November 30, 2024

The Capri Marfa

8PM

Ballroom is pleased to present a Fall 2024 music series full of romance, nostalgia, and invention. This series featuring four musical acts, from across the Americas and spanning genres, will illuminate each of these artists’ unique ways of connecting with Marfa and its particular geographical, social, and cultural landscape – and with one another.

 To close out the season on November 30th, Ballroom presents Jess Wiliamson. Her inventive blend of synth-pop instrumentals and classic country twang is distinctly blue – at once it is both the focused glow of a phone screen in a darkened room and the endlessly deep hue of a wide-open sky at dusk’s approach. Williams’ Texas-to-Los Angeles (and back again) sound is apt for the occasion; a surprising and satisfying blend of opposites.

Jess Williamson

Endless prairies and ocean waves; long drives and highway expanse; dancing, smoke, sex, and physical desire – the core images of Jess Williamson’s new album Time Ain’t Accidental revel in the earthly and the carnal. After a protracted breakup with a romantic partner and longtime musical collaborator who left Williamson and their home in Los Angeles at the start of the pandemic, the album’s reckoning with loss, isolation, romance, and personal reclamation signals a tectonic shift for Williamson as a person and as an artist: from someone who once accommodated and made herself small to a woman emboldened by her power as an individual.

A daringly personal but inevitable evolution for the Texas-born, Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, Time Ain’t Accidental is evocative of iconic Western landscapes, tear-in-beer anthems, and a wholly modern take on country music that is completely her own. Above everything, sonically and thematically, this album is about Williamson’s voice, crystalline and acrobatic in its range, standing front and center. 

Last year, Williamson and Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee released I Walked With You A Ways under the name Plains; a critically acclaimed record filled to the whiskey-barreled brim with feminine confidence, camaraderie, and straight-up country bangers and ballads. Williamson now splits her time between Marfa, Texas and Los Angeles. Time Ain’t Accidental, with its synthesis of traditional country instrumentation with digital effects and modern sounds, unequivocally embodies the energy of the two very different places that she calls home. The album’s artwork, subtly menacing and neon in awareness and strength, displays, in Williamson’s words, “that supernatural forces are acting all around us, that we can trust that we will be in the right place at the right time.”