Features

Keller Williams’ Dream Team (Relix Revisited)

We have some bonus Keller content today, to accompany the video that looks at his kids matinee shows. Here’s a piece that ran in the February/March 2007 issue.

Our story begins with Keller Williams’ Youth. No, not his adolescence (although presumably that’s essential to the mix) but rather a studio recording of that name, which Williams began in February 2004. He assembled a number of songs thematically linked around this title, with the intention of releasing them on a disc that would feature a painting of his infant daughter as cover art. In reaction to the cloistered Home cooking of his prior recording, in which he played all the instruments, this time Williams asked for help.

Initially he tapped Jeff Covert of Wally Cleaver’s Recording Studio (who had engineered Home) to contribute drums and guitar. But as Keller considered the material he wished to record, he began to hear some of these songs with other voices. Although he typically goes it alone in the live setting, the concept of drawing in additional players to the studio context was not altogether novel to him, as Williams had recorded Breathe (1999) with The String Cheese Incident and Laugh (2002) with Dave Watts and Tye North. This time he decided to vary the palette, by inviting an increasing number of his musical heroes to participate. The pursuit of his Dream team absorbed him for over two and half years and carried Williams along a path that eventually would land him on Bob Weir’s doorstep, where the two of them would entwine their voices to sing of a Cadillac populated by Allah, Buddha, Hari Krishna and Jesus “riding in the bitch seat, cause he’s good like that.”

Oh yes, Santa Claus is in there as well, likely the object of Williams’ gratitude, given the musicians who ultimately assented. In early 2002, when asked to name the contemporary musicians that he most admired, Keller’s list included Bela Fleck, Charlie Hunter, Martin Sexton, Victor Wooten and The String Cheese Incident, all of whom appear on the disc that came to be called Dream, to reflect its new direction.

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One possible peril of producing a studio recording with over 30 participants is that while the individual tracks might shimmer, when taken as a whole the disc might lack a unity and flow.

“I never put that much thought into stuff,” Williams laughs. “I didn’t go very far in college and my whole life doesn’t really revolve around that type of thinking. Too much theorizing on one thing can be bad, I guess. I was just hoping that it would be something that I’d be proud of. So I was shooting big, going as big as possible for certain things and wondering with giddiness what that might sound like with certain heroes of mine playing these things—the whole mystery of what that would sound like.”

In some cases, the mystery extended to the artists themselves. Fareed Haque (Garaj Mahal), who appears on the instrumental “Cookies,” recalls, “It was real exciting because Keller was so open and encouraging. He said, ‘I’m going to send the track with my guitar part and I want you to do whatever you want to do.’ And when the track showed up, I was thinking, ‘Is there a vocal missing or is something missing here? Does he just want me to add a guitar?’ So I called him up and he told me that he basically wanted me to invent a track, to go ahead and compose alongside his composition. That’s pretty amazing, because most artists tend to be more controlling and he was all about the spirit of it being an actual collaboration. So I think I played 19 or 20 guitar parts and then he went back and did more stuff to it as well.”