Eccentric, powerful and deeply personal
Jess Williamson’s Texas lilt seeps ahead of the acoustic guitar and through the eclectic pop beat of “Time Ain’t Accidental” in this throttling romantic goodbye song about the person we want when we find ourselves in a place where we don’t really want them. In a chorus that alludes to the impermanence of their space “by the pool bar.” In moments of brief togetherness, the characters in the song experience depths of connection through short stories of Raymond Carver, “pretend it’s our honeymoon” and how long they have known each other.
Williamson etches away the beats of the piano, the bass drum, the overarching electric country guitar chords and cuts through it with “I want a mirror not a piece of glass.” In an autobiographic song that revels in the truth of “being a hunter for the real thing,” Williamson admits to rushing through relationships and moving fast to find out whether it will fail or last. The changes in tempo between the verse and chorus echo that rhythm and carry the listener along. It is as if the listener were in her car with the windows down, speeding through a tunnel into Los Angeles, the beats steady like alternating disco-ball streetlights.
In an effort to save someone from their own addiction and keep them from “shaving ten years off their life” she expresses how loving is difficult. To grasp at straws and look for “something simple worth staying in town for” the song expresses the differences between someone who is fighting for their dreams and someone who says they are while “chasing spirits.”
Williamson’s vocals take center stage in “Tobacco Two Step,” which is accentuated by the chords of acoustic guitar. In the background the alternating scratches of the bowstring on the violin’s strings becomes like static and “smoke in the air.” The piano adds depth and grounds the two as she sings “thought I was the one with some kind of key” with such confusion, agony and despair that can only be sung from the very personal experience of losing someone once loved.
The stinging lyricism of “God in Everything” stands out against the traditional country ballad. The insignificant things become the massive things when a relationship is at its end and the other party has moved on. It becomes a constant agonizing reaping of questions about why they were not good enough. Williamson sings, “there was never a shortage of the women in boots,” accentuating the general taste of the character on the other side of this song. The taste of monotony, of consistently filling the hypothetical shoes with different women, all without a semblance of difference between them while questioning if they ever noticed how she “took her tea.”
In “A Few Seasons” Williamson sings about how “our life and our love slowly slipped away” in a declaration of the codependency of a failed relationship. The way she will keep the rooms in the cabinet of her heart “dark” and questions why he was able to walk away. What does that mean about her if he did not “yearn” for her? The solemn tone of the song comes down to the conceptual reality of self-worth in a crumbling partnership. When the things that used to be prized become faults and how from the outside looking in someone can be “admired for patience and strength.” However, the aching in their bones rally around the way she “accommodate[d] and got so small” in an effort to “step so far out of the way” and that what was left was “nothing…at all.”
“Something’s In the Way” is musically different from any other song on the album; it utilizes a full array of woodwind and percussion instruments to add an almost upbeat cheery optimism to an otherwise lyrically dark song. In asking “what happened to your heart a year ago” Williamson acknowledges the invisible layer of hurt that etches its way into the aura of people long after the original breaking occurred.
The album closer “Roads” compiles the metaphorical storms Williamson tread through to find the home where she is now. It is all made up of “the roads we didn’t travel and everything we left unsaid.” It surmises an album that is both eclectic in its instrumentation and entrancing in Williamson’s vocalization. It is evident that she has weathered the proverbial storm and found something vital to her craft along the way: her own voice.
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