Alan Williams

Alan Williams

Photo: Bob Hannan

The music of Birdsong At Morning, with its themes of self-discovery and reinvention, is initiated by Alan Williams, a man with a few reinventions of his own. Alan grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, after an early childhood spent in various locations from Ohio to the east coast. At three, prompted by a viewing of The Sound of Music, the precocious musician stunned his parents by reaching over his head to tap out the melody to "Do-Re-Mi" on the piano. A teacher was quickly recruited to instruct the budding Mozart, but Legos held much more interest and the lessons were soon abandoned. 

Alan's love of music can be traced to a game his father used to play with him as a toddler: records were pulled from their sleeves and shuffled, then reconnected, proper disc to jacket. Records remained (and remain) a source of endless fascination, whether a portable player loaded with a disc of Winnie the Pooh, a babysitter's misplaced 45 of "I Am The Walrus," or the several hundred LPs he had acquired before graduating high school. We won't even mention what happened when he discovered used record stores. A visit by a traveling salesman hocking World Book Encyclopedia-like sets of piano music reignited his musical impulse, and at six, Alan began a formal study of the instrument.

Though classical piano was interesting, it wasn't as much fun as trying to pick out "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" or "Lady Madonna." A chance viewing of Keith Jarrett on Saturday Night Live led Alan to pursue other musical forms on the instrument. If someone could make things up on live television, couldn't someone attempt the same in the family room? Thus suitably distracted, Alan made lots of different music in lots of different contexts during his teenage years (much to the consternation of his piano teacher). He played electric piano versions of "The Orange Blossom Special" in a bluegrass band, and discovered the joys of the modulation wheel playing "Just What I Needed" in a professional bar band. His own musical creativity was encouraged by a summer school friend who suggested that perhaps they were the next Lennon and McCartney and ought to form a band. The fact that this friend lived on the other side of the state, and that they had never written any songs was conveniently overlooked. As fate would have it, this friend (now the Chancellor of the University of North Carolina, but that's a different bio…) knew an excellent musician who played bass and violin, and —this can't be stressed enough— had all the right new wave and punk records that Alan had read about but never heard.

Greg Porter thus entered Alan's life, and several decades and musical groups later they are still making music together. They both majored in Third Stream Studies (most certainly a whole other encyclopedia entry) at the New England Conservatory, where Greg excelled and Alan suffered a crisis of faith about playing the piano. Rescued by a used Oberhiem synthesizer, Alan exchanged piano for electronic sound, stepped up to the microphone, and helped to steer a conservatory collective known as Danse Real. Highly arranged and detailed, adventurous and over-reaching, with moments of stunning beauty as well as unfortunate encounters with drum triggers, the group provided a wonderful platform for its members to stretch. Though Danse Real gained a small but enthusiastic following in the Boston area, graduation put an end to the experiment. 

Alan then met (and eventually married) singer Carol Noonan. Together with fellow NEC alum Rick Harris, they formed a group called Knots and Crosses. The band was largely inspired by Richard and Linda Thompson, and incorporated a rotating cast of musicians, including Greg (when he wasn't fully immersed in his own band, Talking to Animals). Their first recording, Creatures of Habit, got significant airplay on Adult Alternative Radio in Boston, and as their audience grew, they were eventually able to sell 20,000 copies of their self-released recordings. This led to a deal with Island Records that went woefully awry. Alan and Carol divorced, the band was dropped, and eventually broke up (not exactly in that order, but something like that).

It was in the context of Knots and Crosses that Alan first met Darleen Wilson. She produced some of their early demo sessions and had been a supporter of the group in the years that followed. Both recently divorced, Alan found in Darleen a ray of hope in the last dark days of the band. As the Island deal was falling apart, his connection with her bloomed into love.

Alan then embarked on a solo career before a second crisis of faith prevented him from releasing his own CD to the rest of the world. He worked for a time as a freelance recording engineer, eventually recording several albums with Patty Larkin. He flexed his own production muscle on projects for The Nudes, Kris Delmhorst, and Stephanie Winters, and tagged along for Darleen's work on Cry Cry Cry. Happy to take gigs that Darleen turned down, he served as musical director for Dar Williams' first band, and later did the same for the touring version of Cry Cry Cry.

An entirely different avenue opened up for Alan when Darleen was asked to teach a class in sound recording aesthetics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. As the course description poured from the fax at home, Alan thought, "I could teach this class off the top of my head," and Darleen recommended that he do just that. Once in the classroom, Alan knew that he had found his calling, but to pursue it seriously, he needed another degree. After putting off the move for a few years, he went back to school to earn a PhD in ethnomusicology at Brown University. 

At Brown, he not only garnered the credentials to teach, he also found the opportunity to make music from a fresh perspective, without years of formal preparation or the expectation of financial success. In Ghanaian drumming, Javanese gamelan, and Arabic takht, Alan rediscovered joy in music making.

While developing his dissertation (which focused on recording studio practice), in part as a distraction from the research and writing tasks at hand, Alan picked up the guitar he had only casually played for many years. In so doing, he developed a command of the instrument and, from experiments with alternative tunings, a distinctive musical style. Newly confident, Alan held his own in the living room gatherings that gave birth to Birdsong At Morning, and that experience further led to an explosion in musical expression as song after song appeared – a lot more easily than the chapters of the dissertation. But when he was done, he had a bunch of songs, something resembling a book, and something fairly accurately described as a job.

In the fall of 2006, Alan joined the full time faculty at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he serves as Coordinator of Music Business and lectures on non-European music, American music, rock, and other technologically mediated music. Concurrently, he is the prime instigator of the machinations behind Birdsong At Morning, putting his research into practice and bringing his real world experience into the classroom. He has been known to ride a bicycle for hundreds of miles in a handful of days as part of Ride Far, an HIV/AIDS fundraising endeavor, loves swimming in the ocean, Reese's peanut butter cups, sudoku, and the Criterion film collection. He is the requisite Beatlemaniac of the group.