Marlon Williams hitting the right notes

Marlon Williams is leaving the Yarra Hotel for a tour of the South. Photo supplied.
Marlon Williams is leaving the Yarra Hotel for a tour of the South. Photo supplied.

Melbourne-based Kiwi country boy Marlon Williams is in the ''eye of the storm'', a whirlwind existence that has him performing in Europe one month, Canada the next. Back in New Zealand for a tour that includes a one-off Dunedin show tomorrow, he found time to chat to Shane Gilchrist.

Marlon Williams admits his life is more than a little crazy at the moment.

In fact, it has been since he moved from Lyttelton to Melbourne in 2013.

Partly, that's to do with the fact he lives in an upstairs room at the Yarra Hotel, which hosts no small number of bands and is frequented by a few new-found friends, some of whom, Williams admits, he tries to sneak past if or when he arrives home late from one of his own gigs elsewhere.

''I'm hardly ever home at the moment. It can be a bit depressing at times coming home from tour and living at a bar. I am the worst punter in regards gigs at the Yarra; I always try to run past the front door and up the stairs.''

Williams' schedule of late hasn't left too much time for rest either.

Having completed a tour of Europe and the United Kingdom last week, Williams this week began an album release tour in New Zealand, which includes a performance at Chick's Hotel, Port Chalmers, tomorrow night.

He and his band, the Yarra Benders, then promptly return to Australia for a series of shows before heading to North America next month.

''I fly straight from Brisbane to Winnepeg (Canada) and do a couple of festivals and some other shows.

''I am certainly in the eye of the storm,'' he says, lamenting the fact that he is unlikely to have time to catch up with many of his old friends from Lyttelton and Christchurch, where he first arrived on the music scene with the Unfaithful Ways, the country band he formed in the mid-2000s while at Christchurch Boys High School.

''I fly into Christchurch, have a quick sound-check, try to eat something, say hi to my mother, play a show, then drive to Dunedin in the morning.

''I've got so many people in Christchurch whom I'm really close to, but I can't catch up with them. I always find touring New Zealand really sad for that reason. But I will find time to come back and do it properly.''

It has been quite a year for the 24-year-old.

His self-titled debut album, released in April, charted at No 4 in New Zealand and No 31 in Australia in its opening week.

It recently featured in Faster Louder's Best Album of 2015 (so far) list and has been tipped as one of the albums of the year in a swathe of favourable reviews.

As Billboard magazine fawned: ''Marlon Williams has been heralded as the `impossible love child of Elvis, Roy Orbison and Townes Van Zandt'. There's something in it.

"A two-time winner of New Zealand Music Awards, the folk singer, who is now based in Melbourne, is taking leaps forward in his career ... Expect to see and hear a lot more from this man with the voice of an angel.''

It's interesting the magazine touched on the heavens.

Running parallel to Williams' interest in country, folk and rock is a passion for choral music.

He grew up singing in the Christchurch Cathedral Choir, long before his Maori father, a former punk rock band member, introduced him to country music in his teens.

He reflects on a choral excursion a few years back that took him and Unfaithful Ways band-mate Ben Woolley to Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, among other countries:''Yeah, you can't beat singing all that amazing music with 60 other people. It still gives me a thrill.''

Williams' deep knowledge of harmonic structure is obvious, be it on The Unfaithful Ways' 2011 debut album, Free Rein (which earned the band a Critics' Choice nomination at the 2011 New Zealand Music Awards), or his recent self-titled solo debut.

In fact, he admits he often has to scale back his inclinations to add more and more vocal layers to the mix.

He recalls getting lost in a harmonic hole at one point during the two-week recording sessions for Marlon Williams: ''Ben and I got to the stage where we'd just gone overboard.''

At the mention of Enya, he laughs.

That mild self-criticism shouldn't obscure the fact that Williams' voice is a rare thing.

Deserving of being high in the mix, he can hit all sorts of notes while, importantly, conveying all sorts of emotions: cool and aloof, smouldering and intimate, off-the-rails and dejected ... no wonder he's drawn comparisons with various American vocal giants.

Williams certainly regards himself a singer first, a songwriter second.

He thanks Christchurch alt-country singer Delaney Davidson for his help in getting him to ''loosen up a bit and look within myself''.

Those collaborations with Davidson had other outcomes, too. Having begun performing as a duo in 2011, they released three volumes of the series Sad But True: The Secret History Of Country Music Songwriting, garnering critical acclaim, including winning the New Zealand country song and country album of the year in 2013.

The pair also won the APRA ''Best Country Song'' award for Bloodletter the same year.

Williams, a 2012 finalist for ''Best Country Song'' (for Ghost of This Town), once likened writing a complicated country song to ''putting a stained glass window in a house looking out over Milford Sound''.

It's one of the key lessons he learned from Davidson: keep it simple, keep it honest.

That honesty extends to interviews. Williams admits he entered The Sitting Room studios in Christchurch with just five songs destined for his debut. Some of them weren't even completed.

Still, it helped that he was working with producer Ben Edwards, with whom he'd collaborated on The Unfaithful Ways' album as well as those three releases with Davidson.

''I ended up doing 10 tracks, nine of which appear on the album and some of which are covers.''

He's referring to Lost Without You, by Italian-American songwriter Teddy Randazzo, and Silent Passage, by Canadian singer-songwriter Bob Carpenter. Both choices are obscure.

''I tend to just go with the flow.''

Though that might be a reflection of William's varied tastes, it's also a quick glimpse into his personality.

''I'm fairly relaxed. That's why it's good to have management.''

 


The show

• Marlon Williams and the Yarra Benders perform at Chicks Hotel, Port Chalmers, tomorrow night, supported by Laura Jean.

• Williams self-titled debut album is out now.


 

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