Mood Board is our column where artists share a few of the things that inspired their new record. This time, Texan singer-songwriter Jess Williamson tells us how Pam Houston’s short stories, Shooter Jennings’s tarot deck, and more helped shape A Mile South of Heaven — out today on New West Records.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
1. Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston
I read this collection of short stories right after my last album came out and in the early stages of writing A Mile South of Heaven. I’ve had a long history with the short story "How to Talk to a Hunter," which I stumbled across by accident in a high school English class, but I finally got around to reading this whole collection a couple of years ago. I was deeply moved by the women in these stories. They live in the rural American West, and they’re strong, earthy, a little wild, and drawn to men who are the same way. When I wrote the song "Country Mile," it felt like I was writing a short story inspired by my own life, but also by Pam Houston’s characters.
2. Todd Alcott’s Horror Tarot Deck
Shooter Jennings has this tarot deck in his studio. Every day that the band was in, Bonnie Whitmore, who played bass on my album, had us all pass around the deck and made each of us shuffle it to have our energy on the cards, and then someone would pull a card. This would be our card of the day. This deck is based on the Rider-Waite deck, but these cards all point back to fake horror films. The major arcana cards in particular reference entire made up films. It’s great. I remember the day we got The Tower and the day we got The World. Big days! Also, it was cute, the one day that the engineers didn’t get a chance to shuffle it (they were busy and we thought they didn’t care), they later told us they were sad. We didn’t make that mistake again!
3. Highway 2810 in Marfa Texas
There is this one specific stretch of highway two miles outside of Marfa on Highway 2810 that I love to walk on. It’s a really important place to me where I get a lot of thinking done, and it’s also where I listened to demos, mixes, masters, and worked on sequencing for A Mile South of Heaven. I’m working on adopting this stretch of highway, actually, and it should be coming together soon. [Ed. note: it did!] It will be nice getting to take care of it, and I’m there all the time anyway.
4. Morning Pages
Almost every morning for the last 10 years, I’ve done morning pages. It’s a practice I learned in The Artist’s Way (a book I started but never finished; maybe morning pages was just the thing I needed to learn from it). Basically, when you wake up you hand write three pages in a journal just to kind of get all your thoughts on a page. It’s not meant to be read again, it’s not for anyone else to see, and it’s not a to do list. I love it. I find it to be a very grounding and reflective process, and when I miss a day I can feel the difference. I get a real thrill out of picking my journal. Each one stays with me for about three months, and something about the color or style of the journal feels symbolic for whatever era I’m in. I just got a new one, and it’s yellow.
