Tuesday Night Live

No sooner did I complete a 5 hour drive from Jersey on Tuesday than I had to scramble to get ready for the Songwriter Showcase at JV's here in Falls Church, Va. The bi-weekly showcase is hosted by the great Daryl Jr Cline (of Daryl Jr Cline and the Recliners) and has featured some veterans as well as some brand-new youngsters (who were talented as hell and made me feel old).  Here is my set, accompanied as usual by the invaluable David McKittrick. I have been away from live performing for a long time, and I'm afraid it shows, but I am slowly gathering back my confidence.

The three songs featured are of course future denizens of Abandoned and Heartbroke: "One More Day to Rain", "Into the Night" and as always "South Street".  It's all coming together, folks (slowly).

John E. Williams Live at JVs, 5/29/12

Filmed Myself on South Street

Over the Memorial Day weekend I got to do something I've wanted to do since writing "South Street": film a video for the song using actual footage of New Providence, the town the song is based on. I had only about an hour of free time away from family obligations, but I got exactly the shots I wanted, straight from the lyrics -- the "stoplight", the statue at Our Lady of Peace, the park across the street, and of course the home of the Pioneers, New Providence High School. The resulting video was exactly what I had envisioned, only better, and after posting it on Facebook I heard wonderful things from people who grew up in NP and who felt touched by the video and the song.  You can't ask for better results than that.

Every bit of footage is original and was filmed just a few days ago, but I deliberately shot everything in a shaky, home movie style, and then added age effects to give the video a dreamlike, long-ago quality. I like how it all turned out. What's funny is that when I went to upload the video, I got a message that read: "Your video appears to be shaky. Would you like YouTube to fix that?" Ah... no.

Hope you enjoy.