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JOE WILLIAMS
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Joe Williams
Self Titled
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Track Commentary:
Three Squirrels:
I had set out to write a song in sort of
a 'classic' folk song style of working sequentially through something.
In this case, squirrels. And I clearly remember writing these
lyrics, sitting on a dilapidated red pillow-chair-thing on the
front porch of my home at that time: 506 West Cameron Avenue,
Chapel Hill, NC, directly across the street from the UNC Power
Plant. Cameron is lined with these great old Willow Oaks, 250-300
years old, so the street is also home to a whole lot of squirrels.
The street also gets a lot of traffic. Anyway, I was thinking
about old time music pretty heavily back then, and I began wondering
how songwriters back then would have approached a squirrel song.
Probably in a pretty straight-forward manner, either talking about
the frenetic way they move, or about the process of hunting them,
categorizing the things you can make with their bodies, whatever.
Certainly none of that was my experience with squirrels, though.
Most people I know have a new and more limited kind of reference
with squirrels. So I tried to capture that change here, but to
tell it in a simple folkie style.
Mustang Romeo:
All of the songs on this CD have some horribly
autobiographical
information embedded inside. And even though I've never owned
a muscle car like Romeo here, I have definitely spent some years
in this mode of living. Actually, I did own a '71 AMC Gremlin
which I believe is still the smallest-framed car to ever house
a V8 engine. And that's all those cars really did, too: house
the giant engine. You can say what you want, but Gremlins were
pretty great cars and fast as hell. But I don't think they could
honestly classify as 'hot rods.'
Anyway, this song here was originally fueled by
some vague teenage memories of Friday nights in uptown Albuquerque.
Like most hometowns, our Friday nights brought out the armies
of young people and their camaro armadas, revving and circling
away their time in search of true love. And I started thinking
of the mode people can get into when they're seeking a mate, and
how the ability to slip into that mode doesn't completely go away
once you've "grown up." At least it didn't for me. And
I thought of those aging muscle cars. And I've always wished I
could yodel. And then I put my pen on the paper and out popped
Mustang Romeo.
Evolution:
Evolution takes an excruciatingly long
time, and I'm lucky to have found someone willing to wait out
the changes. These lyrics are pretty straight-forward, but here's
a side note about how I arrived at writing this song. It seems
like essayists and poets are always writing responses to other
essayists' or poets' works, but you don't see much of that kind
of thing in the music world.
Well, I was hunting for something to write about.
And as an exercise, I decided to try writing a response to a song
I was listening to on my stereo - James Taylor's "Gorilla."
I really love his 'Gorilla in a cage at your local zoo,' who 'mostly
sits around contemplating all the things that he'd prefer to do.'
I've always loved this song, and have always related easily to
this big, dumb brute. But he's kind of a tragic figure, because
he's rendered so helpless there in his cage. So, thirty-some-years
later, this is what my gorilla whispered to his.
The Waltz:
Writing about waltzing is like a core requirement
of folk songwriting. I recognized this obligation early on, and
began working on my own waltz-related piece shortly after I started
penning songs. I figured I'd just get this waltz requirement over
with, then I could get back into writing about food and domesticated
animals - my preferred electives. I came up with the musical framework
for this song very quickly, and had the cadence of the lyrics
in mind as I played. But I couldn't really write any lyrics that
were satisfying. Versions, revisions and rewrites of this song
began to fill notebooks over the course of a year. I was seriously
stuck.
For me, waltzes are these intrinsically sentimental
and beautiful tunes. And I planned to use the dance as a metphor
for love. I really wanted the song to be this very beautiful,
sort of flowery look at love, but all my attempts were coming
off as total cliche. When I finally looked back honestly on my
past love experiences, I saw that none of my relationships had
ever really flowed like a ballroom dance. There were definitely
some shining moments, but there was a whole lot of fumbling and
tripping happening out there, too. In fact, I'm not the easiest
person to coerce onto a dance floor to begin with. Anyway, once
I stopped trying to write that flowery waltz song, and recognized
my actual dancing abilities, this song leapt and flopped gracefully
onto the table.
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