Faye Williams begins her climb with ‘Woman in Black’

The songs on Faye Williams new Woman in Black EP, out today (Friday, May 1), collectively paint a picture of rebirth, the Columbus musician’s narrators steadily progressing from haunted to empowered.

“They kind of represent what I’ve gone through these past couple years, and that journey from being really, really low to figuring out how to pick yourself back up,” Williams said by phone in late April en route to a gig in Port Clinton, Ohio. 

The tracks are also indicative of a larger evolution that has taken place within Williams since she began making music around 2020, with the singer and songwriter allowing that as a younger person she was driven more by ego, her earliest efforts often existing as a search for “external validation,” as she described it.

“And you can burn out really fast that way, because you’re not being true to yourself,” said Williams, who hit a wall a couple of years in and set aside music for a stretch around 2022 as she struggled with mental health issues and drug addiction. “Then I picked up meditation and stayed consistent with it, and I started doing really consistent therapy. … And when I picked [music] back up, I told myself, ‘How you write, how you present yourself, it has to be for you.’ … I would say hitting rock bottom helped to remind me what my priorities are and why I even started making music to begin with. And as I’ve done more work on myself, I’ve realized that chasing fame or doing this for any of those vain reasons, it’s not sustainable, and it zaps the joy out of everything pretty quickly.”

“In the Rain” marked a particular turning point for Williams in her return to music, with the singer describing the rock ballad as sounding “more like me,” its raw, unvarnished lyrics living closer to the surface than what she had previously allowed. “Writing it was almost a therapy session, and I had all of these feelings, where I felt really, really sad and really alone,” the musician said. “So, I picked up my guitar and that’s what came out.”

The songs that followed and which make up Williams new EP – “Supernatural,” “Down Dog,” and “Woman in Black” – trace an upward arc, with deep pleas for connection (bluesy opener “Supernatural”) gradually giving way to romantic ascension. “She’ll be your queen,” Williams sings on the title track, a tender roots-rock slow-burner. “Together you will reign.”

The sense of comfort that ripples in Williams’ words carries over into the instrumentation, which began to draw more heavily on the sounds she grew up immersed in. “My dad, that side of the family is more from West Virginia [and] Eastern Kentucky, and my mom is from West Virginia, so it was this mix of country and Southern blues, Southern rock,” she said. “I love the beauty of that music from the ’70s and ’80s. The production of those songs, even if they’re not technically mixed that great, you can still just feel it.”

From an early age, Williams said she always felt a deep connection to music, finding in songwriters like Courtney Love of Hole people whose perspectives and emotions at times mirrored her own. Moving forward, she hopes to spark a similar bond with her own listeners. “I think that’s what the goal has become with my music,” she said, “to provide that connection for other people, whatever it looks like.”