First printed and online in the Sherman Herald Democrat, 1/7/11 issue.
Zane Williams
Story and photos by Mary Jane Farmer
The first time I heard this songwriter was at an open mic in Denison, and to be honest I never noticed him among the many musicians on stage. Then, as I was leaving, I had to pause and turn when this voice belted out a song I’d never heard, but one I knew had substance with the first line.
I took a few pictures of him from across the crowded room, which I tucked away, labeled “Zack Somebody” for safekeeping. After all, one never knows when one might need a picture of someone named “Zack Somebody.”
I was in the right place that night, but it was a while before I learned his name — Zane Williams — even though I knew I had heard a poet, a wordsmith, an artist in action.
Zane Williams is a Texan who returned back to the Lone Star State two some-odd years ago after spending nine years in Nashville, where he said he sharpened his songwriting skills, played at the universities and coffee shops, and even made some pretty good money in songwriting contests. And he rented, at first, a room from an older man, a widower, for whom he wrote one of the more tender of his love songs, “Party Of One,” which he calls the “best song I never recorded.”
During those Nashville years, one of those songs which carried him to the top of songwriting contests was “Hurry Home,” and he even put it on an album in 2000 while still in Nashville. It wasn’t until after he returned to McKinney that he learned a Nashville singer, actually another Texan, Jason Michael Carroll, was cutting the song. It’s on Carroll’s CD “Waitin’ In The Country.”
Zane at Cadillac Pizza Pub
But, and Zane is good about telling stories around his songs, that’s not the rest of the story. “Hurry Home,” a song written from the viewpoint of a father whose daughter has left under questionable circumstances, rose on the Billboard Charts to the No. 14 position. Then, for reasons only known by the Nashville executives, Carroll’s record label pulled it from circulation and it never advanced further up the charts.
Zane, in the telling, reverts back to an earlier contest he won on the song, with a grand prize of $20,000. Later, over dinner, an executive with that contest commented that, too bad it wasn’t $200,000.
“Rain on my parade, will he?” Zane said, then tells his audiences that he and his wife just received the first royalty check for “Hurry Home” — $200,000, enough to pay cash for their first home. He added that the particular executive would probably say, too bad it wasn’t $2 million. As he tells that and countless other stories from his stage, his young son Buck, who has grown up listening to his dad’s songs, entertains the crowd in the back of the room with his smiles and antics.
Williams’ songwriting takes his listeners on a roller-coaster of emotions, humor with heart with history, and most evoke memories in every listener. When he sings the tender, “Pablo and Maria,” his voice echoes as if it were being thrown off the frozen canyon walls of the song, as Pablo’s was as he called “How I love you,” to his sweet Maria. Definitely too pithy a song for Nashville.
Then prepare to remember and laugh about an old day with “99 Bottles of Beer.” And he laughs himself when he tells about writing “River Girl.” His line in it about a “concho moon,” he said, was meant to be about the Concho River which ran near his hometown of Abilene, Texas. He realized later that more people believe it compares the moon with a silver decorative piece of jewelry, or a “concho.” Whichever, it works.
Zane Williams
This last week, Williams sang out a new song, one due out soon on his next CD. It’s a beachy, tropical number. Zane said he always wanted to write a “Jimmy Buffet-y kind of thing.” With such lines as “smack dab in the middle of a tropical depression and learning my lesson again,” and others about drinking and women, one wonders if, with a different beat, this could also be a country song.
“During those nine years I lived in Nashville, I wanted to be a mainstream artist but learned that wasn’t my speed. I don’t like traveling. What I like is to be with my family and be a homebody,” Zane said.
He changed gears after a few years in Tennessee, and decided that he wanted to be a songwriter for country artists, and then he could perform locally for fun. “You all (crowds) make this fun for me.” He is signed with Monument/Sony Publishing Company, and said he goes back to Nashville and writes the best he can write, and just hopes some day someone will record them. “It’s a wait-and-see kind of thing.”
Right now, a young Nashville singer, Grammy-nominated David Nail, is in the studio recording, and one of Williams’ song is on hold for Nail to possibly put down on that CD.
Williams works without a set list. He just sings one song, which makes him think about the next one, or he switches gears and belts out one a fan asked for. And the man forgets to take breaks. He just keeps on singing and telling stories and interacting with his audiences and, as he said, having fun and making everyone know they are in the right place.
Watch the Music Scene Calendar for upcoming Texoma-area Zane Williams dates.