Breaking Up His Hard To Do

oy Williams just doesn’t know. Doesn’t know why The Civil Wars, her chart-bestriding, Taylor Swift approved alt. country partnership with John Paul White, upped and died late last year. Doesn’t know if the band might yet return from the dead. Doesn’t know if she will ever again speak to White, a deeply mysterious Johnny Depp deadringer with whom she had a strange, slow-motion falling out.

She shrugs, as if to say that sometimes life does these things to you and you just have to sit there and try not to ponder it too deeply. Otherwise you truly will go crazy.
“It’s like I’m in a bit of a holding pattern,” says 30-year-old Williams, a SoCal Valley Girl turned veteran Nashville songwriter. “I still believe struggle can make you stronger and that this can happen between John Paul and I. If that doesn’t happen, as a band, I am determined it will happen to me as I move forward. I still don’t have any answers.”
She feels as if she is living in music industry purgatory. Last November, with work ongoing on their second LP, Williams and White put out a statement to the effect that they were no longer a going concern. Breaking up by press release is hardly a novelty. Yet here the wording was deeply peculiar, hinting at off-stage dramas, the particulars of which you could only guess at. “Due to internal discord and irreconcilable differences of ambition,” it said, “we are unable to continue as a touring entity at this time.”
The announcement raised more questions than it answered. Nearly a year on, you sense that maybe Williams would have done things differently had she her time over.
“We and our team came up with it,” she shrugs again. “Frankly it would have been easier to say something even more vague. That’s what you see with other bands when they decide they can’t go on the road. We wanted to be as honest as possible, while respecting ourselves and our fans. Ultimately it appeared to prompt questions and attract more attention than if we had put out something very vague.”
The final twist in the saga (to date) came when their second album, simply called The Civil Wars and bearing a sombre black and grey cover, was released – and promptly became a massive hit. With reviewers gushing and sales surging past two million, for Williams and White, stepping away from the project was suddenly more complicated. Joy, whose CV includes a murky background in Christian pop, makes little secret of wanting to carry on – but she hasn’t heard from White and doesn’t know where he is at (he’s believed to be at home in Alabama with his wife and four kids). So here she is, giving interviews about a band that may or may not actually exist, whose latest LP debuted at No. 1 in the US album charts.
“It would have been much easier had their been one big fragment in time where it all fell apart,” says Williams. “John Paul and I originally met at a writers workshop and immediately stuck a chord with each other musically. It was very much a ‘mysterious’ relationship. Every relationship has complexities that go beyond where you think they will. That’s where we find ourselves at the moment.”
When Hot Press had a coffee with Williams and White early last year, they seemed a perfect example of opposites attracting. She was sweet and conversational – and also a rare case of an American music industry professional with a grasp of basic geopolitics (she pulled White up when, in the rich traditions of Americans abroad, he explained that Ireland was his favourite part “of the UK”). He, meanwhile, was languid and laconic, a southern drawl behind a pair of mirrorshades.
At the time, Williams was in early pregnancy and accompanied on the road by her tour manager husband. However, you could have easily mistaken her and White for a romantic couple. That was certainly the suspicion of many of those who saw them performing live. Staring deep into one another’s eyes as they sang about heartache and secrets and unfulfilled longing… well, the questions had to be asked. After the split, people inevitably wondered if unresolved sexual tensions were a factor.
“Musical chemistry can be misconstrued,” says Williams. “Those who have experienced it will understand the layers and complexities. For those who haven’t, well it’s easy to read things into a situation that aren’t there. I will say that part of the intrigue of the band was that grey area – the ‘are they or aren’t they?’ scenario. It did make for individuals drawing conclusions that were painful in a lot of ways. A man and woman on stage singing – there is a lot of power to that and it has to treated with respect.”

The Civil Wars is out now