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 (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?”