FRIDAY, MAY 4, 2012
THE COX CAPITOL THEATRE presents…
AN EVENING WITH KELLER WILLIAMS
Doors at 7 p.m. / Show at 8 p.m.
Admission is $18 Advance/$23 Day of Show
Most artists would bristle at the term self-indulgent, but Keller Williams often invokes it in describing his own approach to music. To Williams, being self-indulgent means creating music that satisfies him – if he likes what he’s produced, he figures, then, his audience is more likely to.
“I’m a music lover first, a musician second and a songwriter third,” Williams says. I love writing songs and I love performing my songs – almost all of them. But I go out and do about 120 shows a year, and I just can’t write enough to play new songs all the time. There are always different cover songs to learn though; just flipping around on the radio, next thing you know you’ve got a song stuck in your head. If you change it around and play it completely differently, it sounds like a whole new song.”
Since he first appeared on the scene in the early ’90s, Keller Williams has defined the independent artist. Most of his career has been spent performing as a one-man band – his stage shows are built around Keller singing his compositions and choice covers while accompanying himself with an acoustic guitar connected to a Gibson Echoplex delay system that allows him to simulate a full band. That approach, Williams explains, was derived from “hours of playing solo with just a guitar and a microphone, and then wanting to go down different avenues musically. I couldn’t afford humans and didn’t want to step into the cheesy world of automated sequencers where you hit a button and the whole band starts to play, then you’ve got to solo along or sing on top of it. I wanted something more organic yet with a dance groove that I could create myself.”