Marlon Williams / Make Way For Love Vinyl LP

Marlon Williams' acclaimed 2018 album Make Way For Love on Vinyl LP.

Marlon Williams has, quite simply, one of the most extraordinary, effortlessly distinctive voices of his generation – a fact well known to fans of his first, self-titled solo album, and his captivating live shows. An otherworldly instrument with an affecting vibrato, it’s a voice that’s earned repeated comparisons to the great Roy Orbison, and even briefly had Williams, in his youth, consider a career in classical singing, before realising his temperament was more Stratocaster than Stradivarius.

But it’s the art of songwriting that has bedeviled the Aotearoa artist, and into which he has grown exponentially on his second album, Make Way For Love. It’s Williams like you’ve never heard him before – exploring new musical terrain and revealing himself in an unprecedented way, in the wake of a fractured relationship.

Like any good New Zealander, the artist doesn’t boast or sugarcoat: songwriting is still not his favourite endeavour. “I mean, I find it ecstatic to finish a song,” he explains. “To have done one doesn’t feel like an accomplishment as much as a relief and maybe a curiosity, you know? To have come through to the other side and have something. But it certainly always feels messy.”

In the past, his default approach to was storytelling. On 2015’s Marlon Williams, the musician took a cue from traditional folk and bluegrass, and wove dark, character-driven tales: 'Hello Miss Lonesome', 'Strange Things' and 'Dark Child'. But when it came to sharing his own life in song, he was more reticent. “I’ve always had this sort of hang up about putting too much of myself into my music,” he admits. “All of the projects I’ve ever been in, there was a conscientious effort to try and have this barrier between myself and the emotional crux of the music. I’ve loved writing characters into my songs, or at least pretending that it wasn’t me that it was about.”

Sensing that people wanted more Marlon from Marlon, on album number two he was determined to deliver. And while he’s still a firm believer in the art of cover songs – his live shows regularly feature covers of songs by artists ranging from Townes Van Zandt to Yoko Ono – Williams wanted the new record to be all original material. By the autumn of last year, with a recording deadline looming the following February, it was crunch time for the musician, a reflexive procrastinator. “I hadn’t written for two years!” he recalls. What was needed was a lyrical spark. A triggering event, perhaps. As it turns out, life delivered just that.

In early December, Williams and his longtime girlfriend, musician Aldous (Hannah) Harding, broke up – the end of a relationship that brought together two of Down Under’s most acclaimed talents of recent years, who’d managed to navigate the challenges of having equally ascendant – though separate – careers, until they couldn’t. While personally wrenching, the split seemed to open the floodgates for Williams as a writer. “Then I wrote about 15 songs in a month,” he recalls. The biggest challenge? Condensing often complex, conflicted emotions and doing them justice. “Just narrowing the possibilities into a three-minute song makes me feel dirty,” he explains. Also, not making a break-up record that was too much of a downer. “I had a lot of good friends saying, ‘Don’t worry about sounding too sad,’” he says. “They were saying, ‘Just go with it.’”

Sure enough, while Make Way For Love draws on Williams’ own story, in remarkably universal terms it captures the vagaries of relationships that we’ve all been through: the bliss (opener 'Come To Me'); ache ('Love Is a Terrible Thing', a ballad that likens post break-up emptiness to “a snowman melting in the spring”); nagging questions ('Can I Call You', which wonders aloud what his ex is drinking, who she’s with, and if she’s happy); and bitterness ('The Fire Of Love', whose lyrics Williams says he “agonised over” more than any).

On 'Party Boy', over an urgent, moody gallop that recalls his last album’s 'Hello Miss Lonesome', Williams conjures the image (a composite of people he knows, he says) of that guy who has just the stuff to keep the party going ‘til dawn, and who you might catch