‘I did not want to be small any more’: Jess Williamson on fate, Plains and her breakout fifth album

After years of shrinking herself, the Texan singer embraces exuberance, sexual freedom and killer choruses worthy of Lucinda Williams and Taylor Swift on a career-making new LP

At the start of 2020, things were coming up Jess Williamson. The Texan songwriter was about to release her fourth album, Sorceress. Its restrained country opulence was turning more heads than her earlier records had. She was happily in a four-year relationship with another musician. But by the time the album was released in May, the pandemic had killed any chance of touring, limiting its potential. And her boyfriend had left.

"I was really afraid and sad, and really alone," says Williamson, 35, speaking from her "hobbit house" in Los Angeles. She wasn't just heartbroken, but despondent about her career. "The first album we made together," 2018's Cosmic Wink, "was the one where I got a record deal and things started really happening. When we broke up I was so afraid that I couldn't do it without him."

What Williamson had left was masses of time to write. She released the first song she finished, the dusky lament Pictures of Flowers, and realised: "I can do this, actually – I’m allowed." So she kept writing, inspired by her breakup and her determination to restore her dissipating momentum. "It was the most prolific I’ve ever been," she says.

Williamson showed the songs to a friend who said that two of them sounded quite different to the rest, with "a more universal, timeless and classic tone". Later that year, when she and her friend Katie Crutchfield, AKA Waxahatchee, discussed starting a band, those tracks became the foundations for the down-home country pop duo Plains: in 2022 they released an immaculate debut, I Walked With You a Ways, which received mass acclaim and switched many listeners on to Williamson's songwriting. In the remaining songs, she says, "I felt a real clear voice of my own coming through."

They became Williamson's fantastic fifth album, a mid-career arrival. The confident, breezy Time Ain't Accidental sounds as wide and fresh as a dewy dawn horizon, pairing classic country choruses with strikingly spare production. Many songs feature the iPhone drum machine that Williamson demoed on, kept at the encouragement of Bon Iver producer Brad Cook, who also did Plains’ album. The lightning-strike artwork nods to Smog's spooked Knock Knock and the Judds’ glorious River of Time, references that encapsulate the sound well; you might also imagine Taylor Swift's take on Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

That voice Williamson felt coming through is hyper-alert and vivid as she swerves and swaggers between her post-breakup anger, desperation and desire. Time Ain't Accidental is so much bigger than her earlier, subtler records, delivering emotions that women are often told are unbecoming in a newly brazen twang. "So many legendary songs written by men are celebrated for being cocky, overtly sexual, desperate, angry," says Williamson. "I had tried for years to make myself smaller and not step on too many toes, to please. After my best-laid plans blew up in my face, I had nothing left to lose."

Meeting Williamson over Zoom, it's hard to imagine her shrinking herself – she's so exuberant, forthcoming about spiritual growth, a past trip to Cornwall to trace her heritage, and sex as a newly single person. She's always been self-assured, she says. "As a tiny little kid, I was telling everyone: I’m going to be a singer when I grow up. There was no doubt in my mind." She quit an MFA in photography in New York to move back to Texas to pursue music despite, as her mum pointed out, not having a band at the time.

Yet Williamson cut a spectral presence on her self-released debut album, 2014's Native State. "I was really into freak-folk," she says, citing the weirdo US scene led by Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, Williamson's enduring hero. "For a lot of years I felt like I wasn't weird enough for the weirdos and I wasn't cool and normal enough for the cool, normal girls. I felt, well, if I dig down deep and express a lot of pain and darkness, that's going to be enough for the weirdos to accept me."

It mirrored a cultural moment in which it often seemed as though a woman's art was only as legitimate as her trauma. "I must have absorbed that on some level," Williamson agrees. "Women needed to be so exceptional to even get any respect, and I really wanted to be respected as an artist." It was touring with Kevin Morby in 2016, ahead of releasing her second album, Heart Song, that shifted Williamson's perspective. "I’m opening for him solo, playing my slow, sad, quiet songs," she says. "Then every night his band and the audience were having so much fun. I was so inspired, it really changed my life."

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Williamson, now living in Los Angeles, had already started writing Cosmic Wink. She drew from the country music of her childhood for an album about her new relationship with a fellow musician, which saw her sign to Mexican Summer. The title, she said then, acknowledged the kismet of their romantic and creative collaboration. But Time Ain't Accidental frames the relationship as one that diminished her. "Stepped so far out of the way now nothing's there at all," she sings on the nervy Something in the Way, over choppy, unsettled woodwind.

"I really believed that this person was my soulmate and that it was up to me to make it work at all costs," she says now. As her career grew towards Sorceress, tensions emerged. "There were special moments happening that I wanted to be able to share, and I felt like he didn't really celebrate me because I think he was so resentful that he had given me so much and maybe wasn't reaping the benefits in the same way. I fed into that because I believed it, too."

When Williamson's relationship ended, she focused on her personal growth. It's incredible, she says, how "our whole outside world changes when our inner world changes. My music, my singing, my songwriting got better because I did not want to be small any more. I stepped into my fullness as a woman and a singer."

You can hear the difference on Time Ain't Accidental, full of big vocal performances that have a conversational ease. Where Williamson once focused on perfection, Cook encouraged her to embody the stories behind the songs and to embrace musical ideas that she had worried were too "crazy" for her, like those woodwinds. "In the past I tried to make myself seem like I wasn't trying too hard," she says. "Now I’m actually trying very hard because it's important to me. It's OK to give it your all. I had thought that level of energy was grating to the ear – like your voice should be sexy or breathy." She admits: "There's some ingrained misogyny there."

Time Ain't Accidental is, in parts, a genuinely sexy record precisely because it's bold, not coy. "That's my tongue in your mouth / That's all my windows down / What’d you take me for? / Take me for a ride," Williamson yearns on the salt-washed Topanga Two Step, one of several songs about her first forays into dating. At school in Texas, sex education was abstinence-only. Williamson was a late bloomer, then a serial monogamist. Once lockdown lifted, she says, "it was exciting to finally be single and explore. It was this sexual time of a lot of possibilities."

Ultimately she concluded that app-based dating wasn't for her. "I’m a hunter for the real thing," she sings dreamily on the single Hunter. (She also speaks openly about her desire to become a mother.) The title track is an account of unexpectedly finding love with an old acquaintance on a road trip, reading each other Raymond Carver by the pool. They’re still together. "I’m in a relationship with a person who loves me for exactly who I am, who encourages me to be big, even down to my body," she says. "I feel confident embracing my curves and dressing sexier onstage."

That's another reclamation. Williamson used to think that "embracing beauty wasn't serious", she says. After the pandemic, she craved razzle-dazzle, which Plains maximised: "We really embraced larp-ing as country stars, being super sparkly." Even for today's 9am Zoom she's wearing a resplendent floral dress.

With a buzz around Time Ain't Accidental, it feels as though Williamson is on the cusp of something. "I feel really ready," she says, and admits that had things gone to plan with Sorceress, she wouldn't have been. That's the big lesson she's learned: "This record is really grounded in faith that things are working out in their own time." It reminds her of a phrase that she loves: "Let go and let God," she says, grinning at the bumper-sticker biblicism. "I’m not in control, actually. I’m really not, and trying to control everything doesn't usually lead to a good place."

Time Ain't Accidental is released via Mexican Summer on 9 June