Karl S. Williams
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Karl S. Williams

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“It’s happened twice now,” he laughs. “It’s bound to happen sooner or later when you have as much hair as I do. It happened recently when we were at the House of Groove in Hollywood. We’d been doing a bit of a bar hop – we’d been to the Whisky Au-Go-Go and the Roxy. We were going to all of those famous, beautiful old bars and we ended up in the House of Groove. I leaned over a candle and my reflexes are not that quick. I heard this crackling and all of a sudden I could smell smoke and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m on fire.’ I did it the same way last time too. Candles in bars are a hazard.”

 

Williams plays a beautiful amalgam of blues, rock, country, hillbilly and gospel and has a voice like a goddamn angel. Actually, he sounds a little bit akin to Rufus Wainwright, if Wainwright were to go a bit hoedown on us. Unsurprisingly, he’s been snapped up by festivals and has just returned from a stint at the CMJ in New York, which also coupled as his first trip abroad. NY for your first time overseas is a bit daunting, isn’t it? “The thought of it in advance was more imposing than the reality,” Williams reflects. “I grew up in small towns, so the thought of diving in was a frightening experience, but when I got there it was all actually pretty friendly.”

 

If anyone was going to win over some hard-bitten New Yorkers, it’d be Williams: he’s affable, polite and speaks from the heart. It kind of makes sense then the heart motif is a recurring theme for Williams – both in his art and music. “I haven’t researched the origins of the symbol, but in modern days it’s everywhere” he admits. “Take the ‘I Heart NY’ t-shirts for example. It’s not necessarily cheapening the image, but it’s been adopted everywhere. For me, the heart is the place I’m aiming for.”

 

Indeed, Williams’ aim is bang on in that regard. If you tried to pin down a demographic for his audience, you’d be hard pressed, but Williams’ has a view about what unites them. “They tend to be people of a slightly romantic bent,” he observes. “People who are moved by music in general or beautiful art. I get feedback from people saying that they were moved and that’s the greatest praise, because it means that I’ve connected with those people. It’s nice. I have everyone from older folks to younger guys coming along and sometimes some of those younger guys have said to me, ‘I nearly cried,” guys who absolutely do not look the type and that’s nice too.”

 

For Williams, music now counts as a full-time occupation. Naturally, it wasn’t always the case and he describes the opportunity to leave his job as a kind of spiritual renewal. You wouldn’t pick it by looking at him, but Williams used to have a pretty straight day job. “I’ve done a bunch of different things,” he explains. “Once I worked in a coffee plant, but my main job was as a web developer and graphic designer. I worked in a corporate office and had to wear a tie and everything. I pushed the envelope quite a bit though. I really do have quite a bit of hair and my beard just kept growing and growing. Strangely enough, I found balancing music against my day job inspiring. I had enough time to think a lot and think about where the grass might be greener.

 

“Back then gigs were hard in terms of keeping office hours and then playing at nighttime and then being back early in the morning. It was a struggle, but I always felt blessed to have something else to dream about and go to.”

 

Sufficed to say, he’s made the transition into full-time musician pretty smoothly and it’s suiting him down to the ground. “It’s amazing,” he chuckles. “I have to pinch myself a little bit. It could end any moment, but I treat it like a precious gift. I was always told that no-one makes a living as a muso.”

 

Another thing that’s changed since Williams started out is his sound and the audience’s response. Previously, he enjoyed a more demure setting, but these days he gets off when the audience raises hell. He thinks the change in attitude might’ve something to do with the fact that he played with a band on his debut album Heartwood and has been playing intermittently with a band since. “It’s definitely opened my eyes to the way a big wall of sound can affect people,” he says. “I feel a lot more comfortable with that now. When I started playing, I had a softer more folky sound, although still in the blues realm, but through playing with a band I’ve found that it’s cathartic to holler.”

 

BY MEG CRAWFORD