SWEET RELIEF:
an interview with
V^ictoria W^illiams

The record came together a bit differently than Williams had expected; just as the recording was set to begin, her MS, which can flare up at any time, made playing extremely difficult. "When I started making this record, my hands were really numb and not functioning very well," she explained during a recent visit to New York, where she performed at the "Rolling Stone's Women in Rock" book party. "I'd had health problems during the last year. I'd finally gotten better and had hired everybody, and then I started getting weird again. I thought, 'Should I cancel this?' But you never know when it's going to come back, so you have to go forward."

And go forward she did. Williams began playing in a number of open tunings, which allowed her to form bar chords with one finger on guitar and banjo, leaving some of the trickier parts to her merry band of cohorts.

"To be handed a bit of a disability is ... interesting," Williams reflects. "You find ways to get around it; it opens up doors you might never have come to. And I had such incredible players on ["Musings"] that it kind of made up for my problems. Maybe it even became a better record because of it."

From the outset of her career, Williams has worked with remarkable players, surrounding herself with some of the most talented, uncompromising musicians in the business. Her more recent records have the feel of a house party -- back porch jams by a loose collective of like-minded pals. "Loose" featured members of R.E.M., Soul Asylum and the Jayhawks; "Musings" is graced by Wendy Malvolin and Lisa Coleman (formerly with Prince), Buddy Miller (guitarist for Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle) and his wife, Julie, Joey Burns and John Convertino of Calexico and Giant Sand and ace session steel guitarist Greg Leize (Matthew Sweet, Rosie Flores), among others.

Williams has always sought, perhaps unconsciously, to re-create the "good vibe" scene of Shreveport, La., where she first learned to make songs -- to communicate the notions in her head, forthright and fanciful alike, through music. While in high school, Williams swapped her first instrument, the piano, for a guitar, "because you can't carry a piano around with you," she explains. She was soon drawn into a circle of local musicians that included T-Bone Kelly and Paul Maines. "I'd go to this Lake Cliff bar, an old roadhouse outside of Shreveport that's not there anymore; I think Elvis played there a long time ago. Afterwards, we'd go out to someone's house and stay up all night long playing music. I'd call my mother, and she was so afraid of the roads at night, she'd say, 'Well, you stay till the morning.' We'd all go out and get coffee when the sun came up," she recalls. "Everyone was writing songs, so I figured I'd better write some, too." She later played rhythm guitar behind local blues legend Raymond Blakes. "It's kind of a blues oriented area, everything's funky or blues; I suppose that's where I learned rhythms," says Williams, who counts Mance Lipscome, Lightnin' Hopkins and the Rev. Gary Davis among her guitar heroes.

Williams left Shreveport in the early '80s to escape a bad relationship -- "it seemed the only way to get out of it," she says -- and followed a girlfriend to Southern California. She began singing in a gospel choir and became a street performer on Venice Beach. But it was at a "hoot night" at the Troubadour where she was spotted by a friend of Van Dyke Parks, who introduced Williams to the eccentric songwriter. "I didn't know who he was," she confesses, "then I listened to his record 'Song Cycles,' and loved it." Parks has since worked on string arrangements for two of Williams' records, and it was through him that she met Richard Thompson and Richard Greene, who played on her first demo, as well as a host of other music luminaries. By the mid-'80s, Williams' professional and personal life were in full swing. She had met Peter Case, a founding member of seminal power pop groups the Plimsouls and the Nerves (who now has a career as a singer/songwriter), and the two were married at a gospel church in Los Angeles' Watts district. Rough Trade was set to record Williams, until then-Geffen A&R rep Teresa Ensenat heard her and brought her over to the major label instead. In 1987, Williams released "Happy Come Home" on Geffen. But even as Williams' music career was taking off, things began to unravel. The recording sessions for "Happy" were fraught with difficulties. Williams' faltering marriage to Case (the two later divorced) was so stressful that it caused her voice to take on a strangely high, "uncontrollable vibrato" during the recording.