Seven Samurai

Jess Williamson

Tue., March 17, 11pm, Cheer Up Charlies

Jess Williamson is a Lone Star product. A Dallas native who came to the University of Texas for school, she was momentarily stolen away to New York as part of a photojournalism graduate program.

"I was there for over a year, which is when I realized I wanted to pursue music," she says on a frigid February Sunday. "I wanted to do it while I was young and able to live in a weird way. I stayed in New York for eight months after I left the program, just bartending and playing in a band. Then my lease was up, and I made a decision to get a new apartment with a friend.

"But that night I couldn't sleep. I was so torn about signing up to stay there for another year. I felt like a bird in a cage, claustrophobic. It was then when I realized I needed to come back."

Her first proper album under her own name was released just over a year ago in January 2014. Native State, seven songs of sparse, plaintive folk almost entirely sans percussion stars Williamson's ragged, operatic voice, which fuses with the seldom-plucked banjo and guitar. The vibe's all very long-haired and mystic, but she still sings about human things, like codependency and rent money. It caught ears locally, but also churned enough momentum to earn a review by the tastemakers at Pitchfork.

"I woke up to all these text messages like, 'Congrats on Pitchfork!' I had no idea," recalls Williamson. "I was just reading the review on my phone hoping it'd be good, and then I sold a ton of records that day to people all over the world."

Presently, Williamson finds herself in one of those in-between years, when Native State still feels new even though she's working on a follow-up. With two songs recorded so far, she hopes to have a new album out before the year's up.

"What sets this record apart is that I have a band now," she says. "Over the last year I've been playing with a solid backing band. We've been on tour together, we've been working on songs together, we make changes together. That's a big difference. The challenge for me is marrying that same sense of intimacy, which I think is really vital to my sound, with the full band."