From her opening count-off to the quick, closing fade-out, Victoria Williams delivers a charming, fun, touching, old-fashioned record, the perfect soundtrack to when you’re feeling both full of life and melancholy. As the title explains, it’s an unpretentious collection of covers — standards you’ve heard a million times, such as “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” (which, [...]

Victoria Williams makes her presence known subtly but intently. On Water To Drink, she characteristically takes the simplest elements of music — the warm greens and soft pinks — and paints with them in the wind. Her pictures end up like laughing tales and wholesome loving from the highest point of the Ferris wheel to [...]

My image of Mark Olson and Victoria Williams is utterly romantic and perhaps indelibly linked to an understanding of how seriously they must take the “better/worse, sickness/health” portion of their marriage vows. They inspire and comfort me on several levels; musically, they thrill me. Let me count the ways, as displayed on the fourth Original [...]

Country players of yore practiced self-reliance long before DIY became a rallying cry for punk rockers. So it’s not completely surprising that despite their past and present major-label affiliations, ex-Jayhawk Mark Olson and his wife Victoria Williams release albums on their own label as the Original Harmony Ridge Creek Dippers. Except that their music, a [...]

Two years after leaving the Jayhawks Mark Olson finally resurfaces, and most inconspicuously, with a 10-song homemade record — and we do mean homemade: Not only was it recorded in the living room of the home in the Joshua Tree desert he shares with his wife, Victoria Williams, but he’s also selling it out of [...]

I first saw Victoria Williams about ten years ago playing with Peter Case and likened her voice to fingers scratching a blackboard. When I heard her songs for the first time sans voice on the Sweet Relief tribute, my first thought was, “What a pity that such beautiful, insightful, unique songs have been going to [...]