Review- Jess Williamson: Time Ain’t Accidental (and one night in Milwaukee)
When the world shut down for the pandemic, Jess Williamson got to work – on herself and on her music. On the personal side, she recovered from the breakup of a long-term relationship, started a new one and re-oriented herself in the world.
Photo by Jackie Lee Young
On the music side, she found herself unable to tour behind her May 2020 album, Sorceress. So she hunkered down and began writing. The first product was a top three best album of 2022 – I Walked With You a Ways, teaming with Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield as the duo Plains.
And now comes Time Ain’t Accidental, to be released June 9 on the Mexican Summer label. Williamson is playing much of the album on tour – it's half the setlist – including a stop at Back Room at Colectivo in Milwaukee on June 5.
It’s a bold choice, playing mostly songs no one has heard. It worked because the new songs are stellar.
Teaming again with Plains producer Brad Cook, Time Ain’t Accidental retains the warmth and emotional intimacy of I Walked with You a Ways while injecting some indie pop musicality. Her voice rings somehow both crystalline and warm, like a modern day Emmylou Harris.
The lyrics are the real star. Williamson is a songwriter’s songwriter. She’s got a knack for capturing an idea in just a few words, incisive and cutting, creating an entire painting in just a few brushstrokes.
Like this bit in the breakup song “Hunter”: “When you walk as a woman who’s only known love / It’s easy to miss the signs / You bowed down to me like I was sent from above / But who's in your bed tonight?”
Or this, from “Tobacco Two Step,” on seeing an old flame: “Y’all seem good / She looks real young and nice and agreeable / And why am I not surprised?” And later in the song: “Did I miss my man? / Did he miss me too? / Did he just pass me by / When I was wasting my time waiting on you?”
From “Roads”: “Give me every detail of the thirsty women who craved you in their wild days / And now they’re home with kids.”
Williamson’s tour band – Matt Larocca (guitar), Caleb Veazey (bass) and Owen Barrett (drums) – juiced the subtle swing of “Roads,” getting the Milwaukee crowd dancing.
Williamson professed her love for Wisconsin, having just played the Shitty Barn in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and sampled a local delicacy, cheese curds. It was her first time in the state: “Is it a secret? I think I love it,” she said. (She’s not wrong. The payoff for Wisconsin’s interminable winter is a SPECTACULAR summer, where we pack a year’s worth of good times into three delirious months.)
The crowd returned the love, grooving along to the other new songs. The sometimes chatty crowd also stood rapt and silent as Williamson started her encore solo with a slow and haunting version of “I Walked With You a Ways,” the title cut of the Plains album.
She brought Pete McDermott and Sam Szymborski from opener Ladybird, a raucous country rock band from Milwaukee, onstage to sing John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” with her. McDermott, coincidence or not, sported a 2000-era Prine mustache.
But back to the new album… Plenty of songwriters can go five albums and not come up with some of the opening lines on this album:
“Time Ain’t Accidental”: “I have a life somewhere real far away / You wouldn’t make a lick of sense in that place.”
“Hunter”: “I’ve been thrown to the wolves and they ate me raw / Worked both sides at the Shangri-La / Thrown back a few more and I mopped up the floors / It’s a life of delusion and love is the cure.”
“Chasing Spirits”: “Are my love songs lies now that the love is gone?”
“A Few Seasons”: “Our friends could see it from a thousand miles away / And that’s how far you moved from our house.”
Other scattered gems glint like shiny pebbles in a stream:
“I want a mirror, not a piece of glass” and “honest as an ashtray,” both from “Hunter.”
From “Topanga Two Step”: “Is it a one time dream or a country queen that you take me for?”
From “I’d Come to Your Call”: “I sleep on the floor / ‘Til you pat on the bed.”
From “God in Everything”: “There’s never any shortage of the women in boots / With their long hair and tassels / Lord, they got nothin to lose.
A million songwriters have written a million songs about love. Few have written them as well as Williamson.
Find out more about Jess Williamson at the links below: