Jess Williamson – “Wild Rain” Video
Jess Williamson first announced her third album Cosmic Wink two months ago, with the memorable video for stunning lead single “I See The White.” That was followed by “Mama Proud,” and now Williamson is back with one more song ahead of the new collection’s release this week.
It’s called “Wild Rain,” and it’s another simmering, gorgeous preview of Cosmic Wink. Here’s what Williamson had to say about the track:
I recorded this song at first with just me singing and playing it on an acoustic guitar. We thought it was going to be a scratch vocal so we didn’t mic everything the “correct” way … I like the way it sounds. It’s a little bit lazy. There is this remnant of my acoustic guitar bleeding from my headphones into the vocal track, you can hear it the most at the beginning of the song. But we liked that too! A happy accident. It became the perfect rhythmic element to anchor the beginning of the song. It reminds me of rain. We wanted to have a moment of the heavens breaking open midway through and ushering us into another realm. So we started building off just my voice and the memory of an acoustic guitar, layering synths and more vocals. This is probably my favorite song on the album and it’s the first song I wrote for Cosmic Wink.
In line with Williamson’s description of the writing process, “Wild Rain” is a song that begins open-ended and suggestive. It never quite leaves its dreamlike drift, but around three minutes in there are flare-ups of beauty that occur, with Williamson’s voice becoming more emphatic even as it’s still subsumed in the song’s hazy atmospherics. It comes with a video directed by Eli Welbourne (who was also behind the clip for “I See The White”), featuring Williamson singing into the camera as images representing her thoughts flash around and behind her. “The song discusses a duality within her and I wanted to represent that in a collage where she is visually split in two,” Welbourne said of the video’s concept. Check it out below.
Cosmic Wink is out 5/11 via Mexican Summer. Pre-order it here.