featuring the very best of americana, alt.country and roots music
June 18, 2023
Scott Foley, purveyor of dust
Are my love songs lies now that the love is gone asks Jess Williamson on Time Ain't Accidental (Mexican Summer). The songwriter will keep that question close on her first solo project since 2020's superb Sorceress. Williamson's new collection is less a continuation of that elemental, mystical force than a full-scale artistic reorientation. She had worked alongside RF Shannon's Shane Renfro on that record and on 2018's Cosmic Wink, but that personal and professional partnership met a bad end.
Seemingly adrift during the early pandemic, Williamson speaks of her momentarily flagging confidence and self-doubt as a solo writer. She eventually found support from Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield who had released her own album, Saint Cloud, just a few weeks prior to Sorceress. Together, as Plains they created one of last year's finest LPs, the breezy 90s country-pop paean I Walked With You a Ways. Time Ain't Accidental ain't Plains-redux, but it does speak to how Williamson leaned into her musical partnership with Crutchfield as a springboard and a support, a way to bolster confidence and to reorient. Time sets aside the relatively plentiful production of her first couple records and embraces the minimalist approach of Plains.
On her new album, Jess Williamson processes her breakup and the subsequent search for human connection in the time of Covid. When you walk as a woman who's only known love / It's easy to miss the signs she sings on the highlight "Hunter". Produced by Brad Cook, who served the same role for Plains, the song features some of country music's familiar trappings, especially in Deshawn Hickman's pedal steel, but delivers a pop-friendly chorus that brings to mind Haim or Jenny Lewis. While Phil Cook contributes percussion to Time, the basic beats come courtesy of Williamson's iPhone drum machine app. The digital rhythms establish a groove on "Topanga Two Step", as the singer addresses the awkwardness of being a Texan looking for love in LA. Hardly a shrinking violet, Williamson steps almost boldly into her sensuality: It's my tongue in your mouth / It's all my windows down / What you take me for / Take me for a ride / No hands, let the car drive / Baby, god damn.
That elemental fire, that sense-ual nature is one aspect of her earlier work that Williamson fully occupies on her new collection. Especially on Sorceress, a new age spirituality wafted like nag champa incense from her music. Here, she speaks of synchronicity on the title track, encouraging a patience or a surrender as the universe unfolds its purpose. That busy programmed percussion percolates beneath a strummed acoustic, joined by banjo and Matt Douglas' woodwinds. Williamson actually cites Jung's definition of god as that which upsets our plans and scuttles our best intentions. On "God in Everything", she reminds us that god is in the earthly and the mess of the everyday. Did you notice how I served my tea?
While much of the instrumentation on Time Ain't Accidental checks the country box, Williamson and Cook build their arrangements so that they don't sound as beholden to tradition as Plains. Where some artists might add sounds and textures in a journey towards their desired sound, Williamson pares back and finds strength in simplicity on songs like "Tobacco Two Step". Beneath a moving, mannered vocal, there is little more than the sigh of pedal steel and piano chords. "Stampede" is another beautiful, misty ballad, addressing the profound sadness in distance: Heard it's a battle / I know you're giving them hell / And maybe I can love you better / From three states away.
The weaving of Crutchfield and Williamson's vocals undoubtedly defined Plains, and the singer's delivery on Time is spot-on country, but with an added wildness and edge that anchor the songs in the indie-folk realm. "Chasing Spirit" and "I'd Come To Your Call" Williamson sings with a yearning and a wavering confidence, the narrator pausing between the bridle and the open field: There's nothing in LA for me / Just a lonely singer at the beach / I could start a garden with the landlord / Something good and simple / And worth staying in town for. These vocals are in perfect service of her impressively thoughtful lyrics throughout, lyrics that so aptly portray her moment in time. On "Stampede": I can close my eyes and be back in our love / It's forever somewhere, a loop we're part of / Behind the foggy haze and mist / Is an endless prairie, I see us there as kids / I loved you beyond time, beyond all pain / Shatter the land, the light remains.
Yet Jess Williamson would testify that god dwells within this mess, between connection and separation, between confidence and doubt, between Marfa and LA. While we tend to praise the strength we recognize in self-control and change management, Time Ain't Accidental would remind us that it's often in moment of letting go that we're closest to the spirit. The albums closer, "Roads", reads like a Psalm, almost like a piece from Van Morrison's long-lost no guru period. Perhaps at her most vulnerable time, bolstered by her experience with Plains, Jess Williamson demonstrates an impressive ability to achieve a musical balance in the midst of all the seeming instability, following her mercurial, elemental muse into a new territory and succeeding beyond her expectations.
Once again, I'm offering a radical kind of love / And it's just the wrong time ...
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