Features

Summer Stars: Keller Williams

Our Summer Stars series features a variety of groups making the rounds on the festival circuit. Today we visit with Keller Williams”:http://kellerwilliams.net/. For more of our Summer Star pieces, click here .

From hosting a “Moonshine Breakfast” at All Good—where people passed moonshine through the crowd in the West Virginia mountains on a foggy morning—to jet-setting from festival to festival to releasing one album nearly every year since 1998, Keller Williams has been busy. This summer, Williams will play Summer Camp, DelFest, Mountain Jam and Wakarusa, to name a few, where he will be performing solo and with bluegrass legends the Travelin’ McCourys.

“I’m most excited to play with humans,” Williams says of his summer plans. “I look at my solo act as my day job. It’s what I’m most comfortable doing; it’s what I’ve been doing the longest. So it’s always really exciting to play with other people.

“I’m really grateful to be a part of [The Travelin’ McCourys],” Williams continues. “They’re very traditional in the bluegrass world but their minds are so open. It’s unbelievably cool because I hold those players in such high regard. I think they’re geniuses.”

As the musician has grown up and built a family, he manages to keep his life balanced. “I’m like a little kid with a routine—you get used to being home for a few days and being gone for a few days,” Williams says from his Virginia home. “It’s the best of both worlds. I’m hanging with the kids and the family during the week and then playing shows on the weekends. It keeps it fresh. I have grown to appreciate being onstage a lot more.”

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Summer pastime more people should try: Nighttime golf course streaking

Best album for a warm summer night: Girl Talk, All Day; Pat Metheny, Bright Size Life; The Mother Hips, Later Days; Kaki King, Everybody Loves You; Pimps of Joytime, Funk Fixes and Remixes; Grateful Dead, Europe ‘72; Joe Jackson, Look Sharp; Don’t forget: a summer night lasts about 9 hours.

This one time at a festival: At the Oregon Country Fair, I hallucinated the leaves to be little lion heads and they roared when the wind blew. That was pretty fuckin’ weird.