Folkadelphia Session: Amanda Jo Williams

For the latest Folkadelphia Session edition, we’re going to try something a little different. Throughout the week, we’ll be presenting new sessions from three exciting songwriter instead of our usual single release. It just so happens that we were lucky enough to record stripped-down sets from Amanda Jo Williams, Christian Lee Hutson, and Kevin Killen all on the same afternoon of Saturday, March 23rd. We’ve adored each of these musicians for a while now – playing them on radio show, seeing them in concert, following them online – so it was a bit of a coup to record them in one shot. Each approach the art of songwriting with a unique voice, perspective, and flair, but in the end and especially in this bare bones format, they all exemplify that vague “Folkadelphia” sound. Honest songs from honest folk.

The first session we’ll hear comes from Amanda Jo Williams, the Philadelphia-via-Los Angeles musician who, at the end of May, released her fourth full-length record You’re The Father Of My Songs. With You’re The Father, AJW has succeeded in biting her thumb at all would-be musical comparisons and instead has created a group of songs that live on their own idiosyncratic plane of existence. We experience an auditory watercolor where the southern-country paintbrush has been dragged through the musical color palette and swirled all over the place. It’s prismatic, speckled with novel twists and turns, and unencumbered by genre baggage of convention. Here for our session, Amanda performs her songs, which includes an unreleased track “Dead Words,” assisted by Christian Lee Hutson on guitar.

Check back on Wednesday for Christian Lee Hutson’s Folkadelphia Session.