Anne-Marie Williot’s musical repertoire boasts a collection of touching stories, silly scenarios and a whole lot of whimsy! The folk multi-instrumentalist melds flute, guitar, and accordion to create a quirky ambience often reminiscent of old-fashioned Paris.
Anne-Marie sat down to talk about being a self-taught musician, writing both emotional songs and goofy sing-alongs and how living in Spain became a catalyst for gaining stage confidence.
Can you go into how you got involved in music in the first place?
I’ve been involved since I was a really little kid. My mom is a musician, so I grew up with her always practicing piano, making us (my sisters and I) sing in all the choirs, and force feeding us the piano. I grew up hearing music all the time, mostly classical and then church music because my mom played the organ at different churches in different small towns.
How did you transition from learning the piano to learning all the other instruments that you play?
My first instrument was always singing. That’s what I always loved. I always sang. As soon as I was talking, I was singing. Then, when I was 15 or so, I started writing music and I taught myself how to play the guitar. Earlier than that, I learned the flute. I was in band with the flute and recorder. More recently, about six years ago, I taught myself how to play the accordion.
See that, I feel is a very hard thing to teach yourself.
It kind of came intuitively for me. It was funny because I had been writing a lot of music and using the guitar to accompany myself, but then there was one song in my head that had to be for accordion.
You were hearing that noise (laughs).
I was hearing the accordion, so that’s how I started. I wanted to teach myself how to play the song that was in my head. It happened that a friend of mine was selling his accordion around that time, so I bought it from him, and I taught myself how to play what was in my head.
I had looked up some charts to try to figure out how it worked. Then, after composing that first piece for accordion, everything else I was writing for a while was for accordion. I just kept teaching myself how to play what was in my head.
So do you prefer then, to do more things on the accordion?
I still like the guitar too, and I have been largely neglecting the flute for the last couple of years, but once in a while I pull it out, and I also love that. I don’t really write for the flute. When I do shows, when its concert style shows on a stage, I alternate between the guitar and the accordion.
I also do another type of show which is the wandering minstrel accordion show. I think that’s what I’ll be doing at the festival actually. For this type of show, I walk around and play accordion through a crowd. I do that sometimes for parties, or festivals and markets. It works really well in places where people are doing other things, and I just walk around and play and bring ambience to the event.
If the people around me are talking and doing their own thing, I just play instrumentally. If I see that people are into listening, I’ll sing for them, for little groups throughout the crowd.
Oh yeah, why not! I mean, these kinds of things can happen.
Can we talk a little bit more about your songwriting process, your style of music, and how it’s evolved since you started?
Sure! I started writing music when I was a teenager, so it was kind of teen angsty (laughs). My first language is French. I grew up in rural Quebec, and I grew up totally in French, but when I was a teenager, I was focusing on learning English, so most of the first songs I wrote were in English - the teen angsty ones, folky, singing with the guitar.
Since I started to write music, it has always been melody driven. I get melodies and lyrics in my head, and then the chords come after. With the accordion, what I end up writing sounds more French. I write a lot of French songs for accordion. I have a few English ones too, but most of them end up being in French. Some of the main comments that I get when I’m playing are: “Oh I need some wine”, or “I feel like I’m in Paris in a little cafe”.
As far as lyrically, you write sort of fairy-tale-ish, storytelling based so where does that come from?
Most of my lyrics are very poetic. They come from true things. They come from real experiences that I try to explain poetically. I think sometimes, in a weird way, when you use poetry you're not as direct, but you can get a lot more of the feeling or the subtleties of feeling through poetry, through images. Some of my songs are stories, but a lot of them are about situations and interactions, or sometimes they’re magical. I have a song on guitar called, “The Fairy Song” and it’s about when I got caught in a fairy ring for 54 years, and of course I’ve never been caught in a fairy ring (laughs), but I’m using some of that folklore. It does relate to my life; that feeling of sometimes being estranged for a long time, or being away and almost being taken away from life for a little bit.
So just feeling disconnected?
Yeah! There are a lot of different topics that I write about. Then there are silly songs. There’s one I like to do as a singalong, if I find a group of people who are into singing. I have a song for the accordion called “French Lover”, and it’s about my misadventures in love and how the only solution to all of your problems is to find a French lover (laughs), so yeah, some of them are sillier. I have another song called “Little Smoke Bird” about a little bird that decided to be a smoker and it ends up being a cough-along song.
I have a couple of songs I wrote in Spanish. I don’t write a lot in Spanish, but occasionally that happens.
So you know French, English, and Spanish?
Yeah. I understand Catalan too. I lived in Catalonia, a region of Spain. That part of my life was good for music. When I was in high school I did a lot of performing and then in University I got shy about my guitar playing, but I still needed to perform. I still needed my words to come out so I was doing more spoken word and trying to get better at guitar, but not really performing musically as much. After that, when I went to Spain, I ended up jamming with people who didn’t understand English, so I got singing again, just improvising English lyrics.
Were you more comfortable because you knew they couldn’t understand you?
(Laughs) Yes! So that’s what kind of got me out of my shell again about singing. I was farming over there, and then at night, we would make up silly songs. There was a song called “El gat té mocs” which is Catalan for “The Cat Has Boogers” and it was a song I made up when I was trying to learn Catalan. I would go around the table, and each verse was about each person at the table. I would say something about their day. It could have been like: “Maria, today, was so hot she was working in her bra, and me. no” and then “the cat has boogers and me too”.
What’s your most anticipated part about playing Harvest Sun?
Well, I heard that it’s all Manitoban performers. I’m really excited about a festival that focuses on local performers. I have a few friends that are going to be performing and some people I don’t know either, so I’m looking forward to discovering them. I like the idea of camping, too. I’m just looking forward to the experience of being there. It’s my first time, so I will be exploring.
Catch at Anne-Marie Williot at The Harvest Sun Music Festival in Kelwood, MB - August 16 -18th.
Follow and listen to Anne-Marie's music through Manitoba Music and Bandcamp.
Janet Adamana is the Founder/Editor-In-Chief of Sound, Phrase & Fury Magazine - a Winnipeg-based digital publication dedicated to promoting independent artists and industry professionals from all over the world. More than just about inciting hype, she interviews/writes to capture an artists’ essence and their greatest passions to ignite meaningful connections between fans and really great bands.