Brooks Williams - Diamond Days (2024)

Brooks Williams’ Diamond Days’, his first solo album in four years, finds Williams stripping it back to the bone with just his voice and guitar on a dozen songs and one instrumental couched in his familiar brew of blues and 60s American folk, all self-penned save for two traditionals and two covers. As such, it’s one of his own that provides the opener, Big Sky, a fingerpicked ode, leaving “this dog and pony show” and getting back to the serenity and healing power of nature (“Breathe in the atmosphere/Blow all the cobwebs clear/We’ll be right as rain again/Sick of the daily grind/Need to fix our state of mind”).

Taking a bluesier tack to the guitar work, the melody based on the traditional Geordie, London Road is a simple song about homelessness in the capital (“When the hour is late and you’re at King’s Cross/Empty lights on midnight frost/Another night of 3-below…When the hour is late and you’re out of time/You can’t spin gold from neon signs/Some things can’t be bought or sold/Down on London Road”).

The first cover is his take on Pony, Tom Waits’ song of rambling and weariness from Mule Variations, though the feel here is more Guthrie, the equine motif continuing with his own nimbly picked Palomino Gold, which, set against the backdrop of Elsenham Orchards, a reference to the Essex village, just north of Stansted Airport, and home to the famous jam brand, which imagines a girl riding bareback as she “dreams she’s riding in big canyons/Like in the films she goes to see/Her swayback brown, she imagines, is a Palomino Gold”, and of her grown self looking back as “Her children’s children hear the tales/Of the time before the houses/Before the airport and the roads”.

The circling notes of the ragtime-like solo guitar instrumental, Stubble And Dust, precede the second cover, Dylan’s Nettie Moore featuring Williams on bottleneck slide, which, while being hailed as one of the 25 best Bob Dylan songs of the 21st century by Rolling Stone is perhaps one of the lesser known tracks of Modern Times.

Returning to his own material, On The Island, with its circular swaying melody, was inspired by the film Marianne & Leonard Words Of Love and again has a reflective mien, wondering if, back when the song’s subject was “the life of the party down at Leonard’s café” and “holding high court with your rich and famous friends”, he’d have been lost in the crowd and “In such a paradise as this would you wouldn’t have noticed me?” Now, unless you’re into motorbike trivia, you might not know that the strummed, walking rhythm, Dylanish Bonnie Triumph is titled for Evel Knieval’s Triumph Bonneville, but if you do you’ll probably also know the song is about his most famous stunt when he failed to jump the fountains at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, though, as the lyric says, he did indeed “go down in history”.

The first traditional number is his terrifically picked arrangement of Train On The Island, an old-time/bluegrass banjo and fiddle tune originally found in North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee, followed by the slow blues worksong shuffle of Anniesland, a number dedicated to his late friend and sometime performing partner Rab Noakes, the title referring to the district in Glasgow where Noakes had his flat, the emotion evident as he sings “What I’d give to hear him play/His Southern Jumbo again”. Given the lines “Our tears were not in vain/They opened up the floodgates/Freed us from the chains” it’s not too fanciful to conceive in a post-abolition context, which would tie in with the subsequent Gone And Done It Now which he describes as a “post U.S. Civil War vignette” though there’s nothing in the lyrics to suggest that, rather coming across as Guthrie/Dylan rambling song (“Went to seek my fortune/But that ship had sailed and gone… Sleeping on the cold, cold ground/With the scorpions and snakes/My belly’s always empty/My head always aches/Gone and done it now”, the penultimate verse sung a capella.

Doing Fine is another rootsy circular melody, a putting on a false front after being dumped number from whence the album title comes (“These are my diamond days/This is my finest hour/Too bad you walked away/I’m doing fine/You’re out there with your friends/Living so free/If you’ve found someone new/It’s of no concern to me”). It ends with the other dip into traditional waters and an upbeat arrangement of Ring Those Golden Bells, a gospel and bluegrass hymnal about passing to the other side, which he learnt from New Orleans traditional jazz street band Tuba Skinny, giving it a slight ragtime vibe. Over the years, Brooks Williams has frequently been found, both on disc and live, in a collaborative setting. Still, listening to this, it’s hard to dispute that he’s at his very best with just those six strings and vocal cords for company.