![]() ![]() ![]() "We just didn't put too much pressure on it," he says of the album-making process. A three-year break between albums, thanks in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, gave him the chance to plumb the depths of each song and tease out all its stylistic possibilities. Part of Williams' ability to do that came from his Grammy-winning 2019 hit duet with Dolly Parton, "There Was Jesus," a collaboration that raised his profile in the country industry.īut just as much of A Thousand Highways' sonic depth and nuance came from the simple fact that he had years to live with most of its songs before the record came out. Meanwhile, he wrote and recorded with some of the highest-profile Nashville songwriters and musicians for this album, embracing more elements of country and Americana than in any previous project. Bluesy, twangy barn-burners like the opening track "Big Tent Revival" co-mingle with gospel tracks such as "Like a Billy Graham Revival" and "Flesh and Bone (We Remember)," so fully realized as worship that Williams and his band take communion with their audience during the encore of his live show. A Hundred Highways is rangier than anything he's released before, with threads of Southern rock, gospel, country and much more running through the song. Ironically, the more Williams has zoomed in on the specific lyrical themes he wants his songs to convey, the more he's broadened his sonic reach. And so I'm just trying to share that with my listeners as much as I can." One thing I know that I've learned is that Jesus is the only one that can fix it. That's really the goal with writing this stuff," he goes on to say. "My hope is that somebody else is gonna hear the same thing I heard in a song, and it'll change their life. Williams often writes his songs to be geared toward people who are going through the same challenges and facing the same questions that he once did, he adds. "But I've had so much that I wanted to say over the last few years - things that God's done in my life - that I try now to write from this season, this personal place," he explains. Before becoming a Christian artist, he says, he used to sometimes write more character or story-based songs. Williams hasn't always written so autobiographically. Even the album title is a meditation on that journey Williams borrowed it from a line in the chorus of "Looking for You," a song he points to as the heart of the record. It's centered around his long, eventful journey towards finding Jesus. The careful, diaristic lyrical specificity Williams strove for in "Jesus' Fault" is just one example of what a personal album A Hundred Highways is. You guys killed it," Williams remembers him saying - and he sings that second verse in the song, and appears in the "Jesus' Fault" music video. Hayes cried when he heard the way the song turned out - "It's everything I wanted to say. He decided to go ahead and record the song, send it over to Hayes and see if he wanted to sing the second verse. "And Walker explained to me that his father had passed away that year, and it was a really important lyric to him." So if there was anything I wanted to rewrite, it would be that lyric," Williams says. " talked about the relationship he had with his father. Williams kept the song in his back pocket for about a year - the pandemic was in full swing, and everything, including his album-making process, was moving slowly - but when it was finally time to cut it, he called Hayes and floated the idea of making one lyrical change in the second verse. "And I didn't have an explanation, other than, you know, 'Don't blame me. "I just remembered when I quit my band and started going to church, all my friends, they couldn't understand what was going on in my life," he says. So when Williams heard the opening line of the song that Hayes and Farren had written - " The Bible by the bed ain't a coaster no more / It's still got some rings from the bottles before" - he knew it was a line he could sing. Both men have chronicled their stories of addiction, recovery and redemption in their music both frequently sing about their experience of finding Christianity and a relationship with Jesus, after taking long, tumultuous journeys toward faith. It's uncommon for Williams to cut songs he didn't write - he likes to sing from personal experience - but Hayes' story parallels his own in many ways.
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