Are you a “Freeker by the Speaker?” Perhaps you’re just “Sorry From the Shower.” Maybe you’ve got “Love Handles.” If you felt your head nodding in agreement to any of the above, Keller Williams is just whom you’ve been waiting for.
Guitarist, singer and songwriter Keller Williams, nicknamed “mad scientist” for his rhythmic inventiveness and technical wizardry, will bring his unique sound to Rick’s Caf tonight. This one-man wonder, who has opened shows for and recorded an album with the String Cheese Incident, describes his sound as “solo acoustic, jazz, funk reggae, techno-grass.” And if song titles such as “You Are What You Eat” and “God is My Palm Pilot” don’t make it obvious, Williams tends to focus on the lighter side of life.
“It’s really no fun being serious. There’s no point in doing this job unless it’s fun,” Williams said. “I can totally relate to other people who sing about their political views, and I can respect that. As an audience member, though, I kind of want to go and forget about troubles, and I’m trying to get that across to people in hopes that it happens to them as well.”
Williams released his eighth CD Home in 2003. For all the new fans who are just dipping their toes into the lake of his musical mastery, Williams says he recommends Home as the definitive Keller album. Although he said Laugh is probably the most popular, as far as album sales go, his personal favorite is Dance, which is a re-mix of Laugh.
“One Hit Wonder,” one of the tracks on Laugh, talks about the desire to be a one-hit wonder and have a song that gets played over and over again until it gets stuck in people’s heads. Williams said the song is only partially reflective of his personal nature.
“It’s sort of a tongue-in-cheek, slash, semi-realistic vision. I don’t think that my love for playing live is going to change, but I do think that if I get blared five times a day on every commercial radio station across the country that my ticket sales will go up,” Williams said.
“It’s kind of a joke song, but at the same time, I’m not opposed to having my song blared five times a day on every commercial radio station across the country. But that’s probably never going to happen, so it’s a joke in that way, too,” Williams added.
The masses of fans that have been crowding Williams’ shows lately may help turn that joke into a reality. Blake Moore is a Keller Williams fan who met the musician after a music festival.
“He’s a super nice guy,” Moore said. “I’d actually heard that he wasn’t very nice but a friend and I saw him after he played this festival and we told him that we really enjoyed his music. He said thanks and told us that he really appreciated us coming to talk to him.”
“He seemed like a really chilled, laid back kind of guy,” Moore added. “And I think he’s just a bad ass on guitar. He’s a one-man band and he can play pretty much any instrument.”
Rick Welch, owner of Rick’s Caf, said he’s had a lot of requests to get Williams.
“I’ve tried to get him for a while, but his schedule is really full. I finally got him, though, and I’m very pleased that he’s going to be playing here,” Welch said. “It’s something different. It’s going to be a cool show.”
Williams said the set list for tonight’s show is “100 percent wingable.” He also offered some words of wisdom for fans planning to attend tonight’s performance. “I would say, expect to hear some songs that you recognize, expect to hear some songs that you’ve never heard before and expect to have some young, hairy, open-minded people bumping into you.”