A couple years after returning to her home state of California, Joy Williams, once part of the Grammy-winning duo The Civil Wars, which disbanded in 2014, began to miss Music City.
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“It was the first time I really felt like I was saying, ‘I want to go home,’ and I meant Nashville, not California,” she says.
The singer-songwriter, who grew up in Santa Cruz, was caring for her father, who had cancer; when he passed away in 2014, she felt pulled to return to Nashville, where she had first moved when she was 18.
She, her husband Nate Yetton, and their son Miles, packed up and headed south, where Williams, 36, found joy in the simplicity of daily life, she says, like
“learning to find the rainbow in the bubbles of the dish soap when I’m doing the dishes instead of trying to, like, race ahead to whatever I wanted to do next.”
She took the same approach to her work, and her new album, Front Porch, out May 3, is a musical homecoming. Her first LP since 2015’s Venus, which featured expansive electronic soundscapes and marked a departure for Williams, Front Porchis a return to the organic instrumentation and haunting melodies that defined her work in The Civil Wars.
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Williams took her time writing. After connecting with Kenneth Pattengale of The Milk Carton Kids at a friend’s child’s graduation party, she asked him to produce the album. Holed up in T Bone Burnett’s studio at the House of Blues recording complex in Berry Hill, Pattengale and Williams, who was pregnant with now nine-month-old daughter Poppy, worked out the sound, recording all the takes live. She calls it one of the most enjoyable recording experiences of her life.
“I was newly pregnant and extremely nauseous, so that’s saying a lot,” she adds, laughing.
The title track is a reminder that you can, in fact, go home again, set to acoustic guitar and fiddle, and the sparse “Preacher’s Daughter,” is the musician’s ode to her dad, who was a pastor.
“Preacher’s daughter, I love my father / turned wine from water in my eyes,” she sings in the chorus, over spare strumming and faint harmonies.
One night, the words came to her one after another, and she took three full pages of lyrics to co-writers Liz Rose and Natalie Hemby, who helped her parse out what she was trying to say.
“It’s become a really special moment for me to be able to sing and remember my dad in this way, and to be proud about the fact that I am a preacher’s daughter,” she says. “For years I felt really embarrassed about it, and I am completely a black sheep in relation to being a preacher’s kid, but somehow I think it all works together, and I think my dad would be proud of me.”