Joy Williams - "Front Porch" & "The Trouble With Wanting"

So I’ve loved her delicate yearning voice since I first heard her as half of The Civil Wars, and now with her most current solo albums she’s been able to grow on that success. Taking the beauty she found as part of that duo and enriching and deepening all the colors in her own palette.

Joy Elizabeth Williams is an American singer-songwriter. The winner of four Grammy Awards, Williams has released four solo albums and four EPs since her self-titled debut in 2001. She was half of the Civil Wars duo from 2009 until 2014.

With a voice that exudes gentle warmth and songwriting skills that landed her on the payroll of Warner/Chappell, Joy Williams enjoyed careers as both a successful CCM artist and a dedicated songwriter during the 2000s before forming the secular Americana/folk act the Civil Wars with John Paul White. During their five years together, the duo won four Grammys and topped the Billboard 200. Williams returned to a solo career in 2015, releasing Venus, her first solo album as a secular singer/songwriter.

Williams returned in mid-2015 with her first solo album in a decade. Distancing herself somewhat from the sounds of Nashville and the Civil Wars, it offered soft-spoken adult pop produced by Matto Morris, Charlie Peacock, and Daniel James, with Williams, Yetton, and Justin Timberlake listed as executive producers. Venus reached the Top Ten of the Billboard alternative chart as well as peaking at 71 on the Billboard 200. An abbreviated acoustic version of the album followed in 2016. She stuck with an acoustic sensibility on the 2018 singles "The Trouble with Wanting" and "Canary," which were both included on her 2019 LP Front Porch (Sensibility/Thirty Tigers).

So today, with delicate hands holding open our hearts, I choose Joy Williams’ "Front Porch" & "The Trouble With Wanting" as my, hold on to the melody, find your small truth, shout it from the rooftops, songs for a, what’s simple is true, my own little rebellion, sing the songs our grandfathers sang, Wednesday.