Sam Williams is very much at the forefront of ‘the new Nashville' movement, pushing the boundaries of Country music genre.
Since the release of his debut album ‘Glasshouse Children‘ in 2021, Williams has been garnering plenty of critical acclaim and building himself a devoted following. Three years on from that record, Williams is back with ‘Act I: Scarlet Lonesome‘, the first of three new releases.
I caught up with Sam to find out about ‘Act I: Scarlet Lonesome', discuss being part of ‘the new Nashville' and to talk about his involvement in Cirque du Soleil's upcoming new show ‘Songblazer'…
How have you been doing since we saw each other in Nashville a couple of weeks back?
I'm good. It's busy. It's crazy putting an album together and then like living all of it. You'd usually have to wait quite a while before the music actually comes out. It's an interesting time but I'm doing good.
Before we jump into the new music, let's talk about CMA Fest. We saw each other briefly before you headed into a crazy few days of performing. What was the experience like for you/
CMA Fest this year was really awesome. It was my first true CMA Fest playing a stage and having several different shows throughout the city that week. People come here from all different kinds of places. I might be running around like a scattered chicken to different shows on the same day, but there's 1000s of people in the city that are having the time of their life; this is the pinnacle of their year right now and that's really awesome to see. (There was so) many different types of music (and I saw) some of my artist friends (that had) shows. The vibes are so good at Universal right now and there's so much going on (with) my album coming out. It's just a great time that I'll always be able to remember looking back at that, like the formative years, the early CMA Fests, and everything. It was awesome for me.
We've talked a number of times over the years and you know I've always been a fan and supporter of what you do. ‘Glasshouse Children' was a very personal body of work but this new collection, ‘Act I: Scarlet Lonesome', is even more personal which I didn't think possible. What was the concept behind this body of music?
I think it's personal in the same way that I write and I like to create projects. This is really only my sophomore album. ‘Glasshouse Children' had a deluxe but I didn't spend as much time creating as I would have liked to. I just wanted to have some more music out. Now we have so much more music coming. I think the conception of ‘Scarlet Lonesome', the same as my first album, I had the title. That usually only works that way for me for an album title not for songs and I was like, ‘I don't know what this means but it means something. Don't worry about it, we'll figure it out.' (laughs) That's just how I am. The songs began to come out, not necessarily in chronological order of the three acts of ‘Scarlet Lonesome'. The first act, when I'm writing a project like that, I (don't) necessarily set out to think, ‘OK, I need this and I need this, and all these things'. I don't really approach it that way. I like to just let the music come and I'm really grateful that I had such a close relationship with the producers of this. Me and the producers Ben Roberts and Nathan Sexton, we're super close and I love them dearly. We made it together and it just happened.
I think that it's personal in the same way as ‘Glasshouse Children', but just in a more mature way. I like to make music in real time, that's very important to me. It might not be released in real time, but the moments still matter. My first album dealt a lot with my upbringing, and transgressions against the past and things like that. ‘Scarlet Lonesome' is very present and it has more to do with fear of the future and the present than it does with the past. It has to has more to do with love and loss, and figuring your life out. A lot of my first job, I was pretty young. I'm in my mid-20s now and I've lived a lot for somebody my age, in my opinion. This ‘Act I' is really about love and being afraid of where you're at and where you're going. Being afraid of being in love and being loved. I think that we painted a really beautiful picture with it so I'm excited.
The first taster from this project was the Tammy Wynette cover “‘Til I Can Make It On My Own”, which you recorded with Carter Faith. It takes a brave person to cover Tammy Wynette and do it justice. What was it like working with Carter and why did you want to record that song?
Me and Carter have always wanted to do something together. I've always been a big fan of hers, I love Carter Faith down and she has one of the best voices in this city. My manager had the idea and I was like, ‘I just don't know about that?' I listened to the song (and) I wasn't as familiar with it. The subject matter really made a lot of sense where I was in my personal life. I was like, ‘no, this is sad. I can't do this.' (laughs). Me and Carter talked about it for a while and we had a lot of fun doing it. We did not study Tammy's record to a tee of how do we want to reinterpret this, we didn't do that at all, but Carter is a huge Tammy fan so it was easy for her to bring her spin and me to go into it (with a) blank slate (of) just how would I approach (as) a call an answer with a female voice like hers. We had so much fun doing the video. It came together last minute and I came up with the plot of it and the sequence in 15 minutes and then we just did it. We did it a few more times until we got it right. It's something that I think we'll always be able to look back on (as) early in our career when we were just making it happen in whatever way, shape or form we could. I think that's what it's about. I love artists like Carter that are very true in their music and have a very defined sound. I like to try to do that too. I love working with people that represent ‘the new Nashville' that I talk about; people out here that are a little bit different than the norm or maybe left of center, but do such a great job conveying their artistry.
I picked up on that in Nashville that ‘the new Nashville', as you say, is being more embraced after a period where fans of the genre seemed quite scared of anything outside of the expected. You really are a driving force of that so how does that feel?
I think that there's an element of fake it until you make it in anything. I was probably saying ‘the new Nashville' long before I really felt like I was making an impact in ‘the new Nashville', I just knew it meant something to me and it was me. To represent that feels natural to me. I've done several interviews recently about the term ‘outlaw' in country music and being a rebel. I did a documentary with Jelly Roll and Lainey Wilson called ‘Rebel Country' and I say in it (something) along the lines of ‘in this day and age, in my era of making music, being an outlaw is a little bit more having to do with making music that's true to yourself that's not really catered to somebody else. It's being an artist and making the music you want to make'. I feel like a lot of the outlaw movement of Country Music's past, that will forever be there – the 70s and the 80s, my dad, Waylon (Jennings) – it's just not that day and age anymore. I totally respect people that pay a lot of homage to that era with their own spin on it but it's not for everyone. I like to be an outlaw and represent ‘the new Nashville' in a way that it's always something new and fresh. I'm not looking at Country Music's past wondering how to spin on it, I'm looking at where I'm at now, where do I want to be and where do I want the genre to be?
We've talked about the aesthetic side of what you do before. The aesthetics with all of your work are so strong and the cover of ‘American Actress', which I saw all over Nashville during CMA Fest, is so striking. What can you tell me about the visuals for this project?
I've always been very eclectic. I'm a sneaker head (and) I like really random different things. Some people close to me would describe me as human encyclopedia vibes. I've always loved visuals. I can see a movie that people think is terrible and I love it because I'm in the movie already. I love creating a setting, creating a story, creating something that you can see yourself and that inspires you and blurs the lines of reality and a dreamscape in a way. Visuals have always been very important to me. I'm a humongous fan of pop music and hip-hop music and all different things outside of Country music completely. Bringing my own creative spin to thing for the music that comes out, that's just the cherry on top that I like it to be a certain way. I might be doing something and know that this is going to make something less palatable, or less popular than if I did option B or C or something, but I like to do what I want to do anyway because I just want it to be right. I want it to be real. I don't want it to be made into something else so it gets 50,000 more (views or likes).
With ‘Act I: Scarlet Lonesome' it's very sensual and sexy, and there's a lot of pain and sadness in it as well. You can feel it. I like when you press play on a project, that first instance when the record starts, that you feel something and you're left with some wonder. The album cover for ‘Act I' and I want it to be something that when I ask people I'm close to, I'm pretty detailed, I need to know what everybody thinks about it, if they like it or not. I might not care about it (but) I want to know if they like it. I'm like, ‘do you want to click this? Do you want to enter this world?' and if people are like, ‘yeah', I'm like, ‘okay, great'. I'm proud of the album cover. I did it with Alexa Kinigopoulos, who did my first album cover as well and I've done a lot of projects with her. It turned out great. I'm excited for the visuals to continue to play a role in the rollout of all the music for the next year.
The visuals, to me, always bring back that grandeur of classic Hollywood. It's a world I want to be a part of and I'm also so impressed by them…
It helps me be myself. The artists that I've always looked up to are themselves in their art, and can showcase that they can do a lot of different things. Bringing the visual aspect to things and animation and character is really important to me. For some people, it's not and predominantly in Country music it's not, but that's why I like to make all different kinds of stuff. Recently getting to do the theme song and write music for Cirque du Soleil, that opened up a whole different side of things for me. I always would have loved to do something like that, but never thought it would happen. It opened me up to let me write a country song for such a beautiful production and make it as big as I want and make it transcend the ceiling of the genre, but really tell a story. Projects like that excite me and get me going. It's the type of stuff I really love to be a part of.
The song, ‘Carnival Heart', for Cirque du Soleil Songblazers is incredible. How did you get involved with the project?
Thank you Pip. Universal is a partner in Cirque du Soleil's new circus Songblazers. It's been in pre-production for quite a long time. When the partnership was being figured out with UMG Nashville, they came to me to ask about writing for them. Long story short, it just finally happened and the show launches in July in Nashville. It'll be here all of July and the rest of the US for the rest of this year and next year. It's pretty insane. I don't really know how it happened Pip but it did. I was very confused at first. I've never been to a circus (so I was thinking) am I going to be like on animals singing? Do I get a mic right here (points to face) situation (like) Britney Spears? I was really having fun with it. I didn't know if it was really gonna happen. That it actually did is so awesome for me and just a great thing to be a part of that is real, and it's not a forced thing and it's all about celebration, creativity, diversity and entertainment. I love some good entertainment. Some Country doesn't give entertainment, for me it's just something. When you see Songblazers by Cirque du Soleil it's entertainment. It's real entertainment.
You mentioned earlier about your wide appreciation of music. Anyone that follows you on social media knows that you're a huge Nicki Minaj fan. When is the collab going to happen?
I have a good Nicki Minaj right here (points to a vinyl). This is a ‘Pink Friday 2' alternate vinyl. When is that collab going to happen? I'm not sure. I'd love it to happen now (laughs). I've actually always said I didn't want that to happen because I'm not quite ready for it to, and I'm probably still not. When ‘Act II' comes out later this year and people hear some of my hip-hop records, and the people that will probably be on ‘Act II' with me, that's going to open up a big idea. It'll probably cause a little bit of commotion of people that don't like it but it's pretty important for me to not limit myself and to do anything that I feel like I want to. That's me. Dolly Parton really made a right turn in Country and went into pop music. Look at everything that she's been able to achieve by doing that. You also get to return to your roots whenever you feel like it. When you want to take off the glitz and glamour, and reflect back to your story of how you got to there, you can do that. That's an important part of being an artist. You're supposed to grow. Some people are good at one thing and what they do, and I respect those artists. Some artists are made to do more of a wide array of things.
There are plenty of artists in music who stick to a lane and put out the same album time and time again. Surely it's more interesting for you as an artist to experiment, push boundaries and keep things fresh?
I think that everybody has a different level of drive. Everybody has a different level of passion and tenacity and determination for different things. For some people it's going to be how are they going to feed their family? For some people it's going to be how are they going to reach this goal. And for some people it's not going to be anything. For me, I know that I am going to succeed and I'm supposed to be great. I don't like the idea of failure. I don't think that you should be truly afraid of failure but I'm definitely against it. I don't really believe in mediocrity and I think the here and now is very important so I'm at a really hungry stage in my career making a lot of stuff. I'll have three albums out in the next year. We're announcing my first European tour the day that the album comes out so we'll see you guys in September.
Struggle and creativity inspiration creates drive. It creates your ascent to your destiny and I think that you have to be very focused on your destiny being your business. I'm very much that way. I can be just as nonchalant sometimes but that's always there for me. Being authentic in my music and creating something that I think is worthwhile is very important to me. For example, to be funny, if I found out the day before but I'm having an EP coming out for streaming the next day and the name of it is this and this is the cover title and the cover photo, I'm like, ‘No, no, no 1000x no' because I like things to be a certain way. It matters to me. Music is art and life is art. Whenever I turn in my very first super lame single or album cover or extremely lame song Pip, just call me and say, ‘this one's not it'.
I'd be very surprised if that happened. This new music is so good!
Which song do you like the worst and the most?
There's no song I like the worst because I think they're all great. I am torn between ‘I Was Home' and ‘Run Away'.
YAY! You like ‘I Was Home'?
That's the one I've been going back to the most but I have been flitting between that one and ‘Run Away' quite a lot.
OK, cool. All of the songs are new other than ‘American Actress', which I've had for a few years now. But all of those songs are written in the past year. It was nice that I created them all in a time period so them going together was supposed to go that way. I'm glad you like ‘I Was Home'. That makes me happy.
I'm looking forward to hearing the other two acts, and hearing you pushing the boundaries of what you can do and your sound. It's going to be interesting…
My live show has changed a lot in the past six months, probably, because I just have a lot more music that's not as ballad like as ‘Glasshouse Children' or ‘American Actress'. I'm not really loving to perform ‘American Actress' unless it's something I can really curate because I'd rather be doing some some higher energy records and we'll see more of that later this year. ‘Scarlet Lonesome' is my favourite. That's my baby. I think it's so interesting and unique because it doesn't sound like anything else. It doesn't remind you of anything recent and it has instrumentation and melody from all over the place. It just came out that way. I don't really know what I was on when I wrote that song one day… I wasn't on any drugs that weren't legal. That song just kind of came out and we were like, ‘what is this?' I realised the next day that I want to stay in this. I think that's the introduction to bigger sounds for me, and then we'll see more of it later this year.
Sam Williams' new album ‘Act I: Scarlet Lonesome' is out now.
