Victoria Williams – Desert Bloom
Williams remains on the steering committee of Sweet Relief, which by her count has raised and disbursed some $350,000 to uninsured musicians, most of that funding coming from all-star tribute albums saluting her songs, and those of Vic Chesnutt.
“It’s not going exactly like I would like it to go,” she says, almost a parent speaking patiently of a wayward child. “We’re broke right now. We gave away $350,000, which was good, but there’s still people waiting. They’ve cooked up some sort of fund-raiser, and they want me to come play. So I’ll do that. I’ll do anything I can, you know. But my dream for the original, the original dream for Sweet Relief, was that people in every town would do at least one concert a year and give the proceeds to this fund.”
Sweet Relief has been her principal concession to the disease. Her artistic response was 1994’s Loose, a thoroughly engaging celebration of life and death. City living insulates us from that cycle, detaches death behind walls and hospital gowns, and thereby devalues life. Both city and country, gripping one with each hand, Victoria spun songs as direct and honest as anything the Carter Family mined from their hills.
This Moment in Toronto With Victoria Williams and the Loose Band followed a year later. Though she was careful to pace her touring schedule (fatigue and stress are contributing factors with MS) in support of those releases, Musings of a Creek Dipper, the first new material in four years, bears as few traces of that battle as she can manage.
Well. The cabin on the desert is hardly a concession, for it seems a place where Mark and Victoria are truly and happily at home. And yet she moved from Laurel Canyon out to the desert in part to escape the city’s pollution and its impact on her health, the kitchen table is filled with pill bottles from health food stores, and, later, walking around the property, she notices that the bees — one experimental therapy for MS is to be stung many times each day — have abandoned their hive.
“Ever since I’ve been given the opportunity to record, since the very first record, I always prayed, ‘Lord, let me do something that will be good for people,'” Victoria says. “And that’s probably one of the reasons I haven’t put out some of my more dour moments. Maybe I just don’t want to shower people with that, too much. I suppose I could just put out a really black album,” but even at the thought she begins to laugh that laugh.
Later, Mark digs up a tape and plays one of those songs, but they won’t release it because the story’s true and the names haven’t been changed. A notebook in the living room holds another 90-odd unrecorded songs, much of that the archiving work of her frequent bandmate Andrew Williams, who came out to the desert and sifted through work tapes and put them in some order.
“She has a lot of wonderful songs,” Mark begins.
“Oh, I do not,” but her eyes dart shyly toward his anyway. “There’s some songs that I haven’t recorded that I…you really have to be in the right place to record a song, where you can really share the song the way it was given to you. And sometimes…maybe I don’t want to go to some song’s place. And sometimes I’d rather write something new.”
Victoria’s records and concerts are like one imagines church should be. They are open and honest and celebratory, full of delight and respect, able to sweep black clouds to the side with a soft breath. In this way, in occasional gospel flavorings, and in her singular word choices (the first new song is called “Periwinkle Sky”), Victoria Williams’ music retains the unique character of her Southern upbringing.
A lot of wonderful songs, and yet, if Loose was in part a meditation on the endless cycles of life and death — from “Harry Went To Heaven” to “Happy To Have Known Pappy” even to the unexpected cover of Spirit’s “Nature’s Way” — Musings of a Creek Dipper is just a trace sadder. Weary, in spots, but no less wise.
“I wonder…” Victoria says, squinting. “It’s not as perky as some of my records are.”
Well, as we head into middle age we probably aren’t going to be all that perky.
“Exactly. Exactly! That is what Danny said, my manager said. This record is mature, it’s mature. It looks at a lot of life-death issues.”
But Loose kind of did, too.
“Yeah, it did, didn’t it? I’m sort of prepared, I suppose. God’s been good to me. I was prepared, I think. To deal with this, whatever. You know. The shortest prayer: Whatever.” And then she breaks into a vintage Victoria Williams laugh.
Still, there is a pervasive sense of looking backward throughout Musings. The prayer is implicit within “Let It Be So”: “Rejoice in this moment/And any hereafter/Sweet and holy/Be the sounds of your laughter.” Early in “Last Word” she sings, “Who’s going to bury the last man when he dies? All the money in the world can’t help you if the world’s on fire.” The penultimate “Grandpa In The Cornpatch” plays almost as a prayer to her own life, with its elegant refrain: “Chores, chores, chores,” during which Victoria’s voice manages to age twenty years each time the word is repeated.
“In a way,” she chuckles, perhaps delighted with that assessment, “it’s a life. It’s about a life. You know? There’s a lot of chores in life.”
“And I know that she was singing that song around here a lot,” Mark adds. “And I got accustomed to hearing that. The song has been put into practice, definitely.”