Although he was never one to romanticize suffering, for Hayward Williams, depression was the devil he knew. Over the years the Milwaukee songwriter had learned to accept the condition, and, like many artists, even take inspiration from it. But after experiencing the first of a series of serious panic attacks on a flight home from a tour, Williams realized that he couldn’t live with the anxiety anymore. He needed treatment, and that realization, in turn, sparked its own anxieties. What if the antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication changed him, both as a person and as a songwriter? That uncertainty shadows his latest album, The Reef.
“These songs came out of this realm of not knowing where I was going to be or who I was going to be,” Williams says. “I’d lived in this world where I’d written songs a specific way or from a specific part of my soul—mostly from a place of depression or fear or uncertainty. As much as that’s not a great place to be, it’s a useful place to write songs from. So when I was changing the actual chemical formula inside of me I was worried I wouldn’t be able to do that anymore.”
And indeed the treatment did change him. He describes himself as a different person now, and, subsequently, a different artist. It’s difficult to imagine the forlorn Hayward Williams of yore making an album as cheerfully peppy as The Reef, an album that, despite its turbulent origins, radiates joy and hope. “I’ve made six records and at some point things were going to have to change,” Williams says. “I just wasn’t expecting them to change in a way that rocked my whole world.”
Breaking from the melancholy Americana of his previous records, 2010’s Cotton Bell and 2012’s Haymaker, The Reef sets Williams’ heavy prose to uplifting, almost celebratory arrangements modeled after Van Morrison’s Moondance. Williams was driving late at night while on tour in Holland with songwriter Jeffrey Foucault when he decided that album would be the model for his record. “We were playing the record and I was commenting on how I just loved the way that record felt and the spirit and overall aesthetic of it, and I wanted to use that as a jumping off point,” Williams says. “It was listening to Moondance on that trip that convinced Jeff he should be the producer for this album. We made plans to get ready to record that night.”
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For their sessions, Williams and Foucault abandoned the conventions of typical singer-songwriter albums, instead recruiting a small band to lend the record a soulful, live-in-studio sound. Drummer Billy Conway, formerly of the storied jazz-rock band Morphine, is the driving force behind many of these songs. “We had this idea that we wouldn’t use lead instruments or anything like that—we’d just play the tunes through Billy until they made us move,” Williams says. Backing singers Matt and Kate Lorenz, on loan from the group Rusty Belle, further lend to the record’s decentralized sound. They’re given a prominence that modern backing singers rarely find outside of a Leonard Cohen album.
“Those extra vocals give the album the coloring that I always loved in older records,” Williams says. “These days musicians don’t incorporate backup singers the way they used to, but one of the reasons we all love those old Stax records and Motown records is that you hear those songs, they just jump out at you because of all those singers. That’s what makes everybody move. That’s what brings everybody into the party.”
Williams says he’s still adjusting to his new headspace, and he still hasn’t entirely figured out what it means for his songwriting going forward, but he’s less worried about it than he used to be. “It might just take me a little longer to feel out what works now,” he says.
Hayward Williams plays an album release show at Anodyne Coffee in Walker’s Point (224 W. Bruce St.) at 8 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 16 with Jeffrey Foucault and Eric Heywood.
