Victoria Williams

The trouble with most hippie eccentrics is that they ain't all that eccentric. Like punks or hip-hoppers or stalwarts of any other subculture, they gravitate toward norms of belief, dress, and cant. But Victoria Williams is her own weird, wonderful woman, with an adventurous warble and a goofball sense of humor that mark her as an original. She's a dear heart whose music feels spontaneous at its most elaborate and orchestrated, and who sounds as though she sings primarily to amuse herself without ever seeming self-absorbed. Swing the Statue, now out of print, established Williams' voice, but it was on Loose that she came into her own. She covers both the pop standard "What a Wonderful World" and the Rare Earth nugget "Nature's Way" in her loopy way -- for Williams, both Tin Pan Alley and studio rock are folk music. "My Ally," a duet with Dave Pirner, may be the loveliest song ever written about a male-female nonsexual friendship; it's definitely the loveliest vocal of Pirner's career. Williams coproduced Musings with Trina Shoemaker, and her sound expanded to include more meandering piano, more textural strings and horns as her song structures became more rambling and elastic. Her mood wasn't always as unrelentingly nostalgic as on "Train Song (Demise of the Caboose)," an elegy for locomotive travel, but sentiments such as "I wish I could fly and see everyone I love in the blink of an eye" pervaded.

Given her tendency to glance backward, it's not surprising that Williams has since been content to rely on others' material. Sings Some Ol' Songs is her second disc of covers; the other, Water to Drink, is now out of print. Here, as on her collaborations with hubby Mark Olson, the former Jayhawk, as the Original Harmony Ridge Creek Dippers, Williams' homeyness has come to the forefront. This is private music, and listening to it is like paging through a stranger's family photo album -- you can sense the love, but you can only experience it from a distance. (KEITH HARRIS)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide