Jess Williamson writes her goodbyes in pencil

Her mother was driving whilst her grandmother was in the passenger seat, and Dolly Parton came on the radio. As a little girl, it was her first time hearing Parton’s silvery twang, and she listened as her family effused over how much they loved Parton’s voice. “I’m going to be a singer like Dolly Parton when I grow up,” she declared to them, unquestioning. 

Decades later, in the bizarre dislocation of the pandemic, Williamson was behind the steering wheel driving alone through Texas, the glittering Austin skyline rolling past her window. Now a young woman, she was on the way home from mingling with a group of friends – one of them a relationship she was still heartbroken about ending – after having jumped at the chance to flee California and temporarily house-sit for friends. Her long-term affinity with Los Angeles was unravelling, and so too was her sense of who she was within it. She turned on the radio, and her song was playing. 

“I was just like, who am I? If I’m not that person’s girlfriend and I don’t live in Austin and LA feels weird, and I’m alone, where do I belong?” she says. “But I turned on the radio, and I was just like, that’s where I belong. Getting to write these songs, getting to record, play shows – that’s me. That’s the path I chose.” 

As with every childhood ambition, there comes an accompanying fine print, and the girl who wanted to become Dolly Parton had no idea what becoming Jess Williamson would entail. And on her sixth solo album, A Mile South of Heaven, she’s still en route between the flashing lights of LA and the sprawling plains of Texas, between what her life in music may have looked like and what is in front of her. “My last album was a very classic break-up record about realising that everything was working out for my highest good, even if it felt really difficult at the time,” she says. “With this album, it’s a similar lesson, but it’s being applied to the life of an artist.”

For Williamson, that distinction is the crux. Much of her career has moved towards an imagined horizon, but the expansive, tactile sound of A Mile South of Heaven hears her accepting that sometimes horizon is a trick of perspective. Across 12 stunning songs, she weaves the intimate with the cinematic, minute tales of love, uncertainty, and resolve unfolding against the vast imagery of Texas and Hollywood. The record sees her at her most physical, its country instrumentation close enough to touch, but with an expanding scale that continues to nurture the heartfelt rapport of her songwriting.

“It can be easy to say, well, if I’m not Dolly Parton and if xyz isn’t happening then maybe I’m a failure, but what I’m learning is that I am doing it,” she says. “It’s always going to be looking different and shifting, and it’s been a beautiful process of gratitude. Getting to have this path and realising that actually everything I’ve ever wanted is right here. If you’re always looking ten steps ahead or looking at someone else or looking at what you think someone else has, you’re going to miss your own life.” 

For someone whose life has been so configured by movement, staying put has been complicated. Williamson grew up in north Texas, spent a chunk of her twenties in Austin, and for nearly three years split her time between Los Angeles and Marfa – a tiny Texas town so remote that it’s closer to Mexico than it is to an airport. One is secretive and strange, filled with hidden waterfalls and a community that feels sealed off from the rest of the world. The other remains a twinkling possibility, a sense that something might happen just because you happened to be there. 

Williamson admits that, even a decade on, LA is still a place she’s starry-eyed about with the classic childhood magnetism towards the red carpets and mansions and ocean piers. “I still feel this romance about LA, that it’s this exciting, sparkly place where anything can happen. I still get excited driving down Sunset Boulevard and seeing the palm trees and the glittering hillsides with all the houses. I still get such a kick out of being able to get in my car and drive to the ocean. In Texas, that’s unheard of. That’s what vacation is, and now I get to do that. LA feels like a place of growth and expansion and inspiration and learning, and Texas feels similar, but in a different way.” 

For a long time, she needed both, suspended between two distinct places – 955 miles and worlds apart – categorising the pair into an almost work/life balance dynamic. “I would be in Marfa and I would be in my relationship, with all of our community of friends there, and closer to my family who are all in Texas, and Marfa felt like home,” she says. “LA became the place where I would go to get stuff done, and then I would go to Marfa to live and have a peaceful existence.” 

Eventually, the arrangement became harder to maintain. Her life in Marfa began to feel more substantial than the apartment she kept in California, and it was in this time that she wrote “Goodbye to All That”, the opening track that immerses the LP into a reckoning with where and how to live. The same way it stands as the rallying cry of the record, she woke up one morning and was affirmative that she was ready to leave. Borrowing its title from Joan Didion’s 1967 farewell to New York, the song was a goodbye to Los Angeles on paper: to its loneliness, its ambition, the holiday heat (“going to the grocery store at Halloween and seeing pumpkins when it’s 90 degrees outside”). “Goodbye to the dreamers, the poets, and their songs,” she sings, “I’m afraid there’s so much that I still haven’t done.”

“That just kind of came out, and I just started crying. I started off so sure, but I didn’t want to let that go,” she says. What began as an unwavering farewell morphed into an unexpected reason to stay. “A lot of the time when I’m songwriting I feel like I’m channelling ideas that come from somewhere else – sometimes I feel like I’m not really writing the song, I’m just catching the song. I needed to write “Goodbye To All That”.” LA, she realised, was still capable of surprising her. 

One Friday evening, her friend spontaneously invited her to a concert at The Troubadour, the tiny West Hollywood nightclub stitched into just about every tale of Los Angeles musical folklore. Going in blind, she discovered velvety multi-instrumentalist Loren Kramar. “The show was so powerful. It made me love that I was in a place where I could just get a random invitation, go, and be completely inspired and floored and so moved,” she says. “So when I wrote that lyric, about the dreamers and the poets, I was thinking about Loren. Now, I can look back and see what a mistake it would have been to leave at that time, because if I didn’t live in LA, I don’t think I would have been able to make this album with Shooter.” 

Shooter Jennings (Brandi Carlile, Tanya Tucker) produced the record at Sunset Sound Studio 3, a room that housed Prince while he recorded 1999 and Purple Rain, as well as hosting overdub sessions for Fleetwood Mac, Earth, Wind & Fire, and James Taylor. For Williamson, who had spent years making records in a more DIY fashion, working with computer plug-ins out of her friend’s garage, the process was a new beginning. 

The result is Williamson at her most textured. Surrounding her crystalline voice, shimmering pedal steel, crisp, rolling drums, and plucking banjos tumble pristinely, all with the physical intimacy of human hands. “Every sound you hear is people playing an instrument in that room. In the past I’ve made records that use technology more, or use computers more, but in this case, everything was analogue.”

Working with a band was completely new, and confusing. “It was almost too easy,” she laughs. Williamson arrived with bare-bones demos recorded on guitar and keyboard, and Jennings arrived armed with references that seemed uncannily close to her own musical instincts. “It was like he was reading my mind. He was bringing up Daniel Lanois producing Emmylou Harris, and [we were] geeking out over Bonnie Raitt’s self-titled and the warmth in that record and the way it really sounds like people in a room. It’s the same with Emmylou Harris; you hear her, and you’re connected to her, but it feels like people in a room together playing instruments.” 

Seven songs came together in four days before Williamson and Jennings spent another three working through them one-to-one. During the first day of being in the studio with Jennings, she stopped at a random diner in Hollywood and sat down at the bar, ready to fuel up before heading to work. Hearing a voice that pricked her ears, she turned to the bar stool beside her. “I’d sat right next to Loren Kramar,” she says. “He was like, ‘I come here everyday’. He knows all the people that work there. For those 3 days, I went to the diner and saw him everyday. That felt symbolic. Something, somewhere was telling me that we were on the right path. Now, he’s actually going to be in the music video for ‘Hum of the City’.”

Williamson’s catalogue is a testament to her impulse to look closely at what happens when life changes shape. Love ending, identities growing, places becoming strange – while refusing to settle for one musical world. On Sorceress (2020), she refracted Americana through dreamy textures, but with I Walked with You a Ways, her 2022 collaborative album with Katie Crutchfield, she reclined further into traditional country twang. A Mile South of Heaven lifts the twang closer to the surface, but the mysticism remains, the rich and earthy instrumentation retaining the spaciousness that has always made her work feel transcendent of the genre she draws from.

On “Country Mile”, the sound arrives almost tentatively with four drum hits into steady, swirling layers of plucky guitar and resonant piano around soft harmonies, Lana Del Rey’s “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” having played on repeat in the studio that day. Speaking of the four drum hits, she says, “that’s because Shooter went to the drum kit and just tapped out a tempo, and that was for us to work off of. It was enlightening for me to know that you can start with a whole band and then you can pair it down, you can change things, you’re not locked into anything. It was really cool. It made me feel like I was in another time.” 

A reflection on a brief, tumultuous love affair, “Country Mile” was another song born from surprise. One of the most vulnerable on the record, it deliberately disguises autobiography as fiction through character-building before the curtain is pulled into first-person narration: “I was born having visions / And I’m mean when I’m drunk.” 

“I’d never really done that before, and it was surprising. It felt good to talk about other people, and gave me some distance from it, in a way that felt safer,” she says. “I think my audience is vulnerable and sensitive and that’s why they like my vulnerable and sensitive songs. I’ve never been afraid to lay it all out there, and sometimes I wish I was more afraid to do that, but ['Country Mile'] felt like a little bit of a wink – of course it’s about me.” 

Her willingness to let the edges show extends beyond the songs. Eager to make friends after moving to LA, Williamson speaks candidly on pretending to be included in certain circles or with certain people, a phase she’s grown out of after becoming less interested in performing a version of herself. “When you stop pleasing people, people stop being pleased,” she says. “So you can experience relationships falling away and people becoming disappointed when they’re perhaps used to you fulfilling a certain role. In authentic relationships, we can be a little messy. We can be annoying. We can be ourselves. Real human beings are not always convenient. I wouldn’t want to hang out with someone that was pretending.” 

The route has changed considerably since her childhood declaration in the backseat of her mother’s car, but the ethos has not. Between those moments in Texas, LA, and Marfa, between the relationships, departures, strangers in diners, and songs that arrive before she knows she needs them – Jess Williamson is still following the music, and still allowing it to show her where to go. “I’m just really trying to stay in gratitude and have fun because one day I’m not going to be doing this anymore. I don’t want to be 80 and ask, why didn’t I have more fun?”