Marlon Williams on Lorde, talent and resettling in New Zealand
More time in his homeland has helped the distinctive Kiwi singer-songwriter decide where he wants to settle in the long term.
In his homeland, Marlon Williams has been a star in his own right since soon after the release of his self-titled debut album in 2015. The singer-songwriter’s recent solo tour of New Zealand sold more than 10,000 tickets while playing in a variety of rooms from 250-capacity clubs to 1500-seat theatres across 28 dates.
At the last of his eight concerts in Auckland, though, Williams introduced to the stage a fellow Kiwi whose star has burned brighter than most for nearly a decade – so much so that in recent years, she has spent very little time in the spotlight.
Born Ella Yelich-O’Connor, she is better known as the chart-topping pop musician Lorde, and hasn’t played a show of her own since November 2018. While sitting beside him at the piano, she asked, “Guys, how amazing is Marlon?”
After receiving cheers in response, these two distinctive voices blended beautifully to cover Tougher Than the Rest – a 1988 Bruce Springsteen single recorded before either of them was born – as Williams’s hands moved through the chords.
“The crowds were so well-behaved in terms of (not) pulling out their phones throughout the whole tour – and as soon as Lorde’s on the stage, it all goes out the window,” he says with a laugh.
Their March 31 duet wasn’t the first time they had accompanied one another on stage: at a charity concert in Christchurch two years earlier, Williams had strummed and sang his way through the classic Simon and Garfunkel track The Sound of Silence while ably assisted by Yelich-O’Connor.
“She keeps her private life private, and she has to do that,” Williams says of his friend. “It must be so hard being at that level of fame; me, with my own relatively very humble level of fame, I know what that feels like. So I’m just constantly in awe of her ability to have herself a solid home life, and also go out and do the things she does.”
When Review connects with Williams ahead of three upcoming Australian shows, including two appearances at the inaugural Rising Festival in Melbourne, he’s enjoying a few days at home in Lyttelton, a small port town near Christchurch.
Like just about every other person on the planet, Williams spent much more time in one place last year than he had been anticipating. But for a road-dog musician who has been travelling and performing almost constantly during the past decade – while also based in Melbourne from 2013 to 2017 – the pause has been more welcome than he had expected, too.
“This is the longest I’ve been at home for a long time,” he says. “Not being in Europe or America or Australia hasn’t hurt me in any deep sort of wanderlust sense, and that’s probably largely due to the fact that we can’t travel right now.”
“But I think it’s really solidified in me that I want New Zealand to be my long-term home, and that it doesn’t matter where you are: there’s enough in one place, wherever it is, to sustain you,” he says. “That might change once the veil lifts on the world, but at least at this stage, it’s a nice thing to realise that.”
The singer-songwriter had previously flirted with – or perhaps fantasised about – the notion of pressing pause on his public life for an extended period, though perhaps such thoughts were more appealing when they were a tantalising possibility rather than a COVID-enforced reality.
In a 2015 interview with the New Zealand Herald, for instance, he said, “It’s coming up to eight years of never-ending shows and the whole treadmill, so I think I’m getting to a point where I’d like to be able to sit back and be still for a while. I have this half-dream of being a complete stoner nobody.”
Reminded of this quip, Williams gives a hearty laugh and says, “I’m on the way to making that a reality; I’ve managed to juggle that side of myself with the touring. But that’s funny: that’s what, six years ago? I mean, everyone wants to do nothing a lot of the time, don’t they?
“The last week of this tour I just did, I was desperate to stop,” he says. “Every night, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m just at the edge of my physical and energetic capabilities here …’ Then as soon as it stopped, or a day or two after, that motion sickness hits you, where all of your synapses have shifted into tour mode, and the nausea of the sudden stopping makes you want to keep moving. It’s just an aggregate of all of those feelings, to make sense of it and make it all survivable.”
Wielding a beautifully clear and distinctive voice that recalls crooners who prospered decades before he was born on the last day of 1990, Williams is the kind of once-in-a-generation performer whose talent is immediately obvious from the moment he opens his mouth.
Asked about how his thinking around his evident gifts has changed since he’s been in the public eye, first in his homeland then abroad – including a brief but memorable cameo in the Lady Gaga-led 2018 film A Star is Born, directed by Bradley Cooper – Williams gives a thoughtful response.
“I guess I’m a people-pleaser by heart; I’m a very reactive person,” he says. “I’ve spent a lot of my career presenting a public-facing persona, and a very engaged one, and I’ve (seen) the general effectiveness of my talent upon an audience. Going into my 30s, it’s like, ‘OK, I’ve got this general ability – what is it? What do I want to do with it?’ I mean, ability is just an abstract concept until you apply it, and that’s when the real art comes in, and the work.
“Hopefully, within me there’s a sense of growing ownership or confidence in the general ability, which then leads onto being able to explore – in really definite ways – concepts and ideas, and the real sweetness and intrigue of life,” he says. “That’s a constant battle, but I hope that I’m becoming more refined, specific and directed.”
Late last year, Williams released Plastic Bouquet, an album he’d recorded around Christmas 2018 in Saskatoon with the Canadian folk duo Kacy & Clayton. Border closures mean they have been unable to tour the release, although the three musicians did tune in remotely for a charming concert for NPR’s Tiny Desk online series.
On his recent NZ tour, Williams played three songs from this release: the only three he can get away with doing solo, he notes with a laugh. His upcoming Australian concerts – thanks to the recently opened travel bubble – will take a similar form to the one-man show he developed at home.
That word – home – has taken on a new resonance for Williams. After spending his 20s constantly on the move, the past 12 months have seen him do something that was largely incompatible with the lifestyle of a travelling musician: spending plenty of time toiling in the garden with his father, David.
For a man who previously characterised himself as flighty by nature, and prone to being carried off on whims, keeping his feet on the ground has been a pleasant shift indeed.
Marlon Williams performs at Rising Festival in Melbourne (May 27 and 28), followed by Sydney (May 30).
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