Q&A: Ezra Williams Asks “Is Anybody Else This Lonely?” in New Single “Bleed”
IN THIS LIFE, WE OFTEN FIND OURSELVES ASKING WHAT IS NORMAL AND WHAT IS NOT — We spend seconds, minutes, hours, even years second-guessing ourselves and overanalyzing our behaviors, hoping that despite our various quirks and odd ends, we’ll somehow end up blending in with the rest of society. Wicklow-based musician Ezra Williams has grappled with this notion of “normalcy” for much of their life, using their music as a medium to make sense of their mind and the way they perceive human life.
Since beginning their career as a professional musician, around the age of 15, Williams’ penchant for writing intimate and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable melodies has been constant — a talent that landed their track “My Own Person” a spot on Netflix’s hit queer love story Heartstopper. Now, as they prepare to bring their debut record, Supernumeraries, to life, the track “Bleed” helps to pave the way.
Released March 29, the track is the latest cut from Williams’ debut record due to release on June 16. “Bleed” comes filled to the brim with gloomy angst that attempts — but fails — to hide the musician’s deep-rooted worries surrounding their relationships with others.
“It's a song about people you are close to and generally the disconnect one feels in certain situations,” Williams confides. The musician has, at times, “want[ed] that closeness without it sometimes feeling [or] being possible," and “Bleed” deftly extrapolates on those feelings that are often hard to graspe and define.
Ominous guitar lines and snippy drums back Williams’ soft yet assured vocals as they spend the track ruminating over their relationships; a tinge of jealousy over how easily other people seem to go about living their lives permeates the melody. Williams finds themselves “Sittin’ at the table / Wonderin’ is anybody else this lonely?” caught in flux as a war of thoughts wages on within their brain.
“You smell like a home that you love and you know / Wish I knew what I smelled like to you,” they sing, trying to gain some semblance of understanding of who they are to others. Instead of continuously grasping for this sense of belonging that seems to be just out of reach, Williams opts to wave a white flag, thereby surrendering to the thoughts crowding their psyche and embracing that the unknown is something they’ll just have to get comfortable with.
“Everybody thinks that when they're really, really upset that they're the only one who has experienced this level of pain,” Williams asserts, hoping that the messages in “Bleed” will provide listeners with a much-needed safe space to reflect and recuperate.
Williams’ ever-expanding discography is a shining testament to their character. The rising musician is an empathetic and caring soul with a special knack for writing a universally relatable song. They are someone who is continuously growing alongside every melody that they put out into the word — and rest assured, we can’t wait to see what they’ll do next.
Continue reading below to learn more about Williams’ creative process, their open-ended songwriting style, and their debut record, Supernumeraries.
LUNA: I want to start off by asking about your time as a musician so far: When did making music begin to feel like a meaningful outlet for you, and why does it continue to be meaningful?
WILLIAMS: Music was always a meaningful outlet; even just listening to music was an outlet. I started writing music properly — songs that I actually wanted people to hear — when I was 14, and from the get-go it was always quite meaningful for me. It was more for me than it was for anyone else.
LUNA: Has that changed now that you have been putting out music? Do you still feel like it's mostly for you, even though you have an audience who wants to hear it?
WILLIAMS: It still definitely is mostly for me. I feel like if I was trying to write for someone else, it wouldn't sound the way I wanted it to. A lot of my songs happen the way that they do because I write them for me.
LUNA: That's so good! I feel like you get to, in turn, put out art that you're actually proud of because you're not trying to please anyone else. I love that you have a good relationship with your work. How do you balance wanting to share these parts of you with the world but also prioritize your own mental health and privacy when it comes to releasing these really vulnerable pieces of work?
WILLIAMS: I don't know if I have reached a balance yet. A lot of the time I want to release songs, but with some of them I don't want to explain what they're about when it comes to me. That's why a lot of the time I'll give very vague descriptions of what the songs mean or why I wrote them. Then I'll have my management being like, “Is there anything else? Do you want to talk about it a bit more?" And I'm like, "Nope, not at all!"
LUNA: Yeah, I feel like as an artist, there's all this pressure put on you to divulge your full life story with your discography and explain every single moment of your life, which is kind of inhumane if you think about it.
WILLIAMS: It does feel like that sometimes.
LUNA: Especially with the nature of your music and how introspective it is, it can be hard to hit that balance of preserving yourself and separating yourself from the “artist self” that you have. Kind of going off that, how do you deal with self-doubt when it comes to sharing your music?
WILLIAMS: What helped me a lot is listening to my friends’ music and hearing them talk about their music. I realized how you [can be] to yourself. I have so many friends who will play me something and they'll be like, "Oh, this is going nowhere, it sucks." And I'm like, "This is the best thing I've ever heard in my life." I'll write a song and sometimes I'll spend too much time on it in one go, and then I'll annoy myself with it or I'll end up not liking it anymore. Then I'll spiral into this thing of [thinking] it was terrible to begin with and that it was so bad. A lot of the time, I have to take a step back and then go back to it at another time. Sometimes if there are songs that I worked really hard on but I don't like how they turned out, I will do something with them later on because I know that I might feel different later, or also that, just because I don't like it doesn't mean that someone else won't.
LUNA: Definitely. I love that you don't immediately scrap a song if it's not what you want or necessarily envision. It's like, "I can come back to this later."
WILLIAMS: I do that with a lot of my songs. That's why loads of the songs on my [upcoming] album are actually songs I wrote a while ago. A lot of them are songs that I decided to scrap a while ago and then came back to.
LUNA: What's the process of revisiting those songs like for you? I imagine some were written a couple years ago as opposed to recently.
WILLIAMS: It's different every time, but for the album that I just made, from the moment that I decided I was going to start writing an album I wrote all the names of every song that I had in my phone and my Notes on sticky notes, and I put them on my wall. Then I organized them based on which songs I liked and which songs I didn't like, so that if I had a moment of inspiration, I could go look at my wall and be like, "Okay, I'll work on this song, or I'll work on this song." And that's how I did it.
LUNA: It's nice to have a methodological way to go through it, especially when you have so much source material to pull from.
WILLIAMS: Yeah, definitely. If I hadn't done that, it would have been a completely different album, because without having the songs on my wall in front of me I would forget most of the songs that I had written.
LUNA: It's also a really nice way to see how much you've accomplished even if you haven't put these songs out. I can imagine that you're probably like, "Wow, I've written so much!"
WILLIAMS: Yes, definitely.
LUNA: You semi-recently changed your moniker as an artist from Smoothboi Ezra to Ezra Williams. Do you feel that your music has changed along with this switch?
WILLIAMS: I don't know — even if I hadn't changed the name or anything, my sound is going to continue to change as I get older because my inspirations will be different from what they used to be. I know that this time next year, I'll be looking at the songs I made and being like, "Wow, I've made such better things since then." So, the answer is yes, but not in that way.
LUNA: I get that. It's definitely an ongoing thing — it depends on the project. It's nice to see that gradual evolution of sound. If it's alright with you, could we change topics and talk a little bit about "Bleed" coming out tomorrow? How are you feeling? On a typical release day, what are the emotions?
WILLIAMS: When I was younger and I was releasing stuff a few years ago, it was so nerve-racking and anxiety-inducing. I would go a little bit insane for the day and just be really anxious and stuff. Whereas recently, especially with the last release, "Deep Routed," I'm in college right now so I have so many other things going on. Before when I was releasing things, it was the biggest thing, or the only thing that was going on, so it consumed me. The last release I did, I had an important day of college, and so I was just in college working. Then I was like, "Oh, yeah, that happened!" Tomorrow is gonna be a busy day in college for me as well, so I know that I'll be excited for the release, but in a way it's nice to have something else to distract me because I don't like being on my phone all day and I like having something else going on while something big is happening.
LUNA: Definitely. It can be comforting to have other things to turn to so it's not like, "Oh, how many people are reacting to this post?" or "How many people are streaming the single?" I imagine that is stressful.
WILLIAMS: I'm so bad at looking at those sorts of things. When I was younger, I had a YouTube channel and I was so obsessed with the numbers, and I completely did a 180 when I was 16 or 17 where I completely just stopped looking at them. Now I've forgotten that you're supposed to look at them to learn how to promote yourself better. Now I forget all the time that that's a part of the job.
LUNA: I've just talked with a bunch of artists about this, but there's that whole aspect to the business side of the artistry where you have to lock in on the numbers. That can be stressful and almost distract from the art sometimes.
WILLIAMS: Sometimes it does take away from the art. I want to be able to release things and have people listen but also get the music out to people who would potentially want to listen to it. I have to promote myself. It's definitely not my favorite aspect.
LUNA: Social media is so hard. It's like "musician/influencer" now, which is unfortunate because not everyone loves social media. It's a wild time for the industry right now where you have to wear multiple hats. So I applaud you for doing what you do now!
WILLIAMS: Thank you!
LUNA: What were you feeling at the time of writing "Bleed"?
WILLIAMS: I don't think something happened to cause the song. The song started as two separate verses from two other songs that I've written, and there's not one thing that it's about. All the things that it is about are very personal, and it is one of the songs that I don't want to share the meaning behind. But I know that unless you have context to it, the lyrics kind of make no sense — but I like that.
LUNA: I have perused through the lyrics and I love "Look through the window / My whole life / This would be so nice / If it was real." It's heartbreaking.
WILLIAMS: I remember at a gig last year I performed that song live and someone came up to me after and asked if I could recite the lyrics to them so that they could write it down. And so I did, and then they left. Then my bandmate Ciara turned to me and was like, "That person is about to release your song before you can." And I was like, "Oh no." So I'm semi-afraid that it's going to come up as plagiarized since this person might have released it without me — I doubt that they did that, but it's funny.
LUNA: I love that story. I haven't seen anything, so I think you're in the clear! But that speaks volumes about how impactful your lyrics are and how wonderful it is that your introspection within your personal life can apply to so many other people. That must be such a rewarding part of songwriting, to take those feelings of loneliness and disperse them to other people who might feel the same way.
WILLIAMS: It is!
LUNA: In the song you ask, "Is anybody else this lonely?" Do you think having the answer to this question would be more comforting or alarming?
WILLIAMS: I think the answer is yes. I feel like everybody thinks that when they're really, really upset that they're the only one who has experienced this level of pain. It's because you don't want to imagine the people that you love feeling the same way. It's a rhetorical question for me.
LUNA: Having the answer be “yes” is so powerful, because you're not alone in your loneliness, if that makes sense. It's almost nice to know that these are universal experiences. Can you tell me a little bit about the cover art for the single?
WILLIAMS: I made all of the cover art for the singles and the album. I started painting them in the summer, and then I finished them in October or November. I had a few pictures on my phone of different people doing these specific facial expressions. I wanted to paint that, and then I was painting it and I started having a theme with the different paintings I was doing. I thought that they matched the songs, so I decided to use it as album art. I didn't start painting thinking that this is what I wanted the album art to be, but it became that halfway through.
LUNA: It's so fitting, and they're all so beautiful. They're so cohesive, and the vibe that you create with them is really fitting for the project. What do you want listeners to get out of "Bleed"?
WILLIAMS: I want them to like it. Whenever people say that they relate to [my music], I don't know if that's a good thing or not. But if it brings comfort to some people, that would be nice. I want it to be received well. I know that some of the lyrics wouldn't make complete sense unless you knew exactly what I was writing about, but I think that's good! Some people have heard the lyrics and thought that they were funny. I find that really interesting, because I never saw it like that. Looking at it from their perspective, I guess asking someone what they smell like is kind of funny. I want people to reach their own conclusions of how it makes them feel.
LUNA: There's such a beautiful open-endedness to the way you write lyrics. It can be applied in so many different ways. Like you said, the smell lyric can be funny, or it can be very intimate and sincere. There's so many different ways people can interpret your music, which is a testament to your songwriting skill. What can listeners expect from your upcoming debut album, Supernumeraries?
WILLIAMS: I have quite a few songs that I've done with other people. I've gotten different artists that I really like to sing on some of the songs. My friend Jackie also produced two of the songs. Usually I produce all of my music on my own, but I really like his style so I'm really excited for those ones to come out. There's a song that I wrote when I was 15 or 16 in my old bedroom — that's where I made the IS IT EP. That song predates all that. That song is one of the ones that I came back to after a while. The record is messy in a nice way — I didn't want to make a very cohesive album that fit together. I wanted it to be where everything is almost separate from each other, but it's all in a little box for me.
LUNA: It's like patchwork or a collage!
WILLIAMS: Yes, I love that!
LUNA: When it comes to producing your own music, when you're writing a song do you envision the production behind it and all of the things you're going to include, or do you just sit down and write?
WILLIAMS: Most of the time I write the song first. I don't think that there's ever been a time that I've written a song knowing what I wanted it to sound like before I had finished it. If I write the lyrics before the melody or the melody before the lyrics, I'll usually record the guitar first when producing and then I'll go layer by layer and decide as I go — which can be jarring for some people, but it's the only way that keeps me focused and entertained during it. If I made a big list of things I wanted and I knew exactly what I wanted to do, I feel like it would anger me more because I'd be frustrated if something didn't turn out exactly the way I wanted it. Whereas, when I go into it kind of blind, it's more exciting and rewarding to hear the final product that I had no idea was gonna sound like.
LUNA: You give yourself that avenue to be free, instead of being constrained by the idea of "it's gonna sound like this or else I'm not releasing it” or things like that. You have power over your artistry and get to choose exactly what you want; but working with another producer is always so cool because you get that other opinion.
WILLIAMS: I definitely want to start opening myself up to working with more people after doing the album, and working with different artists. It is fun, and sometimes it's a lot more rewarding to work with other people. I'm a bit of a control freak, and that's why before I have preferred doing everything on my own, but I'm opening up into not being like that.
LUNA: It can be hard because it's literally your artist project — only you know what you want from it. It can be tough to let loose on the reins and let someone else insert their own ideas into it. We're actually at my last question, and it's a pretty simple one: What has been giving you joy lately?
WILLIAMS: I've really been enjoying fiber arts: textile making, crocheting, and knitting. I've been crocheting for years, but I only recently started teaching myself how to knit and it's very fun. That's what I do to bring myself joy.
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