Jess Williamson Feels Like a Visitor in Dallas, Her Local Roots Notwithstanding

The last time we talked with Jess Williamson, she was in Upstate New York gearing up for a new record.

On a warm and tranquil afternoon last Friday, May 16, the songwriter is back in her hometown of Dallas. As we talk on the phone to catch up, she is at her mother’s house and laying low before a show at Sons of Hermann Hall.

“I’ve never been [to Sons], and I have really wanted to go for a long time,” she says. “I kind of feel like a visitor to Dallas.”

That may seem like a shocking pull quote or a modest damper on Williamson’s hometown hero hype, but it’s an understandable sentiment in her circumstances. When she was 17, she moved to Austin to study photojournalism at the University of Texas, and she has not been a resident in North Texas since.

More than that, the feeling of being a visitor, even in places where you reside, is far too familiar to Williamson, and this spirit of nomadism is an undercurrent of her upcoming record.

“Over the last two years, I’ve been living part-time in Marfa, Texas, and part-time in Los Angeles,” she explains. “[There is] this tension between going back-and-forth between these two places, which are both really extreme places. L.A. is a really extreme place; Marfa is a really extreme place.

“Where do I belong? Where do I even live? Who am I in these two different places?” she asks.

Marfa plays a crucial role in the grand pantheon of Williamson’s catalog. It was the setting of her 2023 record Time Ain’t Accidental (the title track, for example, tells a story of a romantic encounter at Hotel Saint George), and the 2020 song “Wind on Tin” documents a 2019 drive to Marfa for a funeral (“Southbound 90, past the locked-up luxury store / Tourists take photographs / You’re not a tourist here no more.”)

But even with Dallas not being home in the formal or informal sense for Williamson, she sets the record straight on one thing: she has made her share of musical memories here.

“I went to The Door all the time,” she recalls, referring specifically to the long-defunct Deep Ellum venue that stood in the former place of the Gypsy Tearoom and housed many an emo, pop-punk and metalcore show. “I saw Brand New at The Door. I saw Rufio at The Door. I also would go see Blink-182 any time they came to town and Dashboard Confessional. In high school, I was a huge fan of Bright Eyes – I remember seeing them play in Fort Worth [at the Ridglea Theater].”

At this point in the conversation, the following question naturally comes up: What was your first show?

Without skipping a beat, Williamson gives a proud answer that, to others, would be a badge of shame. But she makes it clear those people are missing out when she gives the answer: “Jimmy Buffett with my mom. Second grade. Falling asleep in the chair. I would always go with her every year to see him, and it was like, our family ritual. I was so devastated when he passed away.”

As if the sentimental value of his music was not enough justification, Williamson continues to make her case for the late tropical troubadour: “A lot of people write Jimmy Buffett off because they just know the very popular stuff like ‘Margaritaville.’ And his business ventures, people can write off as cheesy or whatever, but if you actually dig into his back catalog, that guy is a hell of a songwriter, and those early records are amazing.”
This is especially high praise from Williamson when considering how much gravity she assigns to the word “songwriter.” In fact, this distinction and what it entails have been at the forefront of her mind as she maps out her next record, which she forecasts for next year.

“I’ve been writing a lot for my next record and thinking about the craft of songwriting and what it means to identify as a songwriter,” Williamson says. “[Dolly Parton] always refers to herself as a songwriter. Kacey Musgraves, who I love so much: songwriter. And doing these solo tours has been cool because it really centers the song and like, the bones of the song, and I feel like if you can’t stand on stage with just your voice and an instrument and perform a song, then it’s not a good enough song.”

As we pivot toward the subject of her show at Sons that happened on May 17, she emphasizes the little-is-much ethos of her solo set.

“A big part of the story of the process around how I wrote Time Ain’t Accidental was I working with this free drum machine app on my iPhone to help me write some songs,” Williamson explains. “We ended up keeping some of those beats just straight from my phone on the album, and so when I play some of the songs solo, I actually have my iPhone on the stage and play along to some of those tracks.”

She goes on to call Time Ain’t Accidental “an ‘I-see-you-you-see-me’ album" in the sense that it articulates universal experiences (namely heartbreak) in a way that is as particularized as it is relatable. Springboarding from that observation, we tell her something that we figured she has been told many times: the record is reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s masterpiece Blood on the Tracks.

“No one’s ever told me that!” she exclaims with exuberance. “That is very cool, and a huge compliment. Thank you – I love that record. No one’s ever said that; I’ve never thought of that.”