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JOE WILLIAMS |
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Joe Williams is a 35 year-old library scientist with an amazing wife and two adorable children. Joe Williams also writes songs. Beautiful songs. Funny Songs. Songs that glide and play like a starlet on a first date. Simple songs with a full charming regalia of ill-advised rhymes and concocted words. Songs that chronicle a secret world of heroicly lost bovine, scared recliners, forgotten canoes, environmentally conscious sugar buzzes, hippie joggers, hesitating-darting-hesitating squirrels, and love. "I like to try and write romantically about unromantic things, like waking up cramped and entangled with your lover, with half your appendages asleep. Or kissing someone for the first time, doing it poorly and hoping they don't mind," says Joe. Joe constantly seeks the extraordinary in the ordinary. Counting writers Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Charles Dickens, and Sam Shepard as influences, Joe follows their lead hunting the impish truth in small details and tiny moments, "Musically, my goals are pretty basic," says Joe. "I'm interested in the way lots of old folk music and old country roots songs were written about really common things like chickens and skeletons and food instead of a bigger picture, whatever that might be." Joe first performed for an audience at Warren Wilson College, near Asheville, NC, joining the lineage of such WWC singer/songwriters as Billy Ed Wheeler, David Holt, David Wilcox, and Doug Orr. The first song he performed was a ode to "the only thing stable in this world today...your very own cold Jell-O mold parfait." Audiences have been hooked on his storytelling treats ever since. At a show, it's common to see several generations following Joe and singing along with his conjured cast of animals, vegetables, and minerals. "I enjoy taking that kind of old subject matter and modernizing it a little bit, (see Mustang Romeo and Lone Cow of Pittsburgh) and playing in the same traditional kinds of arrangements. So an old time song might be about a fox running from hunters through the woods, and I'm writing about a squirrel running from a car across a highway." In Deep into Autumn, a ballad about an "all-but forgotten" pond canoe, Joe says to the depressed and aging vessel, "If she could step back and see how she appears to me, there's just no such thing as entropy." Joe sings and proves that while we fight against entropy and the cluttered confusion of a 24/7 world, the simplicity, richness, and humor which inspired so many old-fashioned folk songs still exists in modern life if we have the imagination to recognize it. This summer Joe Williams packs up 15 years in North
Carolina and heads West for College Station, TX. One imagines that
come summer, Joe will be up early with the rising Texan sun, and
armed with a guitar and a hot cup of coffee, he'll be taking vantage
from an undisclosed porch swing and tickling the dry air with a
few requests. |
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