Interview with Jess Williamson: The Beauty of Going Through Life Alone

Texas-born songwriter Jess Williamson talks the trials and triumphs of womanhood, modern pop inspirations, and trying to find comfort in being alone – all while reflecting on new album ‘Sorceress’.

Stream: “Smoke” – Jess Williamson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vINgxOeiCoQ

As women were expected to shoulder a lot, to shoulder domestically, within relationships, within a family, within friendships, and to be able to do it with a smile on our face. I wrote ‘Sorceress’ coming from a place of feeling like I needed to have supernatural power to be able to make certain things work.

Jess Williamson truly has a way with words.

Her fourth album Sorceress – out Friday, May 15th via Mexican Summer – takes listeners through unmarked valleys, across dusty plains, and over rambling rivers to meet her various characters and soak up their saturated stories. This artwork reflects on the itches and pulls of aging, stares down the great enemy named loneliness, and battles societal pressures relating to womanhood, social media, and the capitalist system. It’s complex like unexpected threads interconnecting into a woven, vibrant tapestry; a tapestry filled with images that feel distant, but if you lean in close you’ll realize they connect intimately with you.

Sorceress paints against the canvas of the Southwest with cowboys, coyotes, tiny towns, horses, and freedom all comfortably finding their place within the tracks. Sonically, the album features a folk foundation with flashes of psychedelic distortion, sixties rock ballad energy, and country sonority.

On Sorceress, modern indie pop influences appear as new, but welcomed additions to Jess Williamson’s musical toolbox. Colorful synths greet us in “Infinite Scroll,” sparkling, bubbly percussion flurries carry us away in “Love’s Not Hard To Find,” and winding, rhythmic guitar strums guide us in “Wind On A Tin.” Similar to the mystery of the old West, these surprising sound experiments add a mystical spirit to the tracks and poignantly highlight the uncertain, wandering feelings of the lyrics – especially within the chorus of “Infinite Scroll.”

You watched me laugh in the face of the clock
And fall downstairs with barely a knock
I was on one then, really leading the pack
Swearin love can’t die when I believed that
Time did unfold like an infinite scroll

– “Infinite Scroll,” Jess Williamson

“Ponies In Town” draws our attention as a profoundly interesting track, both on sonic and lyrical levels. At first, the simple story begins with only an acoustic guitar to back it up, but near the finale, Williamson’s voice strengthens and converses with the distorted trills of a flute. This musical exchange takes place around the line, “Free as a bird til the end of the cage,” reminding us that our idea of freedom may look one way, and truly be a cage the next.

I knew a man who kept his ponies in town
We could see em running from the highway
Dig in your heels, hold tight to the reins
Free as a bird til the end of the cage

– “Ponies In Town,” Jess Williamson

Although Sorceress grapples with many values regarding the human experience, from a bird’s eye view, this album contends the most with connection:

Connection to the Earth, to others, to nation, to time, to God or another deity, and – above all – to one’s self. Opening number “Smoke” toys with the give and get of relationships against a playful, acoustic melody, while “Sorceress” haunts with cricket buzzes, deep bass strums, and clarity regarding the weight of womanhood. Then, with gospel-folk exuberance, “Rosaries At The Border” offers a powerful voice to asylum seekers as the U.S.-Mexico border and confronts the founding principles of America as a Christian nation. Powerful feels like an understatement in the shadow of these songs.

Though this track enters last, “Gulf of Mexico” stands out as a poetic summary for Sorceress. Spirituality, love, aging, the metaphysical, society, relationships, and womanhood all tangle, touch, and dance within a winding, ethereal soundscape to bring the entire work to a radiant conclusion.

:: A CONVERSATION WITH JESS WILLIAMSON ::

Jess Williamson: Hi! I’m fine. I’m doing well, it’s actually a very nice day here today. How are you? Are you in Memphis? What’s it like there?

Williamson: Yeah, I’m in LA and I’m not sickm and so that’s good. I’ve just been, honestly, kind of enjoying this time. I mean, it’s bad timing for my record. That’s something I couldn’t have even imagined affecting an album. So, I’ve been grieving that, of course, but I’m learning a lot of lessons from this time, that have been really valuable and that’s really helping me get my priorities straight you know?

Williamson: Yeah, I am. I’m excited to get it out in the world.

Williamson: Totally.

Williamson: Yeah, great question. Well, I named the album after the song “Sorceress,” which I feel conceptually sums up a lot of what the whole album’s about. Which is essentially being a woman, and not being a sorceress, but being expected to be one. As women were expected to shoulder a lot, to shoulder domestically, within relationships, within a family, within friendships, and to be able to do it with a smile on our face. I wrote it coming from a place of feeling like I needed to have supernatural power to be able to make certain things work. So every song on the album, for the most part, features a central character or a woman who on some level is needing to be a kind of supernatural, larger than life, kind of figure for one reason or another.

As I’m getting older, I guess I’m realizing that we are always alone. You go through life alone, and people come and they walk alongside you on your path for a while and then your paths go different directions. And that’s okay.

I think I’m becoming more comfortable with being alone. Yeah, I don’t know, it’s a hard question to answer because I don’t agree that the whole album is about that but, yeah, definitely some songs touch on that especially “Gulf Of Mexico.” That song is actually inspired a lot by – did you ever see that movie 20th Century Women?

Williamson: It’s a Mike Mills movie, I’m pretty sure, and it’s about the relationship of this mother and her son. There’s this amazing scene in the movie where the mom is talking to her now teenage son’s girlfriend. And she’s talking to her and she’s says, ‘You are the one that’s with him out in the world.’ And she’s saying that you know him in a way that I don’t know him. That really affected me. This idea that, we only know one side of the prism of a person, right? For example, the way that I know my best friend is different than the way that her boyfriend knows her, or the way that my mom knows me is different than the way someone I work with knows me. In particular in that movie, the idea that a mother can only know her son one way, and someone else is going to know him a different way. Those are some things I was thinking about while writing these songs.

Williamson: Thank you!

Williamson: I wrote that song when Trump was separating children from their families at the border, when that was all happening and is kind of still happening. And I was really – obviously – really affected by that as a lot of people were. I felt pretty powerless and felt really sad. And I imagined – I can only imagine – how heartbreaking and soul crushing it would be to be a woman trying to escape a dangerous situation to give yourself and your children a better life only to end up in this ‘supposedly’ safer place. To then be imprisoned and have your children taken away from you. I was thinking a lot about how this is supposedly a Christian nation. And I was thinking about the figure of Jesus Christ. And I’m not a specifically religious person. I have become more spiritual in the last few years than I have been in my whole life with my own version of spirituality. I grew up Christian and I know a lot about the teachings of Jesus Christ. They’re all really solid, you can’t really argue with them. Jesus was the person that was hanging out with the lepers and the prostitute, he he was turning the tables in the bank and telling everybody, all the supposedly religious people that they were doing it wrong because they were. I was thinking about what Jesus would think of what America was doing to these please people coming here legally seeking asylum – it’s not illegal. That’s where that song came from. I was thinking about the story in the Bible where the prostitute came up to Jesus and washed his feet with her hair and put perfume on his feet while the ritual leaders were all making fun of her. Yeah, and that that’s where that song came from, really as sort of an apology as well.

Williamson: One big thing is I started writing songs on the keyboard. I was always writing on guitar before, which for me really roots the song in like a country or folk or rock place. And starting out writing on the keyboard because I didn’t really know how to play. I took a couple lessons and I learned some chords, but I really appreciated coming to it with a total beginner’s mind. It helped me get out of my own way, in thinking that I needed to make it musically sound interesting, all I could really do was pound out chords, and it became this blank slate. For me writing a song on a keyboard, it means it can go anywhere it could go in any direction and sort of genre-less. It just became this container for the song, like an open field that the song can sort of fit in, and become anything. I wanted to step outside of the genres I was more comfortable with for this record and move more into a pop direction, but also bring in some country elements. So starting the songs on the keyboard, really helped me think in a new way about the songs. It helped me open up what might be possible for them sonically. So musically that really helped. I also wrote a few song on an omnicord. Do you know what that is?

Williamson: It’s an instrument from the 80’s. I don’t think they make it anymore. Basically, it has buttons that you push for all the chords and it also has this pad on the side that you can stroke. It almost sounds like a harp. It also has a drum machine which is really helpful. So I used that to write a little bit on this record too, which again helped to open my mind sonically. I did write a couple on the guitar, like I wrote “Ponies In Town,” “Sorceress,” and “Rosaries At The Border,” they all started on the guitar. Then sometimes it started on the keys ended up on the guitar. “As The Birds Are,” I wrote that on the keyboard and ended up being a mostly guitar song on the record which is cool. Same with “Wind On Tin,” I wrote that on the keys, but it became a mostly guitar song later on. But yeah, I think that’s what really influenced a shift in the sound.

Williamson: I started listening to more pop music, and realizing I liked and it was really interesting. I hadn’t really been paying attention, honestly, to a lot of pop music, and I’m such a music fan. For me, I felt there was so much to discover that was – like old folk music from the 60s and 70s and stuff like that – and I just hadn’t been paying attention to pop music. I started listening to more pop music and realizing that it’s really weird. That there is there’s so much experimentation going on, and it’s actually really heady and really cerebral in some cases and really strong, and poetic, and cool, and exciting, and I just hadn’t noticed. I just wasn’t paying attention, and I just started paying attention, and it was really inspiring for me. I wanted to open up more and see what that I could do for my own songs.

Williamson: Well right now I think that pop and indie and and rock or all swirling around together in a really interesting way. The lines are completely blurred, there’s really no more distinction anymore.

Williamson: Actually, people always ask me, what kind of music I make, and I don’t know what to say.

Williamson: That’s true, yeah, that’s true.

Williamson: Yeah, Kacey Musgraves, and FKA Twigs, and Maggie Rogers. And those, I’d say those are the main specifically pop artists that I started listening to that got me excited about pop music.

Williamson: Oh totally, no I mean that record Golden Hour. So good.

Williamson: Definitely intentional. Everything about this record, I think the reason that you feel like it’s more raw, is because it’s the first time that I really knew what I wanted. I had a really clear vision, and I was uncompromising in it. You know, it’s funny, when I talk about it being more pop I guess I’m more talking about the weird stuff I’m hearing in pop music. Like FKA Twigs, her songs don’t conform to the typical pop song structure either. Also Perfume Genius, another example of what I consider pop music, but it’s very strange.

So it was intentionally in that I wanted to do something new and create something that felt really new. Some of that is drawing from things that are traditional and some of that is stepping out of the box entirely. So that’s what I did with this album, bringing some non-traditional song structures to the mix with some sonic elements that we hear in pop music but maybe lyrics that we don’t. Then the pop thing – it’s funny – because it’s not every song; it’s just sprinkled in. That was fun, but then there’s songs that are really raw folk songs that feel really me as well.

Williamson: Well I’m from Texas, and I’ve spent a lot of time in the Southwest. I live in LA now, and for whatever reason over the last couple of years, I have made that drive so many times between Austin and Los Angeles. I’ve stopped and spent time in a lot of places in between, a lot of deserts. I love that part of the world so much, and I’m endlessly inspired by the imagery of Texas landscape and by the culture. That’s what I grew up with and so it’s what I’m always thinking about and how I’m filtering my experience of being alive. I filter out these symbols that I’m so enmeshed with. So for me lyrically, it’s just what I know, and so it’s just my framework for viewing the world.

That song “Ponies In Town,” it’s really a meditation on mortality and worth and capitalism. This idea of a man with his ponies in town. Why do you have a horse in a city? For any reason other than capitalism? I’m so endlessly inspired by the symbol of the horse because I grew up with horses. My aunt was and still is a real Rodeo Queen. She has horses, she has a little ranch, which is where we shot all the photos from my album. Now, she does cutting. Do you know what that is?

Williamson: It’s basically – I don’t totally know all the in’s and out’s – but it’s a competition with horses, where you get on a horse and you separate one cow from a group of cows. It’s a very intricate thing and it’s really interesting to me. Anyway, when I was really little, I was riding a horse and I fell off. I was probably four or younger and I broke my arm, and it was a pivotal moment for me. I’ve kind of been scared to ride a horse ever since then. I’ve been in awe of horses ever since. My whole life, I think they’re beautiful. I think it’s amazing the relationship that we can have with horses and I also think it’s sad that you have to break a horse. You have to train a horse to ride it and any kind of training of any kind of animal is usually based on a system of punishment, and them them fearing pain.

And so, that song is a lot about singing about these horses being in town. You know, and why would they be and where would they rather be, and feeling a kinship, perhaps to that, as people, as women. You know people are sort of enslaved to capitalism right? Like, we all have to work? And this moment is making a lot of us question that. And women often are judged by, their worth is judged by their own fertility and at a certain age it’s you have a kid or what’s wrong with you as you must be damaged in some way. Right? Those were a lot fo the ideas of swirling around in my mind. And that last line is, ‘Free as a bird to the end of the cage.’ Feeling a bit like a caged bird.

Williamson: Yeah, I feel like you really get it! No one ever asks me about that song, and it might be my favorite song on the record really. I never get to talk about it so thank you.

Williamson: Well, I love that you’re asking about this song, and it’s kind of hard to put into words. Because the way that I write songs, and decide on the instrumentation is really intuitive and sometimes it feels like it’s coming from somewhere else like it’s coming from my unconscious mind. With that one, it just occurred to me, almost like a vision, that it would be cool to have that song be a play between an acoustic guitar and a flute. So that sound that you’re hearing at the end is actually a flute that we ran through some effects, some distortion, and made it sound interesting. It was really just a vision that I felt could be a cool moment on the album that would have a really folk root and feel like a bit of a pause in the record to kind of slow down for a second, and more so have an intimate moment with just me, the listeners, the guitar, and the flute. I wanted the vocal at the end to represent the bird. So it’s like a bird singing, and it’s like the bird and the flute are having a competition that’s how I thought of it. That’s how I brought it to the table, I wanted it to be a competition between the vocal and the flute and at the end I want the flute to win. I mean, I’m saying that and it maybe sounds so out there, but this is what it is to make a record with me. This is how I talk about music, you know? ‘I want it to be like a competition between the vocal and the flute, where they go back and forth. And then I want the flute to win. And then I’ll sing the last line of the song and the song is over. So that’s what’s happening.’

Williamson: Thank you.

Williamson: Yay!! Awesome.

Williamson: Isn’t that the truth?

Williamson: I can’t quite explain it because I don’t always know. I feel like, as a woman I have spent my whole life trying to explain it, but I don’t always know. And I just feel like that’s a line that every woman will understand.

Williamson: I understand because it’s actually my biggest fear ending up alone. I really don’t want to, but I don’t know why I don’t want to. I mean, I know that I want to have a child. And I’ve started to release this idea that the person that I have a child with is also someone that I will co-habitate with my entire life after that. That certainly releases some pressure and I’ve become a lot more open minded about more non traditional orientations of families. I have a non traditional family; my parents aren’t married anymore, but they’re still really close friends and we do holidays together. And we’re still a family. You know I’ve been spending a lot of time alone obviously in the quarantine and the other night I was sitting in my house, I had all my candles going, I looked around and I thought, ‘Why am so afraid of this when it’s so pleasant.’ *laughs* What is the problem here?

And I think actually it’s the great work of my life to become comfortable being on my own completely. I’m a really social person and I like to see people, I like to be around people. The truth is if I can let go and enjoy just being alone it’s really magical. So I’m still working on it and I don’t have the answers, but I can tell you this: being lonely when you’re in a relationship is way worse than just being alone. A lot of this record has to do with feeling alone, and not being alone. And that’s a lot worse. So, I don’t have the answers. I’m still fumbling my way through it.

Williamson: “Gulf Of Mexico.”

Williamson: I don’t know, I just I love that song. It was almost a single and then we decided against that. I think conceptually it sums up the whole record.

Williamson: Thank you, thank you. This was so nice.

— —

:: stream/pre-order Sorceress here ::

— — — —

Connect to Jess Williamson on
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

Discover new music on Atwood Magazine

? © Kathryn Vetter Miller

:: Stream Jess Williamson ::