Talking To Nyree Williams
Welsh singer songwriter and actor Nyree Williams has started making a name for herself around the country. Fatea writer Nic Rigby caught up with her in Norwich.
Nyree Williams, 23, of Builth Wells, in Mid Wales, has been impressing people around the country with her carefully crafted and often darkly comic songs. Music was always in her life when she was growing up and she began learning the guitar as a teenager.
"My mum listened to lots of county and old crooners like Roy Orbison. My siblings who are quite a lot older than me listened to lots of soul and Motown," she said.
"I started playing guitar when I was 14. I decided on a guitar so I could accompany myself because I loved singing.
"I didn't think about writing songs for a long, long time. I sang folk song and a lot of Amy Winehouse and Norah Jones. I'd listen to a lot of folk music, Johnny Flynn, Laura Marling and some older traditional songs - and from those songs re-connected with country music."
Nyree became a professional actor after studying English and Drama at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.
"I think acting came as an offshoot of singing as in Wales there is such a massive emphasis on performance," she said.
"It's not a shameful thing to sing and perform. I started singing and found you are very vulnerable. With acting you have a cover."
I asked Nyree about when she started writing her own songs?
"I wrote one really bad song when I was 17 about some bloke who broke my heart, obviously. I didn't write again for three years. I was scarred from looking back at that song."
She said her first proper song was Black Lips.
"That took me months to get right," she said.
"After that the process of song writing got a lot faster and more distilled.
"It starts with lots of things, an idea, an image or a feeling. Usually the words come first, but they quickly come together."
One song Narcissus highlights her sharp satirical eye.
It's about a lousy night with a bass player with the chorus "An egotistical man is a lousy shag… / I couldn't save you from yourself, Narcissus" but she adds toward the end "It wasn't all bad, he always made me breakfast in the morning".
She said: "It's basically about someone I wanted to get revenge on. What better way to get revenge than tell everyone they were a really bad shag."
In her song Penelope she addresses the story of the character from Homer's Odyssey.
She writes: "My Penelope doesn't sit at home and weave / She's sweet as can be and drinks a lot of tea / Never put a toe out of line, 'cause she needs some kind of sign / Oh, she suffers and she wants my sympathy But Penelope, you set a precedent / So it's hard for me to feel for you / When you've filled our lungs with sighs, / Made us doubt our own eyes / So we sit and sip and don't know what to do."
Her advice to Penelope is "Step One: Have some fun, you've got plenty of men bowing at your feet /Step Two: Pick a few, make them do what your sailor wouldn't ever do".
Nyree told me: "I'd been reading a book where someone mentioned the Odyssey, and I thought I hadn't thought about the book for a long time, since school, and started to think about the character of Penelope and I wanted to write a song about a women because was sick of writing about men.
"I was thinking about Penelope and thinking she's painting as a wonderful women waiting for her husband and I started to think about people who know their husbands are cheating on them and I thought these women deserve to be happy.
"If you are going to live and be something, you have to make it worth it."
https://www.facebook.com/Nyree-106037945182760/
(Nic Rigby is part of the band Nic Norton and the County Band. See nicnortonmusic.com)
Radicals and Victuallers
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