Marlon Williams’ crime of passion
The darling of the country music world opens up to Bridget Jones about how writing songs helps him express his true feelings.
For a young man, Marlon Williams has the feeling of dread and expectation lurking around him. It’s there, it has been for a while, and there’s almost no sign of it leaving him alone.
‘‘It’s always in the back of my mind. The lack of inspiration, just sitting on my shoulder like the f…... grim reaper, just waiting. It’s a weird psychological battle to keep him at bay, and to try to be productive,’’ he says.
Writer’s block is a strange thing to talk about with a musician who is less than a week away from releasing a new album. Stranger still, a musician who has been in the mix at the Silver Scroll Awards – New Zealand’s top songwriting prize – three times.
But Williams hasn’t written anything in more than a year. His second album, Make Way For Love, was recorded in March 2017 – he says his record label insists there is a rhyme and a reason for the delay – and the songs came together in an unconscious flurry months before, as he processed the break-up of a long-term relationship. In the time since, productivity has been, well, low.
‘‘There’s never any promise of success [when you’re writing], you’re just doing it and it’s like, ‘Oh God, is it going to work?’ And then you get to the end of it and, thank the Lord. It’s a really uncomfortable thing for me.
‘‘I enjoy playing my own songs but it’s because I’m learning about myself through them. And that’s why I write. There are songs on this album that express things I can’t talk about.’’
Williams found music early in life, joining the school choir when he was 10 as a way to avoid science class.
By 17, he had founded The Unfaithful Ways in his hometown of Lyttelton. He went on to play with Kiwi country singer Delaney Davidson, before trying things on his own.
His self-titled album was a revelation. Suddenly the industry couldn’t get enough of this kid who sang like Roy Orbison incarnate, telling tales of loss and sadness in the most delicate way.
He made it impossible to look away and the album took the now 27-year-old to the world, with notable stops along the way including playing the late-night circuit on American television and legendary spaces like The Viper Room in LA.
His dad was a punk singer so Williams became fascinated with classical and country music, obviously.
‘‘I was kind of rebelling against him, and you can end up in some really weird places – like being a 14-year-old who loves opera.
‘‘Joining the choir and hearing people not be able to sing proved to me I could [sing]. ‘I know you’re 10, but that sucks,’ kind of thing. Before that, I’d just sing in the car with mum, and she can sing in tune. So when you hear someone not singing in tune for the first time, it’s quite shocking,’’ he says with a smile. ‘‘But everyone should sing. Ignore me.’’
In fact, his dad introduced him to country music at the perfect time. Williams was trying to figure out how songs were written and country music, with its simplicity – ‘‘three or four chords, common recurring lyrical tropes’’ – helped answer the question.
‘‘That’s what appealed to me about classical singing, too. There was a zero-sum, right way to do it. And there is a wrong way to do it. As a teenager, it was nice having those rules. There is part of me that really liked the order,’’ Williams says.
‘‘I’m very lazy and I found music was the language I understood best. It goes back to being able to communicate best. I wasn’t a very articulate child, so it was a way of me having simple communication. And I got out of class.’’ CHRIS MCKEEN/STUFF
His first song was written for an exchange student he was a little in love with. That Girl Should Not Be Alone was inspired heavily by Orbison, but it’s unlikely to ever see the light of day again. That was the last time he used music to woo a girl. But there’s no debate Make Way For Love is, at least in part, a letter to a woman.
Williams split from long-term girlfriend – and fellow Lyttelton musician – Aldous (Hannah) Harding at the end of 2016.
What came next were 15 songs written in just over a month while Williams recovered from the heartbreak and the unexpected heights his first album reached.
‘‘Writing was really subconscious. And scary. I don’t remember a lot of it. It’s a strange thing to have something you are committing to record – literally – and to not have complete control over every step of that is kind of insane.
‘‘It was a bit of a crime of passion.’’
But it was also necessary. For the first time in his life, he says he needed music ‘‘on an ego level’’.
Until now, Williams has been a songwriter telling other people’s stories, in the oldest folk-music sense. He once said if a song was inspired by a feeling, he’d try to obscure it and just think about the story. The arms-length separation is gone now, and in its place is a collection of music pulled directly from his own painful experiences.
‘‘On Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore, there is a feeling in that song that I literally tried to talk to Hannah about and couldn’t express it. So I had to write a song about it and try.’’
The song then became a duet between the estranged pair. ‘‘It’s funny. I’m writing lyrics that she’s singing to me, which is quite twisted and strange, but it’s me setting up a strawman… Just the fact that she agreed to sing it, at least means that she can empathise with my reading of the situation. What other field do you get to do that? It’s definitely sociopathic, in an accepted way.’’
Of course he’s handsome and charming, but Williams is also bashful and shy and a little forgetful, it turns out. Midway through talking, he realises he has misplaced the brand new pair of Karen Walker sunglasses he was gifted just days earlier. It borders on a national crime, I suggest – and he doesn’t disagree.
When his publicist manages to hunt them down, he slaps them on and wears them for the next 10 minutes, the fear of losing them again is just too real.
It’s not very rock’n’roll, but this album is a little less country than his first. Again, though, he says it wasn’t a conscious decision.
‘‘When I was writing these songs, the melodies were just taking a different shape and I found myself going to the piano, rather than the guitar, which just makes me write in a different way – I’m limited by my abilities.’’
And the success he achieved with his first album still blows his mind.
‘‘I’ve learned a lot from the virgin world tour. It was good, but it was pretty long and drawn out and tough. I released the album here first, and then a year later in America, which meant I had to tour it twice. Both me and my