FEATURE: Spotlight: Yasmin Williams

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Ebru Yildiz

Yasmin Williams

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FOR this Spotlight…

PHOTO CREDIT: Ebru Yildiz

I am spending time with the wonderful Yasmin Williams. Her new album, Acadia, is one of the finest of 2024. Following on from 2021’s Urban Driftwood, this album proves that Williams is a huge talent with a sound and lyrical voice like nobody else. The Virginia-born composer and solo-performing finger-style guitarist is someone who should be on your radar. I am going to finish with a couple of reviews for Acadia. Prior to coming to interviews with Yasmin Williams, here is some biography about a wonderful musician and singular talent:

“When guitarist and composer Yasmin Williams sits down to compose music, she doesn’t scour her subconscious for unheard melodies or clever chord progressions. Instead, she goes granular—fixating on a single note. She’ll play it over and over, sustaining it, varying the attack or the release to change its essence, eventually adding notes to form chords.

She has a name for this. She calls it “ruminating” and describes it as a key part of her writing. “I’ve learned a little about how to sit with a note, and to give things time,” the Virginia native says. “You find some tiny idea and just play it over and over again until something else pops up … You have to trust that sometimes a note will take you to where it wants to go next.”

This intuitive process led Williams to the breathtakingly tactile and rivetingly understated Acadia, her Nonesuch debut. Its nine original songs expand, dramatically, on the sonic space Williams created with her acclaimed 2021 album, Urban Driftwood. In addition to the crisp fingerpicked guitar that helped establish her as a fast-rising star of instrumental folk, Williams plays kora, harp guitar, banjo, and electric guitar and bass—all with authority. And where her two previous records have been mostly solo, Acadia finds Williams collaborating with artists across a wide stylistic range, including the vocalist Aoife O’Donovan, violinist Darian Donovan Thomas, the folk quartet Darlingside, synthesist Rich Ruth, and jazz alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins.

Williams needed these ninjas to help her execute the simultaneously detailed and open-ended music she envisioned. Though her Acadia songs evoke sloping hills and rustic ambles, they’re not folksy folk: Many are structured as complex suites and are notable for sudden shifts of mood, spontaneous re-harmonizations, and the extended mounting- tension ramp-ups common in progressive rock. Williams organized Acadia in three sections: The opening set of songs evokes the wily exuberance of old-time music, then gently stretches its conventions; the second explores lush, layered textures and zones of vast atmospheric ambience; the third, which introduces electric guitar(s) and drums, has an experimental, improvisational spirit. She wrote the songs while touring, and that’s audible: This music has a breathless, world-in-motion sweep to it. It’s alive with wanderlust—specifically, that elevated-awareness feeling of journeying when you don’t know exactly where you’re going.

That openness is something Williams says she longed for during the extended Urban Driftwood tour. “I used to really love the verse-chorus-bridge structures of folk songs,” Williams says. “A lot of my earlier music is organized that way, which I call ‘quick tunes’ and I still love playing.” After doing that a lot, she says, she longed for a more experimental ethos. She’s grown “more comfortable with letting things stretch out. I don’t feel like I need to maintain absolute control over the structure. For me, music is now more about flexibility than it ever has been before.”

That could be an unexpected side benefit from the touring she’s done since 2021: The road throws surprises at every turn, and how an artist responds can be telling. Williams mentions working on a new song the night before her first performance at the Newport Folk Festival. She didn’t finish the song, which is called “Cliffwalk,” but on the golfcart ride to the stage psyched herself up to perform it anyway; she’s since worked her improvisation from that day into the arrangement.

Williams has similar stories of spontaneous serendipity about nearly every Acadia track. She mentions “Harvest,” which was conceived as a duet with the pathfinding acoustic guitarist Kaki King. Listening back to the final take, Williams kept hearing another sound, particularly in the middle section where harmonic artifacts from the two guitars intertwine in haunting ways. She invited the violinist Darian Donovan Thomas to the studio and shared her idea; literally twenty minutes later, Williams recalls, “Harvest” was transformed, its middle section blossoming into a divinely inspired array of overlapping halo tones. “He figured out the world of that tune really quickly, and just lived in that world.”

Williams’ calm, gorgeously consonant music inspires this type of alchemy. Songs like “Sisters” and “Virga” seem to float across scenery in suspended animation, as though propelled by placid mountain breezes. These pieces are centered around long-held consonant tones; they could easily have grown from those single-note explorations Williams uses as a composition prompt.

“My fourteen-or fifteen-year-old brain told me: ‘We should let the notes ring out for as long as possible as often as we can,’” Williams says about her penchant for grand sustained guitar sounds. In high school, she played guitar for five or six hours a day—more time than she devoted to her first instrument, the clarinet—and much of that was spent exploring ways to massage and sustain tone. “It just sounded better to me to do that,” Williams says. “Still does. It requires a lot of practice, getting hands in the right place … But I love when notes ring out. I love it when notes have time to develop, in my music and the music I listen to.”

Williams doubts that listeners would notice if she one day stopped letting her notes ring out. But it matters to her. And her attention to such a small element of music reveals something essential about Yasmin Williams: She might seem to be way up in the upper atmosphere conjuring ethereal sounds, but at the same time she’s in the engine room, tweaking the small details of performance, using often-overlooked elements of craft to underscore and amplify her compositions.

There are only so many ways for fingers to engage with the strings of a guitar, and most of them are evident on Acadia: Williams pounds the strings, conjures dense chords with a shredder’s lust for dissonance, dances through intricate scampering leads (“Dream Lake”), chops out syncopated patterns with mechanistic precision, arpeggiates with a feathery grace. And then, when it’s time to pare things back to an essence, she’ll lean into a note and hold it for a good long while, to see what it has to offer.

“I was taught to be picky about stuff like articulation,” Williams says with a laugh. “I guess I learned it. Honestly, this is the stuff that’s really important to me—the little things. They might go over people’s heads a little bit. They go over my head sometimes. That’s OK, because they become part of the songs.”

Yasmin Williams grew up in the Northern Virginia town of Woodbridge in a family with a deep reverence for music. They’d harmonize together on car rides, with Yasmin handling the highest parts. She recalls listening to a wide range of artists, including Chuck Brown, the pioneer of Washington, DC’s go-go sound. She describes herself as an ordinary rock kid (favorites: Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana) in high school; her listening broadened while earning a degree in music theory and composition at NYU. It was there that she began to explore nontraditional approaches to the acoustic guitar, developing a fingerstyle technique with the instrument resting on her lap. She’s recorded two previous albums—her debut Unwind (2018) and Urban Driftwood (2021)—and used each to expand her array of sound tools and techniques: She sometimes positions her kalimba, the African thumb piano, atop the guitar so she can play both at once. She also plays kora, harp guitar, doubleneck guitar, banjo, and percussion instruments.

Though many of those instruments are prevalent in folk and oldtime music, Williams doesn’t regard herself as a folk musician. “I don’t subscribe to the folk idiom,” Williams says. “It’s not like I listened to folk as a teenager. I feel folk music now is very much in a corner. It doesn’t allow itself to … accept new influences. It promotes conformity in some aspects, and to me that’s the opposite of what folk music is about.”

— Biography written by Tom Moon”.

I am moving along to an interview from FADER. They note how, on Acadia, Yasmin Williams pushes beyond conventional Folk and incorporates Bluegrass, Jazz and Ambient music. It is a wonderful album that I would recommend to everyone:

“Her third album, Acadia, out now via Nonesuch Records, is expansive both structurally and sonically. Collaborators weave in and out — O’Donovan, saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, neo-traditional bones player Dom Flemons, and guitarist William Tyler, another guitarist stretching the limits of the American folk tradition — and the sound shifts with them. The bluegrass of “Hummingbird,” a collaboration with Allison de Groot and Tatiana Hargreaves, exists on a different plane to the electric “Dream Lake,” which features jazz-rock drummer Malick Koly. Williams has always been in conversation with folk conventions, but Acadia runs completely counter to tradition. Written in three parts, it is constantly in flux. There is sax and harp and electric guitar, songs written on the banjo and turned into jazz-rock tracks. There’s a key change at the end of “Malamu,” the closer, that seems like a final flourish, a statement against categorizing Williams as anything other than an artist interpreting her instrument and her craft in her own unique way.

What were you looking for in a collaborator on this record?

I was looking for someone who seemed super comfortable and confident in their playing style, someone who is as close to masterful as you can get on an instrument, and someone who was just nice to work with. There are 19 folks on this record, and I picked all of them. They all serve the function of masterful playing and fitting into the worlds I created in the tunes, which are complex and difficult. There's a lot of tempo changes, key changes, technical things that are difficult about the songs. For them to pick that up quickly and insert themselves in a seemingly personal way was super special for me to witness and hear. I just wanted people who were comfortable doing that, not afraid to improvise, not afraid to take a leap of faith.

You mentioned the worlds that you've built around these songs. Do you feel that they each have their distinctive worlds?

I think each song has its own narrative and journey. I ordered them in this particular way because they come together in groups of three. The first three songs live in an acoustic world; they're very organic. The next three are almost like suites, bringing in more instrumentation, experimenting more, and including vocals — a different thing I decided to do on this record. They're ethereal-minded. The last three tracks are electric, with electric guitar prominent and a different vibe altogether, but they still bridge the gap between the first two sections. They're organic in a different way and also ethereal in a different way, but they bring even more instrumentation. I think of the album as three sets of trios, like suites. Each song has its own world, and I was in various moods when writing these songs. Pretty much every song is super personal to me and represents something I was going through at the time of writing it.

What's it like communicating the personality and personal nature of a song when most of the time you're not using lyrics? Is it something that you're often relying on your audience to pick up on, or is it more for you?

For me, it's really freeing not to rely on lyrics. It's freeing not to tell the audience what to think. They can interpret the songs how they want to. If they happen to get a record and look at what the song's about, cool, but I'm not banking on that. I like to put music out into the universe and let it take people where it takes them. People are going through whatever they're going through, so a song will hit someone differently than it hits someone else. For me, the songs are definitely about various things like relationships and the difficulties of being a musician and traveling so much. I listen to tons of instrumental music, so I prefer not to have to worry about being told what's going on. I can just let the music wash over me and figure things out for myself.

You’ve talked in the past about “ruminating” on a particular note when you write. What does that process entail? What does it mean for you?

I think it's kind of how I've always been. I'll just play a phrase over and over again, and if it sits right with me, then it'll stay; if not, it'll disappear. That's how I process music and use it to process the world around me. Music gives me space to think and let my emotions out in a constructive way. It's not a conscious thing. I'll remember it, write it down, or record it. If months go by and nothing becomes of it, cool. If years go by and I remember the phrase again and want to use it, cool. It's a vital process. I need to give myself time to play phrases over and over and see how they intertwine, see how they play with each other. It's a very necessary part of the process.

This goes as granular as single notes, not just phrases—the sustain of a particular note.

Absolutely. For me, it's imperative to let notes ring. I don't know why; that's just how I've always been since I started playing guitar. I love when notes ring and have time to develop, even if I'm playing something that's technically fast. Letting the notes ring and develop is necessary to me, especially on acoustic guitar, because that's where it shines brightest — how the notes change over time.

Where do you think your relationship with folk music is right now?

I appreciate it for what it is. I love listening to old-time music. I honestly love how a lot of it sounds the same. Even people who are steeped in the tradition aren't sure if it's this song or that song because they sound exactly the same. I think that's really cool that they have such a cemented style. For me personally, it's not flexible enough sometimes. I feel like the aesthetic of folk music is not in line with what I'm trying to do sometimes.

But very different sustain. Does that push you even further out of your comfort zone, knowing that you're not going to get that same sort of resonance?

Yeah, that's really interesting you bring that up because I find myself gravitating toward melodic style, which gives you that sustain in different ways. Instead of playing a scale on a single string, you play a major scale going up the fretboard and let the open strings ring out. There is that ringing aspect in melodic style that I appreciate. That's why I gravitate toward that style in particular. It's tricky to get notes to ring out on the banjo; your finger placement has to be exact. But once it works, it sounds great”.

I will round off fairly soon. Before I do, this interview from Stereogum is well worth exploring. I have taken sections from it. The more I read about Yasmin Williams, the more I want to explore her music. She is a tremendous artist that needs to be known by all. I hope she performs in the U.K. soon:

“On top of being a really cool artist, you’re technically extremely skilled. I’m curious if you have a daily routine as a musician.

WILLIAMS: [Laughs] No, I don’t. I don’t practice nearly enough. But when I do practice, I have a couple warm ups that I’ve made up over the years that are really helpful. Usually, before shows, I play a song by Elizabeth Cotten called “Vastopol” that I really like. It centers me and grounds my mind, which is really nice.

Fair enough. With such an intricate formula, I’m curious if you could talk to me about your writing process. Is your music rooted in improvisation or do you know everything you’re going to play before you play it?

WILLIAMS: I would say it’s a bit of both. So mainly it seems that, at least lately, when I sit down to play, I don’t really think about writing a song. It just happens over time. I might come up with a phrase or something that I really like and just repeat that over and over again. Eventually, I come up with other phrases that fit with that and I repeat those over and over again. The songs kind of write themselves.

It’s a mix of improv, for sure, but sometimes, when I sit down to play, there’s already something stuck in my head and I just play it on the guitar and see how it fits and go from there. But yeah, improv is very, very important to the overall writing process. Usually, it takes me several months to finish a tune. Sometimes it doesn’t take that long, but usually it’s a pretty long process because I like to sit with things and see how I feel about it over time.

This new album feels like a pretty big step forward on a lot of levels. I’m curious how you feel your music has grown and changed since Urban Driftwood.

WILLIAMS: I feel like Acadia is just a representation of where I wanted my music to go, as far as expanding instrumentation, using more complex song structures, or maybe not depending so much on song structures. I feel like I grew up with a lot of music that was, like, verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge — that sort of thing. And recently I’ve wanted to not depend so much on that. Because I do love that structure in songwriting. But I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could write longer tunes and tunes that didn’t rely on such a rigid structure and use different chords and chordal shapes.

I incorporated collaborators — there’s, like, 19 guest artists on the album, which is kind of insane. I didn’t plan for there to be so many people, but that’s just how it worked out. I think it’s a really cool expansion of Urban Driftwood, and I think Acadia sounds like me. But it has more going on, if that makes sense.

Yeah, for sure. Could you talk to me about the recording process for Acadia?

WILLIAMS: I recorded most of my guitar tracks and other tracks I played at this studio near me in Maryland, Blue House Productions. Some of the guest artists, like Tatiana Hargreaves and Allison de Groot, I had them fly over here. They recorded “Hummingbird” with me. A couple times, I did have to go to New York and Boston to record with Marcus [Gilmore] and Immanuel [Wilkins] and Malick [Koly] for their tracks. And to record with the string ensemble that’s on “Sisters,” which was really cool.

For the most part, a lot of the collaborators were remote. They just sent me tracks from wherever they recorded and I would give them notes. And they would send me more stuff, and I would give notes, or it would be perfect. It wasn’t super long of a process, in terms of figuring out the guest artists I wanted to be on there. All of the tracks, I had specific things in mind. The people I asked to be on the record were the people I wanted on the record first. So it worked out.

One of the things I love about your music is how much it pushes genre. I feel like this album does that even more. And you’re about to tour with Brittany Howard, which seems a little bit unexpected given where your music lands. But it’s also very cool, and speaks to how much range you have. With all that in mind, I’m curious where you view your music dwelling stylistically, if you do anywhere at all.

WILLIAMS: That’s a question I’ve been trying to answer for years, and I have no clue. I mean, I feel like when my first album came out, I was labeled as a percussive fingerstyle player. I don’t know if you know Andy McKee or Kaki King or those types of people”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ebru Yildiz

The final interview that I am featuring comes from The Guardian. A modern-day guitar hero, it makes me think about the guitar and how we view it now. Less about Rock and shredding, players like Yasmin Williams are modern idols. How we reframe the instrument. It should lead to new discussion:

“Williams is certainly forthright – earlier this year she wrote a popular op-ed for the Guardian criticising Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter as “a capitalist gesture” in the world of Black country and folk. But while Urban Driftwood was inspired by injustice, unrest and despair, its mesmerising instrumentals established a different mood: one that was meditative and uplifting. “We didn’t need another reiteration of the pain and destruction people were going through,” Williams says. “It wasn’t escapism, exactly. But I wanted to believe that things could get better and focus on that. I chose hope over simply stating what the reality was.”

Urban Driftwood was rapturously received, as were a home-recorded Tiny Desk concert for NPR in October 2021 and Williams’ triumphant performance at that year’s Newport folk festival. She acknowledges Newport as a turning point: “It was the biggest stage I’d ever played. The acceptance from the crowd, the intense listening, made me feel I could succeed as a professional musician, which had always seemed far-fetched before.”

‘I wanted to believe that things could get better’ … Williams performing in 2021. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

In this headspace she conceived Acadia, challenging herself to vacate her comfort zone. She embraced collaboration, working with saxophonist/composer Immanuel Wilkins, guitarists Kaki King and William Tyler, vocalists Darlingside and Aoife O’Donovan, and more. And she further widened her frame of reference, accompanying her acoustic guitar with tap shoes and calabash drums, playing kora and making clear her sound couldn’t be contained within the American folk tradition.

“It wasn’t about emancipating myself from genre, because I never felt attached to genre in the first place. I put together folk traditions from various places and various time periods.” She cites the funk subgenre go-go as well as “jazz, rock, cosmic country and classical. I fell in love with Hindustani classical music in college, and west African classical music – kora music, specifically – in high school. The syncopation, the note choices, the different timbres all made me reevaluate what I was doing. Acadia brings all this music together.”

It’s a blossoming, alright – one that unfurls Williams’ own vision and challenges preconceptions. “If people want to place me within the folk genre, fine,” she says. “I’m trying to expand people’s notion of what folk music is. It’s the music of the people. But if you consider ‘the people’ to be just one kind of people, well … that’s simply not correct.” She pauses for a second and then smiles. “There’s a whole universe here”.

Let’s end with a couple of positive reviews for the amazing Arcadia. It is one of the best albums of this year in my opinion. Pitchfork shared their views on Yasmin Williams’ new album in their review. They raise some interesting observations:

“Yasmin Williams is one of the most inventive guitar players of the last decade, an artist devoted to deploying seemingly every technique imaginable to coax new sounds and ideas out of her instrument. She hammers the strings and wallops the body and taps the frets; she strums and drums and plucks with such speed and agility that her performances feel like sleights of hands, as though she owes as much to Ricky Jay as she does to Leo Kottke. But it’s all in service of her tautly, gracefully composed songs, which she approaches with a storyteller’s eye for setting and specificity, just as a lyricist might. Williams didn’t merely write her 2021 album Urban Driftwood during the tumultuous year of 2020, but wrote it about those hard times. “I Wonder (Song for Michael)” was one of several inspired by the demonstrations she attended in Washington, DC. But instead of evoking the commotion and peril of facing off against the police, Williams was much more interested in the warm camaraderie she felt for her fellow demonstrators, all of whom were taking similar risks toward a common goal.

Warm camaraderie of a different sort defines her follow-up, Acadia. It’s a bright, imaginative expansion of Williams’ sound, gregarious where Urban Driftwood sounded ruminative and solitary. Almost all of these songs feature a different set of players: The folk duo of Allison de Groot and Tatiana Hargreaves color in “Hummingbird” with banjo runs and fiddle reels, respectively; the Nashville cosmic-jazz musician Rich Ruth adds soft synths to “Virga.” Dom Flemons plays the rhythm bones on “Cliffwalk” as Williams’ riffs subdivide like fractals, adding impossible grace notes, and Immanuel Wilkins concludes the album with an ecstatic alto saxophone solo. That motley assortment of musicians reflects the variety of Williams’ interests, which range from folk and old-time to jazz and classical composition.

Acadia takes her far from the streets of DC and deep into the woods and mountains. She signals as much with the song titles, but also with the music itself. “Hummingbird” flutters through a garden, the busy guitar and banjo buzzing around a central theme and settling into a familiar old-time jig. This song and several others settle into what sounds like an early ending, only to take flight again, as though Williams’ mind, like a hummingbird’s wings, is always in motion. On “Harvest,” she picks long melodic lines on her guitar, which sound like they have less to do with the physical labor of bringing in crops and more to do with the pleasure of exhaustion. You can almost see the sun setting over empty fields.

Her songs remain as focused as ever, and she uses these other musicians with the same consideration with which she uses various techniques; nothing is simply spectacle. More than anything else in Williams’ catalog, Acadia is open to tangents, wild ideas, sudden realizations, and sustained moods. Listening to “Virga” and “Sisters” is like finding shapes in clouds: The music is daydreamy, each sound blurred around the edges, changing so gradually you may not notice until it’s something entirely different. Some of the album’s finest moments deploy the human voice like another instrument. The pillowy, almost New Age vocals on “Virga” sound like they’re suspended in the air, blown by a gentle breeze, and when this choir sings actual words, it’s nearly impossible to make them out. It’s fitting for a song named after the meteorological phenomenon of rain evaporating before it hits the ground.

Williams appreciates the friction of sounds and ideas, so her songs rise and fall, build and crest, shout and whisper. They’re alive to both the orderliness of a carefully constructed melody and the chaos of being in the moment. As Acadia progresses, it blossoms and expands, adding new instruments. She picks up an electric guitar on “Dream Lake” and shreds bucolically. She trades licks with Wilkins’ saxophone on “Malamu,” and the song rocks unselfconsciously. It’s the biggest and riskiest moment on the album, a finale whose fusion of jazz and folk and rock frees her up to go in any direction on her next album. Unexpected yet exuberant, it sounds like the work of the harvest giving way to the celebration of the feast”.

I will end with a review of Acadia from The Skinny. Even if you are not a fan of Bluegrass, Folk or Ambient music, you will definitely find much to enjoy and appreciate through her album. I would suggest people watch this amazing artist. Someone who warrants as big an audience as possible. I am fairly new to her music but am definitely a fan now:

“Earlier this year, Yasmin Williams raised the hackles of the Beyhive when she criticised Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter in an op-ed for The Guardian. She accused the Texan superstar of sidelining the Black musicians she claimed to celebrate, arguing that “Beyoncé has put the Carter before the horse.” No such accusations could be levelled at Williams, whose latest album sees her backed by a revolving cast of collaborators.

Cliffwalk opens the digital edition of the album, with Williams accompanied by music scholar Dr. Dom Flemons; the clacking beats of his rhythm bones punctuating her guitar like dancing shoes on a hardwood floor. This celebratory tone continues on Hummingbird, in which Allison de Groot’s banjo and Tatiana Hargreaves' fiddle conjure up images of barn dances and flannel shirts draped over faded denim. Elsewhere, the soft vocals of indie-folk outfit Darlingside lend Virga the gentle, unbothered feel of a week spent living amongst nature: stirring with the sunrise, and sleeping under the stars.

Williams may be known for her inventive approach to the guitar – inspired as much by the spiritual blues of Elizabeth Cotten and American primitive guitarist John Fahey as it is Guitar Hero II – but it’s her egalitarian approach to collaboration that makes Acadia so alluring”.

Such a terrific guitar player and notable songwriter, Yasmin Williams is undoubtably a musician who is going to inspire so many other people. I really love her music and can’t wait to see where she goes next. It is going to be fascinating to see how Williams heads…