‘COSMIC’ THINKING
Songwriter Jess Williamson gets introspective on her upcoming album
Jess Williamson enjoys the morning at her friends’ house in Los Angeles.
She’s taking in the early morning bird chirps while she eats a bowl of berries. Why not pamper herself — she’s earned it. Williamson kicked off her latest tour in Los Angeles and is a few shows into the journey.
She will make a stop in Taos in support of her new album, “Cosmic Wink.”
Aside from the new music, Williamson is also celebrating the tour with a new backing band.
“It’s been crazy because we’ve been rehearsing for awhile now working out all the kinks,” she says. “Last night was the second show of the tour and it was humbling. A lot of my friends came out to the show and showed their support after all these years. In fact, one of my friends was at one of my first shows back in 2010.”
In the eight years since beginning her journey in music, Williamson has changed a lot — both as a writer and as a human.
The inspiration for the album also came from the passing of her dog, Frankie.
“I noticed the graying of the fur around her eyes,” Williamson says. “And I realized that she was a physical manifestation of the passing of time, and it was heartbreaking. It’s so easy to act like we have all the time in the world, to feel immortal or invincible.”
Frankie died one month prior to Williamson getting into the studio to record.
She went to Lockhart, Texas, where she wrote and rehearsed with her band, as well as spent time with her boyfriend, Shane Renfro.
Renfro also co-produced “Cosmic Wink” with Dan Duszynski.
“It was the first time I was really willing to take a back seat to that process,” she says. “Shane and I had already been working together for so many years, and I wanted this album to be a marriage of our strengths.”
Williamson’s forever changing life served as an inspiration for it all.
Before writing “Cosmic Wink,” she was living in Austin, Texas, and made the jump to Los Angeles.
“When I left Austin and went to LA, I started to take my process more seriously,” she says. “I took my art more seriously. I didn’t have a normal job or a lot of friends when I first got to LA, so I just spent all day alone in that house writing. I got really into Carl Jung and working with my dreams. The title of the record is a reference to the Jungian concept of synchronicity and learning to live in a more magical way, looking for signs — which is maybe silly to some people, but it was working for me. And in a way, the record itself became a validation of the risks I was taking.”