Joy Williams finds a new voice with 'Venus'

Joy Williams got a late start on her new album because she was putting up decorations for her son Miles' first birthday party.

As a result, she wasn't on time for the songwriting session that would yield Before I Sleep, the first song she wrote for Venus, out Tuesday.

"That seems to be the way it goes when you're juggling a lot of different things that you love," says Williams, 32, formerly one half of the Grammy-winning duo the Civil Wars. "Sometimes, you're late. Sometimes you forget to put make-up on both sides of your face, which I definitely have done."

Before I Sleep, a haunting tune with a chorus that draws from poet Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, set Williams off on her journey. It took another two years to deliver Venus, which comes out on Miles' third birthday.

Along the way, Williams wrote about motherhood, about marriage, about the end of her musical partnership with John Paul White. She wrote about being a woman. As she found her new musical voice, she found herself.

"I became more aware of my rough edges," Williams says. "In finding those rough edges, I also found I was stronger than I thought, more resilient than I thought."

The Civil Wars played a spare, brooding folk music that found a large, grass-roots audience for their two albums, but that was only a sliver of the kind of music Williams had inside her. Venus takes her in a more expansive, sometimes electronic direction. When she talks about her music, Williams often references artists such as Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and Peter Gabriel.

In What a Good Woman Does, Williams obliquely addresses the end of the Civil Wars. "I could tell the truth about you leaving, but that's not what a good woman does," she sings, finding that sometimes the strength she needs is the strength to bite her tongue.

"We've all had a person or people in our lives where we've felt like things have been left unresolved, where you have a moment when you wish you could just pick up the phone and give a person a piece of your mind, but you realize that will do no good anyway," she says. "So you find a way to sift through the ashes to find some beauty in it, even if it's finding resolution within yourself."

In the handful of live shows she gave leading up to the release of Venus, Williams performed a couple of the duo's songs. "It was a cathartic experience for me, dusting off those songs," she says. "For me, it was a way of commemorating where I've been. What was fun was finding more electronic elements but still keep the songs intact and honor what was written but also find a different color palette to paint on it with."

While making Venus, Williams lost her father to cancer and also worked through a difficult period in her marriage to her manager, Nate Yetton. "You get to that place where you realize you've been so busy building a life together that you've somehow been missing each other," she says. "Then you're faced with this dilemma. You've got a few options: You can fake it, you can give up or you can find a new way to love each other. Nate and I considered all those options and both came back to wanting to find a new way to love, and see if there was something we could grow in a deeper, richer way.

"It took a lot of hard work to build the bridge back to each other, but I'm really glad we did that."

The album that began with Williams having "miles and miles to go before I sleep," ends with Welcome Home, which she wrote for her son.

"I love the idea of writing a song I could sing to Miles when he was 5 years old and a song that would still pertain to him that I could sing when he was 25 years old," she says.

While she had Miles in mind when she wrote Welcome Home, sometimes she finds herself singing it for her father. And sometimes she realizes she's singing it to herself.

"Everybody has a longing for home, whether or not it's the home you grew up in," Williams says. "I think it's a very human thing to want to feel like you belong. That's what the song is for me."