John R. Williamson

“This album is my ‘Song of Songs,’” says independent artist John R. Williamson. He’s describing Maybe in a Shade You Don’t Know, a quietly revelatory cycle of songs written as the California singer/songwriter fell in love with his wife Ikuko. Like Solomon, the independent Williamson writes with an ornate simplicity and sparseness. Witness the album’s title track, a gleaming raga over which Williamson’s three-line lyric sounds infinitely suggestive. Elsewhere, he meditates on what he describes as his “continuing frustrations with the leadership of this country,” but stays oblique enough to avoid the paintball effect of protest songwriting.

“My reactions may seem a bit mild, unless you read them as trying to help people to see that love can actually exist in a time of such hatred and ignorance,” he says. As always, his lo-fi, homemade aesthetic suggests an amalgam of Yo La Tengo and Thomas Merton.

Williamson grew up playing music, and began recording during his years as part of the “underground contingent” at evangelical Azusa Pacific University in California. “[We] used to hole up in these practice rooms with our tape deck and create,” he says. He’s made several albums with artists including Mandy Troxel and Robert Deeble, while earning plaudits from T Bone Burnett and Victoria Williams: “She wrote a nice letter to let me know that she was enjoying painting to it,” he says.