Karl S Williams is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, and poet. He is a genre bending, multifaceted musician who loves passionately and wears his heart on his sleeve.
Hey Karl, we are so excited to have you coming to Port Macquarie this October. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what to expect?
Thank you, I am very excited to come back to Port Macquarie! It has become one of my adopted homes over the years of touring (and Cassegrain Winery is such a beautiful venue). Since I last played there I have released a new album ‘Lifeblood’ and we’ve all been travelling through a strange time. I think the songs on ‘Lifeblood’ were really made for these days so I’ll be sharing a lot of those. I have also been starting to work on a new album so hopefully I can share one or two new songs, and of course some old banjo tunes and spirituals!
Tell us a bit about your genre bending music and which artists have been your biggest influences?
I have always loved many different kinds of music, which has created a melange of influences. I think the thing that unifies the music that I love is a certain emotional weight that I call ‘The Blues’. I have been influenced by blues artists such as Blind Willie Johnson and Son House but also I find The Blues in Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen or Jason Molina. I find it in old folk songs, Mahalia Jackson singing gospel, scratchy recordings of spirituals and work songs, Jacques Brel, Edith Piaf…
All these artists and musical forms have been very influential for me and continue to be a source of inspiration. I get fascinated with different music at different times, so I end up writing some soul songs, then piano ballads and then delta blues… I’ve never been very good at colouring within the lines so I guess therein is the genre-bending.
Tell us a bit about your artwork and how that is symbiotic of your music?
Symbiotic is a good term for this! My visual artwork and music are fairly inextricable - I think of the drawings as little poems. They attempt to capture something of the human experience in the same way that the songs do, but they use a visual language rather than a written or auditory one. Some ideas arrive as a vision rather than a melody and sometimes that is the only way they can be easily articulated.
I’m hoping to experiment more with combining music and visual art in the near future through video and animation. I think the combination of the two is particularly powerful.
Blood To Give:
Fear - One Shot at Woodstock:
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