With Her New LP, Jess Williamson Is Moving Foward In Music And Life

Sometimes the best ideas come from being initially seen as throwaways. That could certainly be the case for Jess Williamson’s new album Time Ain’t Accidental. According to the country-folk musician, a lot of songs for that record were first written with the use of an iPhone drum machine app during the period of the pandemic lockdown—which would later become a happy accident among others.

“In my mind, those were always placeholders, and I used those on the demos that I made,” she says now. “I brought into the studio with Brad Cook, who produced my record. He loved them and he literally took my phone and plugged it right into the desktop computer and ripped those beats right off of my phone into the session that we were working on. “He was like, ‘Look, you wrote these songs around these beats. We need to keep them in there.’”

The drum machine beat is quite evident on the infectious title song from Williamson’s latest and excellent roots-laden LP, which seems poised to be her breakout release; Showcasing her expressive and heartfelt singing, Time Ain’t Accidental marks another evolution in Williamson’s sound ever since she put out her 2014 debut record, Native State.

“I think Sorceress [from 2020] was the first record that I started to lean into some more traditional country instrumentation,” Williamson says of the difference between her previous album and this new one. “With [Time Ain’t Accidental], it was a chance to hang on into that. I love country music, and I love those sounds. This album has banjo and steel guitar. It was an opportunity to keep those country elements, but do something really new with it and not be bound to any one genre and play with these kinds of sonic textures.”

Thematically, Time Ain’t Accidental could be seen as a snapshot of Williamson’s life in the last three years, which saw the end of a romantic relationship and the start of a new one. Those feelings of love, heartbreak and self-discovery are certainly reflected in the new album, particularly via the exuberantly romantic title track (“I read you Raymond Carver by the pool bar like a lady/Known you for a while and I like calling you baby,” goes the chorus).

“It was definitely a couple of years that felt like quite the journey,” Williamson says. “It was a lot of sadness and rejection and feeling really lonely—and then it being COVID and not being able to see friends or be out in the world and grappling with a lot of big feelings of really asking myself, ‘Maybe I’ll just be alone forever’….then finding real love with a new person, and being able to enter into a new relationship as a different version of myself as a result of everything I’ve been through. So the record really tells that story. There are a lot of sad songs on the album, but then there are also these songs that celebrate love that have a lot of hope, too.”

One of the first singles released ahead of the album was the winsome-sounding pop of “Hunter,” a song that Williamson had earlier performed during her tour as part of the musical duo Plains from last year. It was based on Williamson’s experience of using a dating app as she was putting down roots in Los Angeles when lockdown restrictions eased. “My home is in Texas, but I wanted to really dig into being in Los Angeles and I wanted to meet people,” she recalls. “For the first time in my life, I tried the dating app thing. I lasted about two weeks. It was a very short-lived experiment. I really felt like I was being thrown to the wolves, like the opening line of that song. It was also a moment when I thought I could be a person that could casually date and not be in something serious.

“I learned from that experience that actually it’s not that interesting to me. And this idea of casually dating is really not for me. So it was a pretty quick lesson that I learned, and that’s where that line ‘I’m a hunter for the real thing’ comes from, because I kind of had to try it to realize that it really wasn’t for me. Actually, I’m really only interested in real love at this point in my life.”

The autobiographical nature of the album can be further heard on two tracks, “Texas Two Step” and “Topanga Two Step,” both of which covey Williamson’s feelings of displacement in Texas and Los Angeles. “Those songs were written in this moment where I felt a little bit like an outsider in my home in Texas because I wasn’t there anymore, but I also simultaneously felt an outsider in L.A. And it was this moment of questioning like: ‘Where do I really belong?’

“There’s this dance called the Texas two-step that everybody learns. Even in school, you learn it as a kid and it’s known to be very easy. And for whatever reason, I still to this day don’t know how to do this dance. To me, that became this metaphor of everybody else knows the moves and they’re all doing it right, but I was struggling to keep up. There was a feeling of going back to Texas and feeling like, ‘I don’t know if I really belong here right now’—and then being in L.A. and feeling like ‘I really don’t feel I belong here right now.’”

Time Ain’t Accidental concludes with the poignant and soulful “Roads,” a track she says is about celebrating moves and accepting love. “The first line of the song is, “Find what’s freely given,” and I think that was something that I learned through the couple of years that are in the record–which is that when we’re desperate for something, when we’re aching for something, that’s usually not the right place to put our energy. There’s also this quote by Rumi that I love, which is: ‘What you seek is seeking you.’ When I reconnected with the person that I’m now still with to this day two years later, it was this really mutual feeling of excitement. We were drawn to each other and it was easy. There was no guessing game, and there was no roller coaster of emotions. It was like we just knew. And so to me, that song “Roads” is a way to end the album on a high note.”

Hailing from Austin, Texas, Williamson knew at an early age that she wanted to pursue music (she did concerts with a friend at the playground singing pop songs) and even aspired to become Dolly Parton. But she didn’t think it would become realistic until around the time she attended college in New York City. “I just didn’t see a path to [music] at a certain point,” she remembers. “I went to college and I studied photography and was going down a little bit of a more traditional path thinking, ‘Maybe that was just a childhood dream.’ And I had kind of a come to Jesus moment when I started to realize I was taking out so many loans and that if I kept this program, I was gonna be forced to get a job-job to pay everything back. I was only 21 at the time, and I realized if I’m ever gonna pursue music, it’s now or never. So I dropped out of school and decided to just give it a try. And I guess I’m still trying. (laughs)

A turning point for her was hooking up with the indie label Mexican Summer as she gradually built name recognition as a performer. “I always say other musicians are the ones that discover the new artists…and eventually the labels. the press and the booking agents catch on,” Williamson says. “It was just beginning to connect with other musicians whose work I admired and they helped me and I learned from them, and they took me on the road and they collaborated with me. But signing to Mexican Summer was definitely the very first sort of industry thing to start paying attention, because I was self-releasing for years. I self-released two records when I was living in Austin. When I moved to L.A., I started to meet more musicians. I started touring more, and then I eventually signed to Mexican Summer.”

In 2022, Williamson and Waxhatchee’s Katie Crutchfield as the duo Plains put out their record, I Walked With You a Ways, which received rave reviews and futher elevated Williamson’s profile. That album was written at the same time she was making what would become Time Ain’t Accidental; in a way, the Plains album contributed to Williamson’s vision for her own solo project. “When Sorceress came out, it was like peak COVID times and I wasn’t gonna be able to tour. When I realized all of the plans for that record were being canceled, I just dove into writing as much as I could because I felt, ‘Well, I better get the next one out as soon as I can.’ It was during that time of intense writing that Katie and I started talking about doing a project together. At that point I had a handful of songs that I thought would be for my next record.

“There were these two songs that were already feeling a little bit different from the other ones I was writing. They were leaning more heavily country, and the project that Katie and I wanted to start, we knew we wanted to be a country band. I was like, ‘You know Katie, I have these two songs that feel a little bit like outliers. What if I bring this to the table and we start here?’ And those songs that I brought to our first Plains session were “Summer Sun” and “No Record of Wrongs.” So those were the very first Plains songs and ended up on the record. That was really helpful because then I could see with what I was writing: ‘Okay, these songs really fit in with the Plains world that we’re building and then these other songs make more sense for my next record.’”

Meanwhile, Williamson is currently on tour supporting Time Ain’t Accidental, which she considers her best work to date; it has already generated positive reviews. “It feels appropriate for this moment in time,” she says of its merger of traditional and modern sounds. “It’s so easy for something to feel too derivative or to throw back-y, and then it can also be so easy to go too modern. And I love that they work together in this really sweet way on this record.”