Marlon Williams

New Zealand musician Marlon Williams returns with “My Boy,” his first new solo music since 2018’s Make Way For Love, and the announcement of a European and North American tour this Autumn, on sale this Friday, May 6th at 10am local time. On the breezy “My Boy,” Williams’ “rare and entrancing” (NPR Music) vocals are on full display atop a loping sway of Polynesian and bluegrass guitars. He’s backed by a new cast of musicians: co-producer Tom Healy on electric guitars, LA-based drummer Paul Taylor (Feist), bassist Cass Basil (Ladyhawke, Tiny Ruins), Mark Perkins on vocals and additional production, and Elroy Finn on additional percussion.

Williams elaborates: “‘My Boy’ is a pop song with a Māori folk strum. The urge to turn every song on the planet into a Māori strummer descended on me like a fever sometime during the long and winding tour cycle of Make Way for Love. So writing it into my artistic life became the only way to get the fever to lift. 

“I turned up at Mark ‘Merk’ Perkins studio early in 2019 with ‘My Boy’ and a small handful of other tunes. Some simple songs will try to tempt and lure you into over-complication; this one showed no such insecurities. For the first time in my writing life, it didn’t even demand lyrics in the chorus. It laid itself out, buoyed by its own sailing rhythm and lightness of phrase: Mark and I fleshed out the demo with a simple drumbeat and a whimsical mellotron descant and dinner was largely on the table. Going into Roundhead with Tom and the band, we kept that simplicity, adding only some extra percussion from Elroy Finn and a folk electric guitar solo from Tom.”

Shot in the height of New Zealand’s summer in Williams’ front yard and the Lyttelton Trinity Hall, the accompanying video was directed by Martin Sagadin and Williams and features choreography courtesy of Robyn Jordaan.