Details of
A Mile South Of Heaven
by Jess Williamson
About the Album
On her seventh solo album, Jess Williamson straddles two worlds: the striver’s paradise of Los Angeles on one hand, the wide-open desert of Marfa, Texas, on the other. Produced by Shooter Jennings at Hollywood’s Sunset Sound, A Mile South of Heaven finds the Texas-born singer-songwriter drifting between spaces, putting some serious mileage on her car along the way. “I am a tourist here/I come and I go,” she sings on “The Gem and Mineral Show,” juxtaposing a glitzy night at the Chateau Marmont with a gem-and-mineral show in small-town West Texas.
Eschewing the drum machines of 2023’s Time Ain’t Accidental, she and Jennings embraced the rootsy sounds of fiddle, steel, and banjo as she floats between lonely hotel rooms and beer-stained dancehalls. (“Just play some old country music,” she tells the bartender on “Hum of the City.”)
Lead single “Goodbye to All That” takes its title from Joan Didion’s essay about leaving New York, spinning it into a twangy farewell to LA—well, almost. Writing the song, Williamson changed her mind, choosing to split her time between the city and the desert. Fittingly, in advance of the album, she adopted a remote stretch of highway just outside of Marfa on FM 2810.
Source: Apple Music
