Joy Williams: What got me through the Civil Wars breakup? Friends, therapy – and red wine

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/25/joy-williams-the-civil-wars-breakup-solo-album-venus

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Joy Williams had an unusual journey into music, because pop and rock were strangers in the family home when she was growing up in California. Her mother knew one Beatles song, I Want to Hold Your Hand, and the Beach Boys were considered acceptable, but that was pretty much it. Until one day the teenage Williams went for a meeting with her drama teacher about a play her high school was putting on.

“I saw this disc and it said, ‘Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin,’” the singer says. “I said, ‘What is that?’ He said, ‘You don’t know who they are?’ ‘No.’ And he said: ‘You need that more than I do.’ And I wore that CD out.” Doors were opened and music flooded in, especially once she got a car and had access to a radio outside the conservative, Christian family home. “The first time I heard the Beatles it was like my brain was melting, in all the right ways. Why have I missed out on hearing this? And I don’t think it was because my parents tried to hide it from me – they just weren’t listening to it.”

Yet Williams’ story isn’t one of teenage rebellion taking her off into a dissolute rock lifestyle. She went into music as a teenager with her parents’ blessing – into the Christian contemporary scene, in which she made three albums. At 18, she was giving interviews in which she talked about wanting to be “an obedient servant of Christ” and how she would rather people left her shows marvelling at God than thinking what a great performance she had put on.

After leaving the Christian scene, she hooked up with John Paul White at a songwriting workshop, to form the multi-Grammy-winning White-Stripes-gone-folk duo the Civil Wars. Now she’s on her own again, on the brink of releasing a solo album that keeps some of the mood of the Civil Wars – an approachable, unthreatening gothic – but dispenses with the folk in favour of sleek, adult-oriented pop. It’s evidently a priority for Sony, for whom she’s a big enough deal that they kept her on after the Civil Wars split, dramatically and bitterly, in 2012.

Williams appears to have been genetically engineered to be a star. A particular kind of one, admittedly – the nice, cheerful, wholesome, don’t-spook-the-horses kind – but a star nonetheless. She’s tiny, so tiny that I suspect, if I accidentally bumped into her, she would collapse in a pile of bones, expensive clothes and perfectly manicured nails. She’s charming, with a hint of flirtatiousness and self-deprecation – she questions her own use of words, asking herself: “I just said plethora. Who says plethora?” It’s a conversational trick she has used in other interviews. And she has the knack of always being able to steer the conversation back to the album she’s promoting. You start to suspect you could bring up anything – the Labour leadership race, the ending of Mad Men, whether chicken or lamb doners are better – and she’d furrow her brow and announce: “I guess, in a way, that’s something I was trying to work through on one of the songs on the album.”

“A lot was on my mind, which I think you can hear,” she says. “Obviously, there’s been a huge amount of change in my life, the obvious thing being the implosion of the Civil Wars. And becoming a new mom. And then having to recalibrate my marriage in a lot of ways. My dad being diagnosed with terminal cancer and passing away. So there was a lot to process. And I think that writing – among other things, like therapy and red wine and good friends – really helped me through it.”

For someone who’s now on to her third artistic guise, she’s keen on the notion of authenticity, insisting that to make music that satisfies her, “I have to split my chest open and reach inside and rummage around”. Which is odd, because both her previous incarnations have involved some level of artifice. She left Christian music, she says, because her songs and interviews had become little more than a script. “I felt like if I were to continue doing that, I would have had to become a duplicitous person and I wasn’t willing to do that.” And the southern gothic of the Civil Wars was often contrived – delightfully so – but it’s hard to think Williams had to rummage around in her open chest to sing: “Won’t do me no good washing in the river / Can’t no preacher man save my soul.”

I’ve made attempts to speak to John Paul, but you have to learn to let go

She has not spoken face-to-face to White since the Civil Wars played the Roundhouse in London in November 2012, then promptly cancelled all their remaining shows. “I’ve made attempts to speak to him, but you have to learn to let go,” she says. “John Paul and I, when we met and started the duo, we barely knew each other. And then you spend hours and days and months on the road, and then you do get to know each other.”

She laughs very faintly, without much amusement. “And as in any dynamic, whether you’re at an office or in any capacity where you’re working that closely with somebody, you begin to notice differences, and differences are not bad – I welcome those. But, when it comes to differences in how you deal with tension, if there’s not a mutual desire then you’re ultimately left with the physics of what goes up must come down.” Venus, her new album, confronts that, she says, by dealing with themes of “acceptance and transcendence and forgiveness and learning to let go of things that don’t serve you and hold on to the things that do”.

Does she find acceptance, transcendence and forgiveness easy? “No.” She looks at me as if I’ve just asked how many elephants she shoots before breakfast. “Is it easy for you?” No, but I haven’t just made a major-label record about it, so it doesn’t matter if I’m unaccepting, untranscending and unforgiving. She laughs, with a little more amusement than last time. “No, it hasn’t been easy. But it’s been worth the fight.”

What’s especially intriguing about Williams is that no matter how soft she appears, she must be made of wrought iron. Not everyone could find the courage to walk away from a hugely successful group that’s still on the way up, just as not everyone could find the courage to leave a successful career in Christian music to reinvent themselves. After three albums she had had enough, and she had to let her parents know she was turning her back on Christian music.

There are certain times you have to lovingly tell your parents, you raised me well – please trust me

“It was hard for them,” she says. “We talked it through. There are certain times as a child when you have to lovingly tell your parents, ‘You raised me well. Please trust me as I move forward. We don’t have to agree on everything to still love each other.’ And we found a really beautiful common ground in that. I was there with my father when he passed away, and all the differences melt away when you hold his hand.”

She’s 32, and poised for a third act, having used the time since the Civil Wars imploded to reconsider so many aspects of her life, including her marriage, which was dragged into the maelstrom because her husband is also her manager and was the “business guru” behind the Civil Wars. “Nate and I had to really work hard as a couple to stare each other directly in the eyes and have conversations that needed to be had, conversations we hadn’t had in a long time or maybe ever,” she says. “And I think every couple – this is a very vulnerable thing to talk about – knows this feeling where you’ve been married, or been with someone so long, that you get in these patterns and you don’t realise there can be a drifting that takes place until you realise you feel very far apart while still being very close.”

And then, having revealed just enough of herself, she pulls herself back on message. “And that’s what the song called Not Good Enough is about: don’t try to leave, try to stay. Sometimes the hardest thing is to stay. And I’m glad we did, because once you work through that, there’s a deep loyalty and deep devotion and deep intimacy that I’ve never experienced before.”

It’s hard to dislike Williams. But that utter likability makes one wonder what exactly did happen to cause such a cataclysmic end to the Civil Wars. She’s always careful to note that it takes two people to fall out, and that she has her own share of responsibility. She’s nobody’s fluffy bunny, evidently. And goodness only knows what happens to the people she doesn’t choose to accept and transcend and forgive.

• Venus is out on Sony/Columbia on 29 June.