Product Description

1. He s Making A Fool out of You
2. Mama
3. I Hold On
4. Keep The Change
5. Let Her Go
6. Three Days In Bed
7. Alone
8. Love I Think Will Last
9. Gone With The Morning Sun
10. Without Jesus Here With Me
11. Birds

Track Listing

1. He's Making a Fool Out of You
2. Mama
3. I Hold On - Chris Janson, Holly Williams
4. Keep the Change
5. Let Her Go
6. Three Days in Bed
7. Alone
8. Love I Think Will Last - Chris Janson, Holly Williams
9. Gone with the Morning Sun
10. Without Jesus Here with Me
11. Birds

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4253 in Music
• Released on: 2009-06-16
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .21 pounds

From the Artist
"I'm such a blatantly honest person," says Holly Williams, "and I love to listen to an album and think the artist is truly sharing their life with me. I like to feel like I'm really getting in and knowing that person."

"My whole thing with writing is I love to tell a story," Holly says. "When I listen to songs, I play the movie in my head. There are certain songs in my head I see the colors and the visuals. Tom Waits is a genius at doing this. I've always hoped some of my songs inspire vivid pictures."

About the Artist
Holly Williams' Mercury Nashville debut titled Here With Me is slated for release June 16. Williams, the granddaughter of country icon Hank Williams, Sr. and daughter of the legendary Hank, Jr., penned the majority of the album's 11 tracks and co-produced with Justin Niebank and Tony Brown. Current single "Mama" was written for her mom as a Mother's Day gift.

Customer Reviews

Hank Sr.'s granddaughter cuts a superb country and pop album
Williams' gold-plated lineage (her father is Hank Williams Jr., her grandfather was Hank Williams) is in many ways misleading rather than informative. Though she's the product of two generations of country music royalty (and a broken home), her songs are modern in style and her lyrics are mostly untouched by self-destructive rebelliousness. Unless, that is, you count her charting a mainstream musical course as rebelling against the family business. The Williams' troubles passed from Sr. to Jr. to III, but in changing gender (and mother, Hank III is a half-brother), the darkest demons seem to have lost their grip on the steering wheel.

That's the long-way around to saying that you shouldn't expect a female version of the rowdy Williams sound or style here, though you will get a helping of the family's breed of talent. Williams' 2004 major label debut, The Ones We Never Knew, was a moody singer-songwriter album that lived in the contemporary folk and adult pop world of Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Jewel. After the album stiffed (and its single "Sometimes" failed to crack the charts), Williams was dropped by her label. A car accident and several years further along, she's back with a new album for Mercury Nashville that has a stronger country flavor.

The opening "He's Making a Fool Out of You" is an original slow waltz that would be a good fit for Lee Ann Womack, and Williams' duet with Chris Janson, the sweetly themed "A Love I Think Will Last," is an upbeat, two-step shuffle. Williams' hasn't abandoned the sophisticated contemporary pop sounds of her debut, she's simply mixed things up a bit. There are songs of coping, faith, troubled relationships, emotional growth and unbridled love. There are biographical lyrics about Williams' mother and father, and a quick name-check of her grandfather, but they're more like waypoints than destinations.

Williams' voice fits smoothly into both the highly produced tracks and the twangier arrangements. She's a powerful singer, emoting forcefully when unburdening herself and choking up when delivering the romantic doormat's heartbreaking simile "like a leaf in mid-October I still change for you." She favors Rosanne Cash a bit on the country tracks. The album closes with a solid cover of Neil Young's "Birds," sung slower and shorn of the backing choir of After the Gold Rush. It's a nice showcase for the expressiveness of Williams' voice, and though it's not as plaintively bereaved as Young's original, it's no doubt a showstopper on stage.

Those who felt Williams' debut hewed too much to one tempo or sound will like the breadth in her songwriting and the new opportunities this provides for her stellar voice. This isn't your father (or grandfather's) country album. In fact, it's as much a contemporary pop album as it is modern country. But as on her previous album, Williams shows herself to be a talented artist whose songs are dark but not damaged, and whose music doesn't stand in anyone's shadow. Now, Mercury Nashville just needs to figure out whether to break her on country or pop radio. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

This one can't touch her first album.
I read she was dropped by the label that produced her first album. So that label has no concept of true talent as 'The Ones We Never Knew' is one of the best songwriter albums ever created. Unfortunately on this album it seems she feels obligated to produce country music which is really sad because she was so great as just a songwriter without the country influence. You can still get a great taste of the non country music with the tracks 'Alone' and 'Birds'. Her upbeat tracks 'Let Her Go' and 'Keep The Change' are catchy. The rest is heavy with country influence which I found both detracting and mundane after having her first album as a reference point. Hopefully she will recognize her error and return to making great five star albums.

Lyrics Straight from the Heart
In the increasingly homogenized universe of popular music, it takes a good dose of heartfelt lyrics that are sung with special conviction to show again the power from the increasingly lost art of storytelling. Holly Williams carves her niche as a singer/songwriter - she writes or co-writes eight of the 11 tracks - on this sophomore effort and her first album for Universal Music Group Nashville: Mercury Nashville Records.

And it's from the deepest depths of despair on "Without Jesus Here With Me" - chronicling a March 2006 car crash that nearly killed Williams and her sister - that delivers incredible textures on such a shattered canvas: My sister fought/My daddy cried/My mama begged him for our lives/And I don't know how I would breathe/Without Jesus here with me. But reflection on that tragic day brings incredible honesty to the present: I still don't talk to him much/But I don't know where I would be/Without Jesus here with me/No there ain't no tellin' where I'd be/Without Jesus here with me.

The daughter of Hank Williams, Jr. - and half-sister of alt-country singer Hank Williams III - also tackles being raised in a broken home on the single "Mama" (You could have been bitter/You could have hated him) through lyrics which meticulously bring out such private emotions. That same soul searching is also found on the other single "Keep the Change" (I'm sitting around singing sad, sad songs/And it ain't, ain't getting me nowhere).

"Let Her Go" bounds forward with particular vibrancy, while the studio turns into a small stage on a very late Saturday night in a bar half-filled with desperate souls as Williams gets down to basics - guitar/vocal - on "Three Days in Bed" and piano/vocal for Neil Young's "Birds." A softer number - "Gone with the Morning Sun" - and a duet with Chris Janson, "A Love I Think Will Last" - expertly juxtaposes the roller coaster that love brings to a life, but each leave room for the listener to add some personal details into the mix.

Holly Williams proves why a premium should still be placed on crafting words that won't be lost in production gimmicks that replaces substance for style.