With some artists the creative spark doesn’t stop just because the guitar gets put down. That’s Annie Williams. Anyone who knows her would say the same. From her self-built straw bale house to her hand-sewn performance costumes to her deeply personal songs, the muse follows her everywhere she goes, and does its best to keep up.
She just released her debut album, Visitor, seven years and one lifetime in the making. Produced with Bill Reynolds of Band of Horses, it’s at once playful and fresh and, like Annie, pretty damn original. The cover of the record is a photograph of the artist jumping through a ring of fire on her motorcycle. The fire was real, the ring was homemade.
In this thought-provoking conversation we talk about some of the more notable moments in a career nosing into its twentieth year, like, say, her arrival in Nashville. She was living in Wyoming and a touring christian hip hop group saw her play and invited her to roll with them back to Tennessee. I mean of course.
We discuss how her decision to break away from her small business designing handmade bags dovetailed unexpectedly with her first publishing deal, and how that led to sync licenses on several TV shows.
And you might be hard pressed to get her to admit it, but Annie is an actor, and a good one. She was approached to star in the film A Funeral for Lightning directed by Emily Kai Bock, which premiered at TIFF and went on to win the Grand Jury Award for Best Short Film at the LA Film Festival. Like many of her opportunities, it was gifted, not sought.
There’s a word for people like Annie Williams and that word is autodidact. She teaches herself to do things and then she does those things at her own speed in a sort of secret dance with the world around her. Its an orchestration of energy, at once mysterious and inevitable.
There’s so much I won’t tell you about, so you can discover it yourself. I guess I should say she plays an unreleased song live in the studio. Emily. Listen:
I hope you take a moment to listen to or watch episode #141 of the Morse Code Podcast. It’s a good one.
Find Annie:
Website: https://annie-williams.com/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/anniewilliams___
Annie Williams: Jump your motorcycle through a ring of fire and see what happens. MCP #141