>>PREVIEW
BELTLINE BLUES FESTIVAL
Tim Williams
June 23-25
Victoria Riverside Park
Most people know Tim Williams as a bluesman, but this local guitarist isn’t that easy to categorize. Williams has spent a lifetime exploring music from blues to country, from Mexican music to Hawaiian steel guitar and, most recently, a stint with a jug band. But this is only part of Williams’s bag of tricks. In a business where there are lots of performers, there aren’t many who justly deserve the title raconteur and showman. Williams has often been described this way but it’s a title he finds amusing.
"That means a good liar, doesn’t it?" he says, laughing at the question.
But showmanship is at the heart of his reputation. He’s obviously a renowned singer-songwriter, producer and pivotal music figure, too, but a seemingly effortless stage routine is something he’s also spent years cultivating.
"When I was growing up and first started to perform, people I was always really taken with, musical performers I was always really taken with, were people who could tell a good story and be funny, like Rambling Jack Elliot, and Hoyt Axton was a master at it," he says.
"Yeah, it’s always been kind of a part of how I saw being a performer. … If you do it right, if it actually comes from a fairly real place, people actually feel like they’re getting to know you a little better, like it opens one more door between you and the audience."
Williams has opened doors to his audience through his songs as well as his personality. The songwriting, though, hasn’t been easy to fit into his busy career.
"Yeah, it is difficult," says Williams. "Its easy to forget to take some time, it’s easy to get lost in that and you actually have to make time. I have friends who are singer-songwriters of every sort of level and every sort of degree you could imagine, and there are people who write a lot and write quite a lot of good stuff, write everyday just like good novelists. And then there are people who write less often but tend to write pretty good songs. They do what I do –they carry journals and periodically sit down and go through them and sort out the pieces of songs and the pieces of ideas that’ll all fit together." Tim laughs as he explains this, because it isn’t always a precise method.
Making time for it is one thing, but having something to say is quite another. Fortunately for Williams, he’s never short on inspiration.
"I try to write down the snatches of stuff that come along," he says. "That can be triggered by anything. It can be triggered by hearing somebody else, or often a conversation overheard in an airport or a bar or a book or a play or a movie. Inspiration comes from all sorts of places and you just try and jot all that down and find some way of collating it and putting it all together."
And Williams does put it all together with just the right twist of the gifted storyteller. |
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