The Guest List | Jess Williamson
The Guest List is a regular book column that surveys the reading habits of our favorite musicians. In this edition, Hannah Smith talks with Texas singer-songwriter Jess Williamson. Her new album, produced by Shooter Jennings, is titled A Mile South of Heaven.
Hannah Smith: What are you currently reading?
Jess Williamson: I just finished All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers by Larry McMurtry. And then I was in San Francisco this past weekend, and I went to City Lights’ bookstore, where I picked up a copy of Motel Chronicles by Sam Shepard. I only just started it. I’ve read, you know, a page. So I’m in between books a little bit right now.
HS: Have you read McMurtry before?
JW: I started Lonesome Dove in 2021, when I was on a tour. But I think I started at the wrong time; my short attention span on tour makes reading hard. I prefer to read short stories on tour. So I haven’t picked it back up again. I’m kind of new to Larry McMurtry. Being from Texas, he’s such an important part of Texan literary history. My mom really loves Larry McMurtry. She grew up in Wichita Falls, and she would go down to Archer City when they were filming The Last Picture Show. So the book I just finished was actually her copy, and now I’m kind of curious about more McMurtry because as a Texan it’s required reading.
HS: Yeah, well, you kind of beat me to the punch. I was going to ask if you’d read in the Texas or Western American direction, because your album is so steeped in that landscape. Lonesome Dove is such a behemoth of a book, but it’s a total rite of passage for Texans. I love his nonfiction, too. His essay collections are fantastic.
JW: He has one about Hollywood called Film Flam.
HS: I loved Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.
JW: Yes!
HS: It’s all about his relationship to home and storytelling and a complicated understanding of Texas—like Texas as myth. It makes sense to me that you would read something like that.
This album, A Mile South of Heaven, deals with big tensions around leaving a home and trying to make a home in Los Angeles. I love that one song title, “Goodbye to All That.” It’s in reference to the Joan Didion essay, yes?
JW: Yes, so I’m a really big Joan Didion fan. I read that essay years ago, before I ever even moved to LA, and I just loved it. I had briefly lived in New York for a little over a year, and I wish I had read that when I was living there because it probably would have been really helpful for me. Years later, after I left and went back to Texas, I stumbled upon her essay, and I was like, Oh my god, this is exactly how I felt. Then, when I was in my eighth year of living in LA, I kinda had my I’m-done-with-this-place moment and decided that I wanted to write my own “Goodbye to All That,” but instead of an essay about New York, it would be a song about LA. But strangely enough, writing the song itself and the things I was singing about made me want to stay in LA. And so I thought I was writing my big goodbye, but then I ended up never leaving.
HS: What’s the first line of that essay? It’s super famous, something about . . . it’s easy to see the beginnings of things.
JW: Yes, and it’s harder to see the ends of things.
HS: It’s interesting to think about in relation to writing yourself back into the place you thought you were leaving. Where the act of songwriting then becomes the argument for staying. As though you can’t access the ending.
JW: Yeah, and she talks in that essay about how it’s possible to stay too long at the fair. I have this image in my mind of the party’s over and the lights turning on, but you’re still there. And that was how I started to feel about LA, like I’d overstayed. It was time to go back home. Around the third verse of the song, there’s the line “Goodbye to the dreamers, the poets and their songs,” and I actually started crying while writing because I realized that I wasn’t ready to let go of this place. I ended up making the record in LA, with Shooter Jennings, who’s here, and I look back and think if I had left when I wrote that song, I wouldn’t have made the same album. I’m really glad I stuck around.
HS: There’s something so interesting about writing about a place you’ve left—that distance allows you to see it differently.
Are there other books that inspired the album?
JW: What’s weird is I went for the Fourth of July to see my mom in Dallas, and she gave me this Larry McMurtry book called All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, and she was like, “You should read this!” And it’s crazy because she later admitted to me she didn’t remember what it was about. It’s about a writer in Houston who leaves Texas to go to California, and who misses Texas the whole time but also feels this pull to California.
I read the last page on the beach in Bolinas, outside of San Francisco, and I was like, What a depressing book. And then I kind of sat with it for a while and realized it almost hits a little too close to home because the main character really wants to be a writer and choose the path of an artist, and as a result, he has to leave his friends behind. After he leaves home to do this thing, he comes back, and those relationships are never really the same. I really relate to this book. And I hope I’m not as reckless and chaotic as the main character, but the Texan identity is so strong, and I value it so much, and for whatever reason, for ten years now, I’m no longer a full-time Texan. Most of the time, I’m in LA or on the road, and I still dream of being rooted at home in Texas.
HS: It’s also just the classic story . . . Homer and the Odyssey, you know?
Something I love about your music and this album in particular is the demythologizing and remythologizing of place. The act of leaving Texas makes it larger than life, and you have the distance to think about it in new ways, and there’s so much happening in terms of place and being a woman that come into play in this album. Have you read any books about this?
JW: Not specific to Texas, but there’s this short story collection called Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston. Have you ever heard of her?
HS: I don’t think so.
JW: When I was in high school, in Addison, Texas, I turned to this random page that wasn’t assigned reading, and there was a short story by Pam Houston called “How to Talk to a Hunter” and—
HS: Oh, I have read this story!
JW: Really?
HS: Yes! Sorry, continue.
JW: That makes me so happy—you’re the first person that has ever said this to me because it’s kind of a deep cut. And it’s amazing! I was like fifteen or whatever, sitting in the back of class, reading it, just blown away. I felt like I was gaining inside knowledge about adult relationships between men and women. Like I was peeking behind the curtain of gender dynamics between men and women in the West. A lot of her stuff is set in Montana, Colorado, and Alaska. I spent years thinking about that story, but not remembering who it was by or what it was called, and then I found it again in this collection called Cowboys Are My Weakness.
So I bought that book and I read it right after my last album came out. The stories usually focus on a female protagonist who is, in one way or another, hung up on a kind of wild man who’s unavailable in some way. And when I was writing some of the songs on this record, I was channeling Pam Houston’s characters and the way she writes about men and women.
HS: This is such a great reminder, too, that I loved that short story, and I never went and read the whole collection.
I want to ask about your song “Country Mile” and this idea of the speaker making archetypes of the self. Or the shifting point of view in the lyrics and the way that as a songwriter, you’re sort of fictionalizing your own life. I think of that Emily Dickinson quote “Tell [all] the truth, but tell it slant,” where there’s this sort of angle shift from literal truth telling to emotional truth telling. How do you think about storytelling and characters in your songwriting?
JW: “Country Mile” was very much inspired by this Pam Houston collection of short stories. In “How to Talk to a Hunter,” for example, the story is told in the second person, but the details are so specific, and so intimate, that the writer likely had a similar experience. And so when I was writing “Country Mile,” I was thinking about my own life and experiences and then fictionalized or elaborated on them a little bit, changed some of the details. It starts off as a story about a man and a woman but with really piercing details, like the moth on the dashboard—things you would only know if you were there, similar to the Pam Houston short story. But what I wanted to do was flip to first person at the end as a not-so-subtle reveal. Kind of stating the obvious . . . like, Of course it’s about me.
HS: It’s so interesting how you can gain a new understanding about the self in the act of changing the point of view. It’s like the camera lens just comes at things from a different angle. Are there other books or writers, fiction or nonfiction, that you read who engage with that type of thinking?
JW: I had a phase of going deep on Carl Jung, and then reading books about tarot, and, I just wanted to learn as much as I could. My favorite tarot book is The Way of Tarot by Alejandro Jodorowsky [and Marianne Costa].
HS: Hell, yeah. Any other books or writers, like Pam Houston, that have stayed with you or haunted you?
JW: I feel like I can look back on my life and I went through big phases. In college, I loved Milan Kundera. The Unbearable Lightness of Being was my favorite book, and I wanted to go to Prague so bad and just, like, walk the streets. I love Joan Didion, of course, and I also really love anything I’ve read by William Faulkner and Nabokov. I also love reading autobiographies by musicians.
HS: Like what?
JW: Just Kids by Patti Smith, obviously—
HS: Obviously!
JW: All-time favorite. That book encouraged me to embrace being a starving artist when I was young. She romanticizes this in a way that I think was, for better or worse, the right time for me to read it and be like, Okay, Patti Smith did it.
HS: Do you ever read poetry?
JW: I really like Mary Oliver. I read Dog Songs after my dog died two years ago, and it was so important just to sit with these beautiful poems. With someone that gets it—the love we have for our animals. I loved that.
HS: And she’s somebody who writes about grappling with natural landscapes in a direct, emotionally human way. I love that you brought up Mary Oliver, because tomorrow is her birthday.
JW: Oh, cool! That’s awesome.
HS: Any other books you want to shout out?
JW: Whoa, put me on the spot. Everyone should read East of Eden. That was one, when I finally read it, I was like, How have I not read this before? That’s what comes to mind first. I’m sure we’ll get done and I’ll think of ten more—
HS: Yeah, but it’s a pretty good mic drop to say Steinbeck.
JW: It’s a classic!
Hannah Smith is a poet from Dallas. Her writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.
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