Some guitarists are inspired by the brawn of AC/DC or the delicacy of Joni Mitchell, but neo-folk fingerpicker Yasmin Williams had a very different way in. “I played Guitar Hero II every day after school when I was 12, until I beat all the levels,” she says, with no small amount of pride. Within weeks, she’d become a Nirvana and Hendrix devotee and had the game licked – even the ridiculous avalanche of notes that is Thunderhorse by fictional thrashers Dethklok (“a deep cut: very hard, very fun,” she adds.)
Today, at home in Alexandria, Virginia, she is not only surrounded by guitars, but also bookshelves in the shape of guitars. Williams is now making some of the most purely beautiful guitar music anywhere, and describes new album Acadia as “a blossoming, of sorts” – it opens with solo acoustic instrumentals in the vein of her spellbinding first two albums, but the arrangements open up until Williams is accompanied by electric guitars, synthesisers, alto saxophone and singing voices. “It’s maybe not what people will be expecting from me,” she says. “But those elements have always been within me. I love jazz. I love rock music. I love electric guitar.”
After she graduated from Guitar Hero’s plastic axe, Williams acquired an Epiphone SG and was ready to embark on her dream of becoming the next Buckethead. “I just wanted to shred,” she says. But she soon outgrew that phase, graduating to an acoustic. “I was figuring out my personality through the guitar,” she says. “I wasn’t an angsty 12-year-old any more.” She hadn’t abandoned the moves learned from Guitar Hero, however. “The game shaped my experimental approach to guitar,” she says. “On really tricky levels, I’d put the controller in my lap and hammer the buttons super-fast. So I started lap-tapping the acoustic and that opened up a whole new world.”
Her sense of the possibility within the humble acoustic was further expanded by a YouTube video of fingerpicking pioneer Elizabeth Cotten performing in 1969. Williams credits Cotten with “drastically changing my trajectory”, and her influence can be clearly heard on Williams’ 2018 debut album Unwind, which she self-released when she was 21. Unwind drew the attention of radical feminist imprint Spinster, which financed her breakthrough, 2021’s Urban Driftwood. She wrote this second album throughout the turbulence of 2020. “My mom said: ‘You’re stuck in the house, so just concentrate on your music’,” Williams remembers. So she poured her anxieties over “the horrible political climate, the George Floyd protests, police violence across the country and the pandemic sending everyone insane” into a batch of new compositions. “I couldn’t put what I felt into words, so I just played. Whatever songs happened, happened.”
Williams is certainly forthright – earlier this year she wrote a popular op-ed for the Guardian criticising Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter as “a capitalist gesture” in the world of Black country and folk. But while Urban Driftwood was inspired by injustice, unrest and despair, its mesmerising instrumentals established a different mood: one that was meditative and uplifting. “We didn’t need another reiteration of the pain and destruction people were going through,” Williams says. “It wasn’t escapism, exactly. But I wanted to believe that things could get better and focus on that. I chose hope over simply stating what the reality was.”
Urban Driftwood was rapturously received, as were a home-recorded Tiny Desk concert for NPR in October 2021 and Williams’ triumphant performance at that year’s Newport folk festival. She acknowledges Newport as a turning point: “It was the biggest stage I’d ever played. The acceptance from the crowd, the intense listening, made me feel I could succeed as a professional musician, which had always seemed far-fetched before.”
In this headspace she conceived Acadia, challenging herself to vacate her comfort zone. She embraced collaboration, working with saxophonist/composer Immanuel Wilkins, guitarists Kaki King and William Tyler, vocalists Darlingside and Aoife O’Donovan, and more. And she further widened her frame of reference, accompanying her acoustic guitar with tap shoes and calabash drums, playing kora and making clear her sound couldn’t be contained within the American folk tradition.
“It wasn’t about emancipating myself from genre, because I never felt attached to genre in the first place. I put together folk traditions from various places and various time periods.” She cites the funk subgenre go-go as well as “jazz, rock, cosmic country and classical. I fell in love with Hindustani classical music in college, and west African classical music – kora music, specifically – in high school. The syncopation, the note choices, the different timbres all made me reevaluate what I was doing. Acadia brings all this music together.”
It’s a blossoming, alright – one that unfurls Williams’ own vision and challenges preconceptions. “If people want to place me within the folk genre, fine,” she says. “I’m trying to expand people’s notion of what folk music is. It’s the music of the people. But if you consider ‘the people’ to be just one kind of people, well … that’s simply not correct.” She pauses for a second and then smiles. “There’s a whole universe here.”
• Acadia is released via Nonesuch on 4 October. Williams plays Pitchfork music festival London on 7 November
