Julie Williams discovers joy, maturation on new EP
Just as soon as 26-year-old, Duke-educated Tampa area native Julie Williams could be an Americana Music Award-winning vocalist, she could also be at Harvard pursuing her Masters degree in poetry or public policy.
Thankfully, she's still in Nashville pursuing her dreams.
Her latest, self-titled EP has arrived three years after arriving in Music City post-graduation.
Yes, just like her new single says, she's now leading a "Sugarcoated" life.
The strain of multiple heartbreaks, plus emotional and physical abuse has been difficult. However, regular gigs with the nationally touring Black Opry Revue, song writes with the likes of Highwomen-beloved singer-songwriter Brittney Spencer (her EP's excellent anti-racism and coming-of-age anthem "Big Blue House"), plus inclusion in 2023's class of CMT's Next Women of Country have buoyed her confidence.
"Being a mixed-race person in the South puts you in a place in the world where learning about community, resiliency and strength are necessary," says Williams to The Tennessean at the Hutton Hotel's Analog venue before her EP release event.
Her 2021-released single "Southern Curls" was a breakout moment that, alongside Mickey Guyton's "Love My Hair," served as a testimonial moment of arrival for Black women, en masse, in country's mainstream.
Just two years prior, Williams was laughed out of songwriting rounds for singing songs obsessed about 15 years of literal trauma of having to use chemicals to straighten (and damage) her hair associated with being teased by white schoolmates about her naturally thick and curly locks.
Post 2020's violent and assertive national call for equity, she was championed by -- fellow curly-haired African-American vocalist -- Apple Music Radio's "Color Me Country" program host Rissi Palmer. This was followed by her inclusion in the Black Opry Revue's growing slate of small-venue concerts and festival showcases of all-Black Americana, country and folk artists.
Williams is a quick-thinking, mindful poet as much as a songwriter.
She names Instagram-famous poet Diego "Yung Pueblo" Perez and Harlem Renaissance-era novelist Nella Larsen as vital inspirations.
Thus, when she says that retelling the story of her physical assault by a man she was dating in the EP track "The Prince" "hurt as much to live as it did to write," there's an allusion to process in the statement that weighs differently.
Too often, female artists are as uplifted to stardom as constrained by presentations that celebrate their youth but rob them of their experiences. So you're ten until you're 20, 20 until you're 40 and so forth.
During those times, public perception forces you to lead a saccharine existence. The only thing that imperils such a charmed life are ill-fated decisions that, without your consent, rob you of the agency to age with grace and wisdom.
To wit, Williams still conflates consent with conversations heard while she was a teenage first-year Duke student.
"The Prince" is a ballad about a doctor who takes a Nashville-residing WIlliams on a date that leads to other encounters at downtown bars and expensive hotel rooms.
One is not like the other.
She didn't let the uneasy, "horrible" interplay between sobriety, heartbreak, "boundaries and lines being crossed," and unequal perceptions of guilt and shame that differ by gender negatively define her future. Thus, she's gained power over the occurrence that impacts the choices she wishes to make for the rest of her life.
Those choices include a heavy infusion of the Indigo Girls' Emily Saliers and Norah Jones as much as Sara Evans, The Chicks' Natalie Maines and Taylor Swift in her sound. They are a result of Williams' mother's insistence that her daughter be raised on country music's 2000s-era women and 90 and 2000s alt-rock and pop superstars.
The impact of hearing Swfit's "Our Song" at age ten and "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" at 15 -- while leading a life in Florida that was often as bitter as it was sweet -- impacts the clinical efficiency of EP songs like "Left You For Her."
Much like Swift, Williams' ability to be so open about breaking up with her college sweetheart (also resulting in the precise lyricism of "Wrong Mr. Right") but also performed in a way that leaves so much unsaid is profound.
Her style impacts her goals in a way that best defines her humanity.
"I'm a creative thinker who, for a long time, forgot that I could write as well as I sing."
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Julie Williams discovers joy, maturation on new EP
