Gary SteelStill fresh-faced and fancy free, Marlon Williams was just setting out on his big adventure back in 2015 when GARY STEEL had a chat with him about his burgeoning career.
Marlon Williams – Hi Gary?
Gary Steel – Hello Marlon, how ya doin’?
Marlon – I’m well, how are you?
Gary – Good, good. So, what time of the day is it there?
Marlon – [silence] Ah… 2.30? What… where are you?
Gary – I’m in Auckland.
Marlon – So am I!
Gary – I thought you were in the States at the moment.
Marlon – No, I go tomorrow. I was initially going to be there today, but I had to change flights.
Gary – Well I’m in Helensville, it could be a couple of seconds different.
Marlon – Depending on how fast you’re travelling.
Gary – So you’re off tomorrow.
Marlon – Yeah, I just got back from Dunedin this morning. The last show of the Church tour.
Gary – You’re looking forward to the American dates?
Marlon – Yeah, I am. It’s a bit of a shock trying to realign to another tour straight away, but that’s the way it goes. Yeah, once I get there I’ll be primed and excited, I’m sure.
Gary – You’ve done it before, eh?
Marlon – Um, not officially and not legally. Ha-ha-ha-ha. [Hilarious laugh]. No, I haven’t.
Gary – It’ll be interesting to find out how authentic they think your moves are over there, in the sense of coals to Newcastle and country.
Marlon – Yeah, for sure. I feel like it’s like an accent, in that you don’t think you have one until you take it somewhere else, and the people at home think I sound like a country artist, and the people where the country comes from will just think you sound like something completely different, you know? I get that vibe, a little bit. They see the differences more than you would in New Zealand.
Gary – [Fumbles next question]. Sorry, I’m a zombie, our 1-year-old kept us up all night.
Marlon – That’s alright, I’m with you on that one, I’m on the same page. We can be zombies together.
Gary – The dates you’re playing in the States, are they solo?
Marlon – Solo, yep, except the one in LA is with a fiddle player.
Gary – I gather you’ve seen that you’re nominated for just about everything except female artist in the music awards.
Marlon – Yeah, I was very upset not to get that one. [Laughs]
Gary – Does that feel good to you?
Marlon – Oh it feels great, like, to get nominations, it sort of feels like getting plaudits when you haven’t even done anything and you’re in the middle of touring and… I dunno… it’s just like little gold stars. It’s for no extra work, people do nice things and say nice things about you.
Gary – Are you going to be away when the music awards is on?
Marlon – No I’ll be there. I’m in the middle of an Australian tour, but I’ve got two days off at the time the awards are on so I’ll come back and hang out.
Gary – And you got nominated for the ARIA in blues and roots as well.
Marlon – Yeah! I’m gonna lose but I’m happy to be nominated.
Gary – It’s interesting to be in blues and roots. When I listen to the album, I don’t really pigeonhole it, you know what I mean?
Marlon – Yeah, yeah, I guess it’s… loosely where I fit in the award genre spectrum!
Gary – It’s interesting to know how certain people… like in America I guess they’ll be more keen to say you’re country or this or that but…
Marlon – Yeah it’s hard to know what people… country music and blues and roots they’re in things at the moment, so it just makes sense to streamline yourself into these things.
Gary – But there’s all sorts of stuff coming into your music, isn’t there?
Marlon – It’s certainly not something I think about, which means that it comes out like a Frankenstein of various things that I don’t really have any idea what they are.
Gary – What award would you most like to win?
Marlon – Of the ones I’ve been nominated for? Um… I dunno. It would be great to win Best Male Artist for sure. Probably Best Album, that’s my artistic piece that I put out there and it sums up the most… it’ll be a signifier that I can move on and properly think about something else.
Gary – And you’ve also done quite a bit of acting work this year too.
Marlon – Yeah, I’ve squeezed that in along the way.
Gary – You’ve got The Rehearsal and there’s some sort of Aussie TV series as well.
Marlon – Yeah, it airs in Australia tonight.
Gary – What would happen if your acting career went crazy?
Marlon – I don’t think it would ever go crazy. I certainly don’t wish to pursue a fulltime acting career. I’m just sort of doing it because it turned up but yeah… it’s certainly not a focus.
Gary – I was just curious because if suddenly you were the hot number in acting there’d be some hard decisions to make.
Marlon – It’s certainly not a focus for me right now. That’s a pretty easy decision for me to make, regardless.
Gary – Are you in a very different place than you were two years ago?
Marlon – Um… probably. I find it very… I’m not one of those people that self-evaluates in that way. I’m not a very good… compartmentalizer of time, people say I have… but when you’re in the middle of it, you can’t see the forest for the trees. And I think it’s sort of, as long as you’re keeping healthy and stable it’s a good thing to just keep moving forward.
Gary – It feels to me like you’ve just followed your nose and taken it on where your instincts have taken you rather than had a five-year plan or anything.
Marlon – Yeah, I have no such thing like that. No.
Gary – I did have to wonder, there’s been such a lot of… I guess the reaction to the album has been so amazing that I wondered… there must have been major labels banging on your door and all sorts of management people coming into it. Industry shit, you know?
Marlon – Yeah, I’m very wary of industry shit and pretty good at pretending it doesn’t exist, and letting my manager, who loves it, deal with it. [Laughs].
Gary – You’re not going to be like Lorde and change to some kind of American bigwig as soon as you get over there.
Marlon – Nah. She’s alright, from what I know of her. For an 18-year-old she’s doing a damn fine job.
Gary – One thing I wondered about, you won’t be old enough to remember but, one of the problems with New Zealand artists has always been that they couldn’t really, if you’d made this album 20 years ago it would have sounded like a demo, and your aspiration would have been to go to Nashville and make it with real ‘professional’ musicians and producers and engineers, to make the slick product. But it seems to me that what you’ve turned out is just world class, it is what it is.
Marlon – Thank you. I hope if I was doing the same thing 20 years ago, I would have been down in Dunedin making… you know, I don’t think I would have tried to do it that way. It doesn’t feel equivocal in my mind that I would have tried to go and do it in Nashville and followed that obvious path that I might have taken at the time.
Gary – So you think you might have been a Flying Nun musician or something?
Marlon – Yeah, in terms of the ethos of what I was doing. If I didn’t have the freedom to do it the way I can now I don’t think I… I don’t have the energy for that sort of… keeping up with what’s expected in that regard.
Gary – So there’s no aspiration to go and play with the best pedal steel players in Nashville or anything.
Marlon – It’s not the players, no. I know plenty of good players, I’m good in that regard.
Gary – You’ve already got the cool synth solos.
Marlon – Yeah. [Laughs].
Gary – I guess it’s a difficult question but to me Hannah’s album last year was one of my favourite New Zealand albums ever, and then you’ve put out an album this year that’s just as singular, and just as fantastic…
Marlon – [Laughs]
Gary – …and I just wondered how you came to this point of having such a musical personality at the age of 24. Is it through a lot of troubadouring and performing and…
Marlon – Yeah, I guess it’s probably the same for Hannah, it was so easy growing up in Lyttelton and around that scene to be creatively autonomous and carefree. There were no pressures except for who’s going to see you play at Lyttelton tonight. It was a microclimate that was very fostering in that way, and I can’t really… never really had any trouble. And certainly working with Hannah and helping her produce her album, I’m in constant admiration of her singular vision and how she wants things to be, and she has these ideas just completely fully formed in her head and there’s no compromise. And going through that process with her gave it that sense of familiarity when I went to do it myself too, and it came very easy without any self-justification needed.
Gary – Have you always been a good singer and did you parents tell you do so something with this?
Marlon – Um… I always wanted to be a musician from about the age… I think I was about 5 or 6 when I decided I wanted to be a trumpet player, but my teeth hadn’t come through yet so I couldn’t play the trumpet, so I tried to play the violin and snapped the bow on my first ever violin lesson. And then when I was about 9 or 10 I joined the school choir and sang in harmony for the first time, and found the beauty of that communication with other people, and from then on it was just, you know… and I do have artistic parents, so they were never pressuring me in any direction really, so I never really came up against any barriers to what I wanted to do.
Gary – The reason I ask is that it’s still rare in New Zealand to find someone who’s serious about their singing. There are lots of great bands but not so many great singers.
Marlon – Yeah, and in the last 30 years it’s not really been a cool thing to do, to fully delve into the fun and joy of singing, of lyrical singing. But I guess singing in choirs and really loving the form and structure of classically good singing… and then blending that with, just loving listening to country music and a whole lot of other things, it was always obvious to me that that was what I wanted to portray my music with, through a strong sense of lyricism in the musical sense.
Gary – So I don’t imagine there’ll be any guest spots on a Sol3Mio record?
Marlon – No, I don’t think so, but funnily enough, my singing partner at high school is now engaged to Pene Pati and she just won the Sydney Aria competition last year. So she’s doing her own thing too.
+ This interview took place on 11 October 2015.
