A reverent hush falls over a packed Lexington as Jess Williamson walks on stage. She’s dressed like a hipster who stumbled across the Little House on the Prairie and is performing alone tonight, just a woman with her guitar – and, at certain points, an iPhone playing the tinny beats that she used as demo drumlines that became an integral part of her most recent album.
That album is Time Ain’t Accidental, her fifth solo record and the first to embrace a more upbeat worldview, as opposed to earlier work that was perpetually close to tears. She has spent years playing country-folk-adjacent music and was on the brink of a big break when the pandemic cut everything in half. Tonight she is as optimistic as her 2023 record, gamely inviting the “smaller people” stuck at the back behind a sea of vertically gifted people to sit on the stage where there is plenty of room. “I think it’d be really nice,” she tells us. “It gets lonely up here.” No one takes her up on the offer.
Call it British reserve if you like, but why would anyone want to sit behind the speakers and be robbed of the full effect of Williamson’s rich, silken voice? After every line she pulls back from the mic as if reluctant to let any more out of her, and the most gripping moment in every song is sung from the corner of her mouth in something like a country sneer. On Ponies in Town she sings about the comfort of being able to afford the fancy eggs as her voice ranges from throaty intimacy to horizon-chasing flute-like flutters. When she pulls back to play her guitar solos, she bobs and weaves with it as if she is ballroom dancing.
It’s not until the second act that she pulls out the iPhone drums, though she’s been moving like she misses them. On God in Everything it has the jarring effect of a cool Christian beat combo doing a school assembly, but on Time Ain’t Accidental they are almost essential – her best and most loved-up song, it fizzes around the room like a kicked-over firework before she retreats back into quiet to end the set. She had opened it with the song Sorceress where she assured us she’s not one, but the next hour proved its preceding line: there’s a little magic in her hat, and she tipped it to us tonight.
