Jess Williamson – Time Ain’t Accidental

The pandemic marked a change of direction for Jess Williamson, as a protracted break from a romantic partner and musical collaborator set the stage for a solo act of rare candour and freewheeling vigour. She recorded the stripped-back standalone ‘Pictures of Flowers’ at her home in Los Angeles, entered the local dating pool then collaborated with Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee for the country parley of I Walked With You A Ways. That experience encouraged her to set her voice free from the choral harmonies and other accoutrements of her last solo album Sorceress. The iPhone drum machine stuck around as her backing of choice, and over spare accompaniment on the steel guitar, banjo, Wurlitzer organ, saxophone or clarinet her voice began to soar, as she set about compiling an album of evocative Western landscapes and ‘tear-in-beer’ anthems offering a uniquely modern take on some of the well-worn tropes of country music.

Always an elegant lyricist, on Time Ain’t Accidental the artist is more personal and profane, caught up in all of the various entanglements of romance, from the sore knees and peach cups of ‘God in Everything’ which eschews the worship of Bob Dylan and Townes Van Zandt for a kind of resolute windswept irresoluteness, to the dark back deck of ‘Stampede’ or the ‘angel in bed with me, his face between my legs’ of the title track. On ‘Time Ain’t Accidental’ and ‘Hunter’ – a killer one-two punch before ‘Chasing Spirts’ stretches out into wide open vistas – there is something furtive and even esoteric about some of the gestures and depictions of place even though the references are hardly obscure, like Raymond Carver novels by a pool bar, a journey through Odessa to Coahoma, and working ‘both sides of the Shangri-La’ which each suggest the sort of shorthands by which we might define ourselves or which might serve as the building blocks of relationships, even when it turns out we’re just passing through.

On the other hand it’s rare to hear lines like ‘hell is a real place’ or ‘the difference between us is when I sing it I really mean it’ and feel the sentiment both poignant and hard-won. Williamson’s voice with its Texan twang always provides the tonic, sometimes lovelorn but too self-reliant to be forlorn, cool and caustic or a place of respite as the world around her swirls. ‘Topanga Two Step’ is another earworm which proves a perfect sonata through the statement, development and recapitulation of its themes around naif innocence and wanton attachment, which imply that a lesson learned always plays second fiddle to the thrill of experience. And through the bottom of a pitcher, tumbler or stemmed glass, Williamson hones in on the elusiveness of these spirits, always back where we first found them while we too are more or less the same as we once were.