Finding 'Poetry' In A Breakup & 'A Sense Of Inevitability' In Terms Of His Career Path

Marlon Williams

Marlon Williams is sitting at a boardroom table, signing photos of himself, when this scribe enters Universal Music HQ in South Melbourne. He sports a brown cap worn at a jaunty angle and a T-shirt emblazoned with a Watchmen quote: "You Me & Everyone We Know: I am tired of Earth. These people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives."

He opens a coupla stubbies with a lighter and passes one across the table, the signed photos to accompany presale packages of Williams' second record Make Way For Love: a heartbreaking break-up album. Williams spins one of the bottle caps frequently throughout our chat and we reckon he could probably use a fidget spinner.

Back in 2015, when this scribe interviewed Williams ahead of his debut self-titled album release in the beer garden at Yarra Hotel in Abbotsford, he was actually living above the pub. "I haven't really had a place to myself since," he observes. "The Yarra was the last place. Last year I was in Berlin for a few months then in New York for a coupla months, but otherwise, yeah! Just sorta floating around."

Williams then shares, "The more I travel of the world the more I'm just happy that I live in New Zealand, for sure, and it's a nice feeling, you know? Not everyone's so lucky to feel that way about their home but, yeah! I wanna retire there and, you know, I wanna spend most of my time there... New Zealand's sort of got the benefit, in some ways, of being the little brother [to Australia] so it's sort of got the spark that underdogs have. So, I mean, you've got something to push against. Whereas Australia - it's bigger and it's got a dark history... Either way, we're both pretty lucky. Cheers!" He leans across the table and we clink stubbies.   

During this previous interview, Williams considered, "It's funny how you set out to write an album and then from the get-go you're influenced by what happens around you." At the time, he was discussing Sad But True - The Secret History Of Country Music Songwriting Volume 1, one of the albums he recorded with Delaney Davidson. While planning this album in a Lyttelton cafe, the 2011 Christchurch earthquake happened. 

We remind Williams of this quote, asking whether this was also the case with his latest album. "Yeah, totally, you know, that happened with Make Way For Love. That's interesting you bring that up, actually, because I'd forgotten saying that, but yeah! That rings true for this one, too."

Williams recalls the first song he finished that made the cut for this album was Come To Me, "which is funny, 'cause there's still this, like, eagerness and naive sort of hope to work things out, in that song," he acknowledges. Come To Me was written "halfway through 2016" and then, Williams tells, come December, they were looking to start recording sessions at "the start of February". But he only had one song! "All I want is to have new material, 'cause I've just been playing these songs forever, but there's nothing happening!" he recollects. "And then Aldous [Harding] and I break up and then all of a sudden I write 15 songs in three weeks, you know, and then that was it. And so I - all of a sudden - had an album and was thankful for the poetry," he laughs.

"Nick Cave says songwriters make cannibals of their own lives; there's this desire to consume what we put out and filter it into something, and it's a pretty scary-sounding cycle - not one I wanna be in, you know? That's something that I've always hoped wasn't true for me, but it seems to have been." 

A "scary-sounding cycle" such as this is not really something an artist has control over though, is it? "Well, no, exactly, none of us can [control it], but I'd like to hope that I could be aware of patterns, especially if I'm making albums about this stuff," he continues. "You know, if I got four albums deep and every one was based upon, like, a traumatic experience then surely I'd be like, 'Maybe I should stop playing music if this is how it works, or I should stop writing, 'cause there's something feeding back into this,' you know?"

When asked whether Make Way For Love is gonna be a tough album to talk about, Williams counters, "Not really, I sort of gave up all the weight of it in the writing process. So I don't really - it doesn't, like, pull me back or anything or, you know,  generally speaking, I just find that kind of interesting; it's like there's so many of the songs that I'm still trying to work out for myself, so talking about them makes me feel, yeah! Like I'm learning, too." So playing these songs live will reveal more layers of meaning over time? "Exactly! And that's what makes it survivable to play these same songs. That's what's gonna make this tour survivable is trying to find the new."

Williams has just come off a European tour with his Kiwi mate Davidson on support duty so we wanna find out how the two first met. "We're both from a town of 3,000 people so there's that," Williams offers, "but we hadn't ever met 'cause he started touring internationally nonstop in, like, 2004 or so and, you know, I only would've been 13 at the time. So by the time he got back I was just leaving high school and was just working stuff out. And then I heard he was back in town and we've got our mutual friends; The Eastern were playing at the Wunderbar in Lyttelton and they had to cancel for some reason. And Adam [McGrath] from The Eastern rang Delaney and asked if he could play the show and then Jess [Shanks] from The Eastern rang me and asked if I could play the show. So we both turned up to play this show, we got double-booked. So I was just like, 'Oh, it's really nice to meet you and I've heard so much about you,' and he went, 'Should we play together?' And we just played, like, two hours of songs that we both knew and we just locked in. So it was off the back off that we were just like, 'Let's make an album!' And we ended up making three of them. 

"And - speaking of Delaney - when I was, like, halfway through the [Make Way For Love] writing process and Delaney was around I was like, 'I feel like this is so heavy. I'm just laying out all my shit and I'm gonna drive people away.' And he's like, 'Don't! People'll - as soon as you put the songs out there they become the listeners' songs. And they've got their own stuff, and they're not gonna think about - they don't know what you're talking about, really. They know what they're hearing and what it means to them - you don't have to worry about them,  feeling like they're looking too closely at your stuff, because they'll just look at their own, you know?'" 

While composing Make Way For Love, Williams also found himself sitting at the piano "a lot of the time" as opposed to picking up the guitar. "I can just play what I've written and really not much more, so it's just, like, really tiny little steps," he chuckles. "You've got inherent chord structures that you habitually go to when you play guitar... and because I'm such an unconscious writer I sorta have to change up my surroundings to influence what comes out, you know?" After pointing out the piano is "very intuitive, especially melody-wise", Williams posits, "I feel like bad pianists often are the best songwriters, because you just stumble upon things that you maybe wouldn't otherwise."

He then offers, "Traditionally I'm such a character-driven songwriter, but I sorta had to go all the way in on this one, I think, 'cause it's what I needed to do for myself this time; outta necessity, I needed to just have it be my album about my stuff." Could Make Way For Love be Williams' Skeleton Tree (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds), then? He laughs, "You certainly can't compare my grief to his, but..."

The first time this scribe witnessed Williams live was at Queenscliff Music Festival in 2014, where he played multiple shows across the weekend and was the name on everyone's lips. We even had to queue to get into his final show upstairs at Salt Contemporary Art Gallery! "Yeah, that was really great! I forget about all this stuff and it takes someone saying it for me to remember," he says.

Upon the suggestion that his career seemed to gather momentum from those QMF appearances, Williams counters, "I've got no clear indication about where there was ever any turning point. I dunno, I've got this sense of - there's a sense of inevitability, I feel, about anything that happens. You know, I'm pretty resigned and stoic and I feel like everything could go south tomorrow and... It's not in a sense of entitlement to a place within the industry or anything; it's just a resignation for whatever happens happening. And so I'm not surprised if I succeed and, by the same token, when things don't go well, I'm not surprised either, which means that I'm not aware of any sort of benchmarks or yardsticks, you know? It was all happening and that's all there is to it, and I've got no five-year plan or anything." Williams then points out that being too attached to a particular order of events as a way of measuring your success can be "a recipe for disappointment".

We're curious to find out whether Williams and Harding ever cross paths at festivals or anything like that, since both of their career trajectories are undeniably on the rise. "That's pretty much the only time we get to see each other," he admits. "We got to sing Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore [their Make Way For Love duet] at Fairgrounds Festival last year, in December, and that was the first time we've ever sung it together, like, even on record. It's absurd."

This duet was actually recorded while the singers were in different countries. "I recorded my part while we were doing the main recording block, then Hannah [Harding, aka Aldous] did hers from Cardiff, over the phone, like, three months later," Williams reveals. "So it was very disjointed, though kind of poignantly and aptly so; it sort of spoke to our relationship in general that we had to really, like, convey this stuff over the phone. But we're pretty good at communicating now, in that way, because of how much we had to do that in our relationship."

When asked how it felt to perform this duet with her, face-to-face, for the very first time, Williams enthuses, "It was great! That was both of our last shows of the year and god knows she had a huge year last year, you know, and I was pretty busy, too. So there was something so nice about, like, meeting and going, 'Well, here we are!' That was really nice."

On whether the former lovers are still friends, Williams stresses, "Totally, yeah, we've known each other since we were 16 and we were always inextricably bound through music, you know - and through sort of understanding each other through music - so it's still the same."