition of “Without You”. Then out came the upright bass and a series of sparse, mostly acoustic numbers. As pretty as they were — and Williams’ voice, which is a little wearier and has little less range than it used to, did sound great — there was something missing. That something, simply enough, was rock and roll, courtesy of backing band (and openers) The Buick 6, and the next dozen songs saw Williams and her wrecking crew trying their hand at punk, blues, noodly Grateful Deadisms, and Neil Youngian guitar sludge. The jammier stuff came a little out of left field, especially when guitar player Chet Lister introduced “Are You Down” with a few licks swiped from the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”. From there the group launched into the riff-heavy “Real Love” (off her latest, Little Honey), one of the closest things to an actual single Williams has put out in a decade.