Jess Williamson
We meet a fine new singer-songwriter in LA to discuss her visionary brand of Americana… involves vegan tacos, magic mushrooms and wild coyotes
Welcome to Griffith Park, LA, where JESS WILLIAMSON is busy refining her distinctive brand of visionary Americana. Over vegan tacos she explains to Erin Osmon how microdosing on mushrooms, a terminally ill hound and “earthing shoes” contributed to her elemental new album, Cosmic Wink. “You have to figure out how to cast a spell,” she says…
Jess Williamson is recounting a recent trip to Bolinas, California, a small coastal community about an hour north of san Francisco. she and some friends were walking along the beach a – prototypically idyllic Northern California seascape
when they suddenly came upon a team of – scientists performing a necropsy on a dead whale. It was a particularly gory scene amidst the coastal serenity. “I thought, ‘Wow, what a lesson in two things being equally true and existing side by side,’” she says. The tale is a philosophical encapsulation of the singer-songwriter’s newfound acceptance of both yin and yang, in life and in songcraft, a poignant reminder that with light comes darkness.
Today, Williamson is at her home in the Los Feliz neighbourhood of LA, a backhouse she rents month to month in one of the East Side’s most desirable areas. Nestled among the foothills of the city’s Griffith Park, the tiny, open-floorplan bungalow with a lofted bedroom and dome roof reads like a minimalist extension of her southwestern influences. Crystals, rocks, incense and Native American-inspired art line each surface. Lee Hazlewood’s baritone croon pours in from a speaker in the kitchen. Williamson exudes an effortless tranquility, from the intrinsic joviality in her voice to her bare feet and makeup-free complexion. A vintage T-shirt speaks volumes about her journey. Texas Native, it proclaims.
She explains that the house is where she wrote much of her third LP, Cosmic Wink. True to the title’s mystical promise, it is a fluent melding of cosmogonic ponderance and earthly passions achieved via a mix of abstract country rock, gospel soul and psych blues. The album has been co-produced by her partner Shane Renfro – currently in the kitchen preparing a late-morning breakfast of vegan tacos with avocado. Williamson explains they took the house over from a friend, a rare feat in the aggressive LA rental market where prospective tenants often break into bidding wars for the perfect apartment. She began subletting it intermittently starting from January 2016. In the midst of travelling back and forth between her former base in Austin and LA, Williamson and Renfro fell in love.
A musician in his own right, who performs under the name RF Shannon, Renfro had been in her band for three years. And
they’d been friends for 10. As Williamson explains it, the feeling struck one night after a gig. “We were at this country bar [in Austin] and we were twostepping,” she says. “Shane and I two-stepped together, and it sounds so cheesy but it was basically the first time we’d ever touched.” The trepidation she felt about a relationship with a longtime friend and bandmate was palpable, and instantaneous. After a few months of resistance they succumbed to their feelings. They spent the next year on the road, touring overseas and subleasing temporary housing in Marfa and Lockhart, Texas, as well as the apartment in LA. “I had two months in this house before he got here,” Williamson says. “That’s when I wrote most of the songs on the record, blissed out, and thinking about love in a new way.”
WILLIAMSoN’S singing ability presented itself early on. Her parents even enrolled her in voice lessons at Septien Entertainment Group, a storied Dallas studio that has churned out pop stars like Jessica Simpson, Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez. The environment stood in contrast to the pop-punk music she loved at the time, bands like Blink 182, NoFX and MxPx. As a Dallas native, she had little exposure to any DIY musical movements. This led to a belief that the only way to a career in music was through commercial channels, which felt like a pipe dream. Her interest in photography seemed like a more viable career path, and by 10th grade she’d focused almost exclusively on her lenses.
She moved from Dallas to Austin in 2005 to study photojournalism, and had a show on the University of Texas campus radio station. She also covered music for the student newspaper. A show by local folk music legend Ralph E White, an idiosyncratic character formerly of beloved local roots trio the Bad Livers, served as a pivotal moment in her awakening as a musician. “He’s freak folk, but he’s old,” Renfro says. “And he’s an actual freak. It’s not trendy,” Williamson adds. She was so inspired by his multi-instrumental performance that she immediately took up banjo and guitar and began to write songs.
For much of her early, DIY career she believed she had to write music from a brooding point of view to be considered a ‘serious’ artist. She also struggled to find her place in the cultural landscape of her home in Austin, and among her peers in the greater independent music scene. “I’ve felt like I was not weird enough for the weird people, and not normal enough for the normal people,” she says. So she used music as a mask, a means for creating a persona that was not necessarily reflective of her truth. She adds that though she found a lot of joy in writing her early, self-released albums – 2014’s Native State and 2016’s
Heart Song – which were much more skeletal and plaintive, she didn’t enjoy performing the songs live. “You have to figure out how to cast a spell and get everyone’s attention, but that doesn’t always happen.”
Touring with Kevin Morby and his band inspired her to pursue a fuller, more upbeat sound. Night after night she witnessed audiences engaged in their performances, dancing and singing along to each song. It was an indisputable contrast to her solo acoustic performances as the opener, and a pivotal consideration as she embarked on writing her new record. “I wanted to connect in a way that feels joyful and like a celebration,” she says. She recalls a piece of advice from Morby. “Be 10,000 per cent yourself,” he told Williamson. “I’ve thought about that a lot,” she says. “If you’re totally yourself, you can’t mess up. You’re just being you. It was great advice.”
She’s toured with Morby three times at this point, once solo, once with Renfro and once as a tour photographer. Along the way she’s become close friends with the band’s lead guitarist, Meg Duffy, who also performs solo as Hand Habits. The pair originally met at the South By Southwest music festival in Austin in 2016, when they
“I was blissed out, thinking about love in a new way” jess williamson
were both booked for the She Shreds showcase. Soon after, they landed the same European booking agent, who added Williamson as Morby’s opener during an overseas tour later that year. It helped that they were often the only women on the tour, which made them instant hotel roommates. But they soon bonded over a shared humour and songwriting ideologies. “Her music has a stillness, and a certainty in that stillness,” Duffy says. “There’s a confidence in what’s being said.” Duffy adds that Williamson’s playfulness translates more clearly on her new album than any other. “Cosmic Wink, those two words together, remind me so much of Jess,” she says.
THE nine songs that comprise Cosmic Wink hum with deep purpose. Williamson’s reverbdrenched incantations transfix even the most casual listener. Her lyrics don’t so much declare their meaning as gently unfold to reveal them, a sort of reverse origami excavating each fold from paper square to finished form. The weight, the texture, the pattern, the doubling over and reworking, are of the utmost importance to her, resulting in keen observations that span the deeply personal and profoundly universal. Romance, consciousness, death, a mother’s love, are all fodder for a work that is an evident milestone in her decadelong journey into a full-time career as a musician. Like a less-introverted Hope Sandoval or a more at ease PJ Harvey, Williamson’s striking voice, combined with a general sunniness and new contentedness in love, steer the LP’s lyrical and sonic themes. “Her voice is so powerful, she can create this simple chord arrangement, then do vocal gymnastics between these chords,” Renfro says. Aside from his co-producer credits on Cosmic Wink, he is also co-writer on songs “I See The White”, “Dream State” and “Love On The Piano”. Williamson explains that it was an intentional act inspired by her wish to relinquish some control over the project and embrace a more collaborative and band-oriented sound.
She treated the songwriting process as a full-time job over the two months she stowed away in LA. Each morning she logged her dreams in a journal and then penned what she calls “Morning Pages”, an exercise she learned from the self-help book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. After she wrote the initial sketches of the songs in LA, the couple finished them together in two rooms they rented on the cheap in an old Victorian home in Lockhart, Texas. Renfro was there working with a few friends to open a coffee shop. In this smalltown setting with few distractions, the work felt natural. Sunlight and breezes poured in through open windows. During breaks the couple took long walks to reflect on their surroundings. “It didn’t so much feel like working on music as it just felt like our life,” he says. A few weeks before recording the songs, longtime friends and touring bandmates Tiffanie Lanmon (drums) and Meredith Stoner (bass) met them in Lockhart to flesh out the sounds and rehearse before the session.
In May 2017 the quartet took the songs to Dripping Springs, Texas, to work with recording engineer and producer Dan Duszynski, who plays in the indierock bands Loma and Cross Record. Williamson admired the sound he’d achieved on Molly Burch’s 2017 LP Please Be Mine, and knew his ways of working and rural home studio setting would be a perfect fit for her. The quartet were invited to stay at the house, and for breathers they walked a trail on the property that looped through a blanket of cedar trees, where deer scavenged and birds from a nearby sanctuary chirped. They even slept outside for the first few nights. Does Williamson know about ‘earthing’ – the New Age belief that connecting with the energy emanating from the planet is beneficial to health, creativity and well-being? She seems the type to be open to such theories, not to mention that nature was integral to her creative process. Her olivegreen eyes light up. “I wore earthing shoes while recording and while we were taking these walks,” she says. She runs to a nearby closet, and pulls out a simple pair of slippers made of soft black leather,
“Here music has a stillness, and a certainty in that stillness” MEg dUffy
which resemble a moccasin. “I don’t know if it’s real or not, but it felt right,” she says.
Album standout “I See The White” is her most obvious voyage into pop music waters, though Renfro is responsible for its hook. The tonal shift comes at the behest of Williamson, who cites the music of Kacey Musgraves as a recent inspiration, along with classic favourites like Townes Van Zandt, Nina Simone, Cat Power, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen. “I think what she wants to do is distil what makes this music timeless and catchy,” Renfro says. Bobbing acoustic guitar sets the stage for Williamson’s buoyant phrasing, which is elevated by anthemic backing vocals and climbing synths. The lyrics centre on the conspicuous ageing of her 14-year-old dog Frankie, who died a month before the song was recorded. But it’s also a celebration of love and companionship. “The circle never ends/The circle never
begins,” she sings of both the white fur encircling her beloved pet’s eyes and of the eternal nature of such deep-rooted bonds. The song acts as a mission statement for the eight tracks that follow, each a meditation on love or relationships that splits the difference between heartworn and handsprings. For the first time, she sounds comfortable in her own skin.
ON the day we meet, Williamson has just returned from 10 weeks on the road. Though she’s been drinking coffee all morning, she’s tired, and wants more. She suggests a jaunt to Trails Cafe, a casual woodland stand at the foot of Griffith Park, surrounded by trees and rustic picnic benches. She explains that the last time she was there she saw Nick Cave. “I didn’t know what to do in that situation as I didn’t want to bother him, but also it was Nick Cave at my coffee shop,” she says with an excited lilt. Climbing into her Subaru Outback station wagon for the 10-minute drive down the road, she points to the rearview mirror. Frankie’s embossed leather collar hangs around it, a dog version of a cowboy’s belt.
Walking up to the counter to order, she ruminates on the appeal of her surroundings, still enthralled with the romance that comes with being a new person in LA. “I don’t think people understand how wild LA is,” she says. “We’re basically in the country right now.” She recalls a time where she encountered a pack of coyotes strolling through the hills of the park, followed by a red fox and six deer. Though such bucolic scenes seem straight from an old-school Disney film, they’re common among the mountains and hills that support the sprawling city. It’s not all Kardashians and collagen.
Sitting down at an empty picnic table, Williamson confesses her fondness for the country music podcast
Cocaine & Rhinestones. She tore through it on her recent 20-hour drive from Austin to LA. She explains that the episode about mother-daughter country act The Judds was particularly intriguing as she was raised on their music. Though the dramatic back story was juicy, true to her instincts as a songwriter, talk of The Judds’ process is what drew her in. “I liked when he was discussing how formulaic the records were, how they were half catchy and half subdued,” she says. “There can be a real art to working within a formula.” She’s been considering a similar approach for her next record, but adds that she’ll never be able to fully abandon the flow of her natural instincts. As she finishes her drink, she considers her next move. With the joy of a child who’d just been given an ice cream cone, Williamson declares that she’s over the moon to stay at home and wash laundry. It’s proof that even the freest of spirits need to drop anchor. Cosmic Wink is available now on Mexican Summer; Jess Williamson tours the UK in October