Holly Williams – The Ones We Never Knew

Among those Holly Williams never knew, it seems obligatory to note, was her granddad Hank Williams. Her music sounds no more like that of honky-tonker Hank Sr. than it does like that of her Outlaw dad, Hank Jr. — so she gets the subject out of the way, real fast, on the opening track. “I wish I were an angel in ’52 in a blue Cadillac on the eve of the new year, and there I would have saved him,” she tell us.

Williams’ own songs — which were tried out before they were recorded in hundreds of club dates where people knew nothing of the family connection — are in a contemporary indie-pop mode, the sound of her voice residing about halfway between, say, Tift Merritt’s on the more upbeat pop side and Mindy Smith’s on the breathy but jagged edge.

Her key theme in these dozen self-penned tunes turns Hank Sr.’s weary, lonesome, heartbroken blues on its head, taking a bit of Hank Jr.’s very directed sort of energy and applying it to a certain sort of adult female task — namely, attempting to save screwed-up, drug-taking, falling-apart men. As the unrelated Williams, Lucinda, has already shown, this theme may lead to a complicated life, but it does generate a lot of songs. Unlike Lucinda, Holly briskly also warns guys that she could well break their hearts — and with her straightforward talk and model looks, you can believe it.

The one family tradition she seems to have inherited is laying it out straight, and often in very simple, clear, day-to-day terms with just a dash of poetry. She carries Dylan’s autograph on the guitar she plays live (he’d asked unanswerable questions about her family, like so many others have), but this is an orchestrated album, in a lean sort of way, not “just Holly and her guitar”; the piano of James DiGirolamo, for instance, is quite prominent.

There are pop tunes that catch the ear to match her lyric style, already on the way to being all the writer’s own. That’s a starting point with promise from a talent to track.