Good Times: An Interview with The Lone Bellow's Zach Williams

Zach Williams talks family, friendship, good fortune, and what it means to live the dream.

By Emilie Rohrbach

Zach Williams is laughing. “My band is going to kill me. I’m talking too much about parenting.”

It’s not his fault. I missed his manager’s last-minute email about calling him later than our designated time because his wife was stuck in traffic so he had to pick up the kids. When I call, I hear a persistent sweet voice in the background: “I want to talk to Mom! Hiiiya, Mom!” This continues until Williams puts me on speakerphone to prove to his three-year-old son that I am not in fact the Mom, we all sing song our good-byes to each other, and I call him back 15 minutes later. We’re both still laughing.

I ask him how many kids he has – four, he tells me, three girls and a boy. I’m delighted, because I am one of four, also three girls and a boy. “Is the boy last in your family, too?” Williams asks, almost as surprised and pleased as I am, that yes, in fact that is the case. Williams wants to know everything – where I was born and raised, how my brother fared growing up with three older sisters, if we’re still close. And our conversation is off and running.

Someone else might think talking family is mundane – after all, The Lone Bellow just released their fourth album Half Moon Light to wide acclaim and are about to start a three-month tour. There’s much music to be discussed. But fans of The Lone Bellow know differently – what a quiet miracle it is that Zach and his wife Stacy have come this far, that they have a family at all, that she’s late coming home shopping for antiques for the business she started over two years ago.

Zach and Stacy have known each other since they were 12 – I’m not sure exactly when they fell in love, though according to Williams she played hard to get in the beginning – and they got married at the ripe old age of 21. “We probably shouldn’t have gotten married until we were 30. There were so many kinks to figure out, it took forever. They say if you’re married to someone a lifetime, it’s like you’re married to five people because the person changes so dramatically every so often. I think I’m at stage three…I look back a few years and think, man that guy was dumb, and I’ll probably look back a few years from now and say, that guy was an idiot, but hopefully with some compassion.”

If this is true, the Williams’ were tested at the very first stage. One year after getting married, while riding horses on Williams’ family farm, Stacy fell from her horse and, after being admitted to The Shepherd Center - the same hospital in Atlanta where Christopher Reeves passed away after years of dealing with a similar accident - was diagnosed quadriplegic, her neck broken at C 1,3,5, and 6.

Williams remembers the moment like it was yesterday: “I was sitting in the front yard and the horse came back over and Stacy wasn’t on it. There was an eerie silence. It took a minute to find her because nobody was bush hogging so the grass was real tall – when I found her I thought it was over. Then she was diagnosed and we lived in that reality awhile.”

Williams had grown up singing with his family and in the church choir, but music had never been the foundation of his life. All that changed in the next few months. “I was worried I’d grow numb so I started writing in these journals. The spouses could only stay at the hospital until 9, then I’d have to walk back to this sad little condo across the street and I’d write.”

Eventually, he showed friends his writing, and they convinced him he should learn how to sing and play guitar at the same time. “There was a Starbucks across the street from the hospital and I would go and cry and sing to strangers as they were sipping their peppermint lattes…that’s where my love of song hit me real hard.”

The same friends made a pact that if Stacy got better, they’d all move to New York. Incredulously, within six months, Stacy was released from the hospital, and Williams and his wife spent the summer working on their friends’ boat. “Good Times” –a raucous song on Half Moon Light - is a song about the stories that came from being on that boat. Two years later, the gang headed north and landed in Brooklyn.

Brian Elmquist, one third of The Lone Bellow and friends with Williams since they were 18, was part of that gang. “Brian was the first person who encouraged me to try to sing in front of people for the first time. I was so scared I had the lyrics on a piece of paper. Brian took it from me, crumpled it up, and threw it in the crowd. We’ve been singing together ever since.”

Kanene Donehey Pipkin’s older brother was also part of the friends from the hospital days. “I went and sang at Kanene’s brother’s wedding, and he asked me to sing ‘Oh Happy Day,’ with his sister. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I think I reached out to her on MySpace to ask if we could ever sing together if she came to Brooklyn, and she told me she lived in Beijing with her husband.” Eventually, the Pipkins did move to Brooklyn, and The Lone Bellow was born. Jason Pipkin, Kanene’s husband, often plays keyboard and bass and collaborates on songwriting with the band.

Living in New York wasn’t always easy. “It took Stacy about three years to fall in love with New York. We had our three girls there. That was hard. We were living in a four-story walk up. Getting kicked out of apartments over and over because they’d jack up the rent.”

Yet, New York was where Williams felt called. “I grew up north of Atlanta where the broke people who still work in the city live. If there was a black sheep in our hometown, they’d say, ‘I’m moving to Nashville.’ And nobody made it. So much of my DNA is live shows and much of that had to be built on a foundation of people. In New York, you had all different varieties of work and people would want to come to the shows. And that’s how you built a following. In Nashville, it would just be other musicians there with their arms crossed.”

But, admits Williams, times have changed. “There are other things happening in this town now, for sure. And I think one reason why Nashville is a music town is that you can boil it down to logistics: if you draw five flower petals around Nashville and you cut the Rockies off you’re a pretty quick drive from almost any place in America.”

That’s part of what prompted Williams, his family, and the rest of the band to move to Nashville in 2016. “I have such a strong crew in Brooklyn. It’s really difficult not living around the corner from them. But we came to the conclusion that I could be home so much more with the family if we lived here. When I was leaving from Brooklyn, I’d have to stay out months at a time. Now I can fall asleep on a bus in Chicago and take the kids to school in the morning in Nashville.”

“So, that’s the dream?” I ask.

“Music and family and feeling like I’m present with my kids? Yes. And there are generations of people who have grown up this way here and you start to meet them. I have a friend whose dad was a musician and he was gone a lot – I asked her if that ruined their relationship and she said, ‘Absolutely not. It’s quality over quantity.’ And the teachers here understand. It’s all part of the culture.”

It’s good to know this culture of support exists as The Lone Bellow revs up for another tour, this one to celebrate their latest album, Half Moon Light. When I ask him about parallels between the journey with Stacy and the journey with his band, perhaps the significance of finishing up the New York chapter and creating this new album, he pauses. “I’ve realized in this process how much fear I have and how I’ve needed to control things. It’s been like an onion unfolding in the last few years. On the first record I wrote all the songs, and after that I realized that I don’t know if the magic’s going to be there if I just shut everyone out and come in and say, ‘Here’s the next song.’ People need ownership in this.”

The band had become friends with Aaron Dessner when he produced their album Then Came the Morning and chose to work with him again. Dessner brought in Josh Kaufman and J.T. Bates, and together they all started collaborating and “it was like this free form experimental stuff.”

“This record is my favorite one by far where we were the healthiest mentally and with our friendships and our respect for one another. We went into the studio with a really clear vision of what we wanted the melodies and songs to sound like.”

The band went to Dessner’s studio in upstate New York and lived there for a few weeks while recording the album. Part of the reason they wanted to work with Dessner is they knew he would challenge them. “We got to the studio and Aaron said, ‘I know you guys always sing really big notes and hold them for a long time and I think it’s become a crutch. We’re cutting that out. We need to get the emotion across another way.’ He kept making the joke, ‘I’m clipping the angel’s wings.’ ”

Dessner specifically challenged Williams to sing in a register he hadn’t before. When I ask Williams if there’s a song he feels most vulnerable about, he has the answer right away: “’Enemies.’ I was trying to get the vibe by playing the guitar and singing the vocal at the same time, and when I finished Aaron was like, ‘That’s the vocal I want. I said, ‘No, that’s just the map,’ and he told me, ‘You’re not going to beat that, sorry,’ even though I was only playing one chord. ‘Dust Settles’ was also really different for me – Jason and Brain wrote that song – and I’m doing it live at The Troubador for the first time ever in two days.”

Dessner’s theory proved correct – this album has a sophisticated, enticing feel, a mystery that compels you to lean in closer as the music washes over you. You hear the controlled depth on singles like ‘I Can Feel You Dancing,’ ‘Wonder,’ and ‘Martingales,’ especially, the feeling of containment with bursts of harmony.

Whether in spite or because of this new approach, Williams’ is relaxed about this album in a way he hasn’t felt before, in part because he knows he’s a small cog in the wheel this time. “ ‘Just Enough to Get By’ is a song I cannot sing and a subject I will not sing. It’s a story that’s specific to Kanene and her mother and I’m just honored to stand beside her and harmonize with her while she belts this thing out. And Brian has a letter to his dad in the song, ‘Wash it Clean.’ It’s all opening up. I’m so grateful for everyone’s influence.”

Perhaps one of the most poignant influences on this album is the presence of his grandmother, who was part of The Justice Trio in Georgia in the 50’s. His Grandma hadn’t played a piano in over 30 years, but at her husband’s funeral she asked her three sons to carry her to the piano. “She laid this beautiful melody and it was a beautiful celebration that I got to capture.” This song is broken into three parts on the album – the Intro, Interlude, and Finale. “The sound of everyone clapping on the outro of the album is actually everyone clapping at the end of my grandfather’s funeral.”

Another piece of William’s ability to surrender is inspiration from a book his best friend Caleb gave him to read, entitled, “War of Art.” “It just talks about natural resistance that’s out there every day all the time pushing against you writing a song, doing an interview, playing a show…knowing it’s there and learning the tools to be aware of that resistance and trying to push against it is what makes me excited. It’s my version of sticking it to the man, but the man is this ambiguous floating thing called resistance.”

Finally, this album has a sentimental quality to it for Williams that overrides the push for commercial success. “This album is like a time capsule – it reminds me of my friendships with the band and their families and the people we get to meet on the road and the conversations we might get to have with people on the road who have the courage to tell us what a song means to them.”

It’s right around this time that one of his daughters walks in the room to show Williams her report card. Williams is ecstatic: “You did great! Can I finish this interview and then really look at it with you?”

He gets back on the phone and laughs again. “You’re catching me on a good day, where I’ve had enough coffee and the kids are making me laugh and I’m saying I don’t care, I can relax…the goal is to live that way. I might screw it up next time, but this time, we’re good.”

Check out their music at www.thelonebellow.com

The Lone Bellow is playing Friday, March 13th at The Fillmore in San Francisco. Tickets are available at www.thefillmore.com