Everything happens for a reason may be a cliché, but it's one that Los Angeles-via-Texas indie folk singer-songwriter Jess Williamson holds deeply in her heart these days.
But if you talked to Williamson in 2020? Well let's just say her outlook may have been a touch different. It's not hyperbole to say her world was falling apart around her at the time.
Williamson dropped her album Sorceress in February 2020... only to have the music world shut down by COVID. Adding salt to that wound, the pandemic's quelling of her momentum led to her professional team (managers, bookers, etc.) dropping her. At least when her work life was cratering she had her personal life to fall back on, right? Right? Well... no. Her relationship with her musically collaborative partner — the person she thought she was going to marry — also fell apart. (Whoof.)
But if there's any upside to the rock bottom that Williamson was hitting, it's that there was nowhere to go but up. So she just kept going. She started writing though the darkness, exposing the raw emotional parts of her. She found a new love in an old West Texas acquaintance living in the small town of Marfa. And she synthesized all that together to create her breathtaking 2023 album, Time Ain't Accidental.
"The title Time Ain't Accidental, it's this reminder. I believe there are no accidents, and that timing works out the way it's supposed to. I had a plan, and I had a story of exactly what my life was going to look like. And it all got turned upside down," Williamson says. "And I just put it all into the songs on this album. When I was in some of the scariest moments, I would just sit at my piano and pour it all into writing a song. And then I ended up falling in love with somebody new and having a whole different experience that I never even would have imagined for myself that was so much different than I ever thought love could feel. And it changed the trajectory of my whole life. And so that's just the kind of stuff where I look back and I'm like, 'Oh yeah, if things had gone my way, my life would look totally different today.' And I'm so happy with how things turned out."
Time Ain't Accidental finds Williamson drawing from the places she's called home. The album emits an intoxicating blend of the country-folk roots of her Texas upbringing and the modern touches one might expect from an Angeleno. There aren't a ton of country-leaning albums that name-check poet Raymond Carver and feature Jungian linear notes. As she puts it, "The sonic choices that we made, and the instrument choices that we made, I just feel like that's me. It's a little Marfa. It's a little LA. I'm both."
The feel of the album actually comes across via its cover photo in which Williamson is smiling and holding herself as a lightning storm rages in the background. The record is lush with evocative lyricism about the dark days and still searching for real love across time and distance — open-hearted hoping in spite of a wave of rejection.
The arrangements range from minimal meditations to big horn-infused soundscapes, but literally the first sounds on the album-opening title track are the ones that are most striking — electronic beats Williamson made on her phone. While pairing these extremely modern rhythmic sounds with traditional country arrangements and Wiliamson's honey-sweet voice might sound like an off-putting combo, it leads to pure indie folk bliss.
Williamson made the beats on an iPhone app called FunkBox when writing the songs in isolation as a way of having "sort of a skeleton that everything could hang on." While she personally liked their feel, she presumed that when she got into the studio, her producer Brad Cook would instantly tell her to replace the demo beats with someone playing a live drum kit. But instead they were kept, giving the often overly second-guessing Williamson a validating confidence boost.
"It surprised me, but it was a pleasant surprise. Because the truth is, I really liked them. And I had grown attached to them," Williamson says. "And [Brad] said, 'No, you wrote the songs around these beats, we're gonna keep these.' And I'm so glad we did. Because, to me, it's a nod to my process. A lot of these songs were written during lockdown during COVID. And I was alone. This record is the most me that I've ever felt on a record."
Considering the splendid quality of Time Ain't Accidental and the fact that it's Williamson's fifth solo LP, it's surprising to hear that this is the first time she's actually felt fully comfortable in her artistry.
"This record was the first time that I really thought of myself as a songwriter. I had never really thought about myself that way before," she says. "I would say that I was a singer-songwriter if people asked, but I didn't understand how important the craft of songwriting is. I knew that the word for what I was doing was songwriting, but I maybe didn't fully understand the implications of that term."
"I went into making this record as a songwriter," she continues. "What I've learned is the best songs stand on their own — if it's just a voice and an instrument, it's still compelling. Whereas in the past, I leaned into production and the live band sound, and I thought that's what made a good song or a good record. Now, I've changed."
Listening through Williamson's discography, you can hear a voice trying to find its sound. Her debut record, 2014's Native State, takes a minimalist, bare bones folk approach and there's so much warble in her voice that it almost seems like someone with a completely different accent. The sound and confidence expanded on 2016's Heart Song, while 2018's Cosmic Wink brought another layer of sonic depth that calls to mind Angel Olsen. By the time Sorceress arrived, Williamson had found an approximation of her current style. But again, that dropped at the wrong time in terms of world events.
A big aha moment in Williamson's path to musical self-discovery came when she connected with Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield during the dark times. Their mutual admiration for each other's music led to the formation of their side project, Plains, which released its debut album I Walked With You a Ways in 2022. Working with the more established Crutchfield on something that wasn't just her own allowed Williamson to approach songcraft with a newer, freer sense of creativity — one that laid the groundwork for Time Ain't Accidental.
"I didn't have a lot of early success. And I think that, for me, that was a good thing. Because it took this long for me to even be this comfortable in my own skin," she says. "This record for me, it is really a lot about just learning to trust myself and stand on my own. And once I started to do that, I started to write different songs. I started to write more vulnerable, better songs. And so I do really look back on all the albums I've put out, and I can see how each one was a different snapshot of where I was in my life. And I can see, like, my very earliest stuff — I can see who that girl was. And I'm writing for my next record, and it's cool to see how the writing is changing."
Things keep changing for Jess Williamson. Nothing about her past four years has gone to plan.
And isn't that just wonderful? ♦
Jess Williamson, Erin Rae • Thu, March 7 at 9 pm • $25 • 21+ • The District Bar • 916 W. First Ave. • sp.knittingfactory.com
