A reverent hush falls over a packed Lexington as Jess Williamson walks on stage. She’s dressed like a hipster who stumbled across the Little House on the Prairie and is performing alone tonight, just a woman with her guitar – and, at certain points, an iPhone playing the tinny beats that she used as demo drumlines that became an integral part of her most recent album.
That album is Time Ain’t Accidental, her fifth solo record and the first to embrace a more upbeat worldview, as opposed to earlier work that was perpetually close to tears. She has spent years playing country-folk-adjacent music and was on the brink of a big break when the pandemic cut everything in half. Tonight she is as optimistic as her 2023 record, gamely inviting the “smaller people” stuck at the back behind a sea of vertically gifted people to sit on the stage where there is plenty of room. “I think it’d be really nice,” she tells us. “It gets lonely up here.” No one takes her up on the offer.
