Country royalty Sam Williams joins Zane Lowe today on Apple Music 1 for an interview to share how he felt once he heard his vocals alongside Dolly Parton on the broadcast premiere of his new single, “Happy All The Time.” Sam shares about the writing process of the song, and how he wrote a two page letter by hand to introduce the song to Dolly Parton, and was amazed when she felt connected to the song. He also talks about pushing boundaries the way Hank Williams did.
Sam Williams Tells Apple Music about getting the Dolly Parton co-sign
“I had the song done about two years ago, so I was only 21 years old, and someone of her stature to forehead stamp me like that, I just couldn’t believe it. It’s just so awesome for country music, for the queen of everything, a legend like that to embrace someone so new, a little bit left of center, it’s just amazing, and I still can’t believe it. I can’t believe I’m sitting here talking to you right now.”
Sam Williams Tells Apple Music about how the song was about the concept of buying happiness
“I wrote it in Mary Goshay’s loft in Green Hills in Nashville in 2018. She was wearing a shirt that said money, can’t buy happiness, but you can indict Trump, and that’s sort of the same thing. We were sitting there laughing about it. I don’t know, I was just sitting there with that idea of money can’t buy happiness for a while. I mean, I write from a perspective similar to that a lot. I just wanted to bring a new outlook to what if money could buy happiness? What if you went on Amazon and you could just buy little tokens of it for however much money? Would people do that, or would people just continue to pursue materialistic things and possessions? I wanted to just bring a new outlook to it. It’s clear that she identified with that message that after this empire that I’ve built, and the lives I’ve been able to touch, and all of the amazing things I’ve been able to accomplish, I know that I could still be happy if I was just in the mountains in east Tennessee with my family. That is just amazing to me.”
Sam Williams Tells Apple Music about approaching Dolly on featuring on the song
“I didn’t have Dolly in mind when I wrote the song, and it just had the idea and pushed and pushed and pushed. I wrote her a two-page letter when I found a middle way to get to her. She just absolutely loved what I had to say. Now, here we are. I’m a humongous fan, and I could go on about how she has the most impressive catalog in country music. I was really writing as a human being and not as a fan or anything like that. I think that that was clear. I borrowed my friend’s typewriter and type wrote the lyrics out to Happy All the Time, which I did mess up, so I was nervous. I laminated them, so I sent her a really official song pitch care package. I sent it all together. It was wild. It’s actually funny. When she got the song, I got word that she likes to put a CD in a CD player and walk around and sing the melody and see what she likes about it, what she can do with it. They said it wasn’t working. It was raining this day, and I went to Target and bought a new stereo.”
Sam Williams Tells Apple Music about pushing boundaries the way Hank Williams did
“If I want to grab attention and push the envelope, I might wear a hat with rhinestones dangling off of it. I might see feedback from people that say, well, this isn’t country, or Hank didn’t do it this way, or things like that. I’m becoming more and more comfortable with doing the things that feel cool to me, that I want to see from an artist and see people push the boundaries.”
