Musician Zach Williams was living at a hospital in Georgia, watching his wife recover from a horseback riding accident, when he started writing music as a way to process his family’s “new reality.”
Then, at an open mic night in a nearby Starbucks, he started performing — and found catharsis among the “kindness of strangers.”
“I fell in love with it,” Williams said.
The sense of togetherness that he felt singing in an Atlanta coffee shop would ultimately become the driving purpose of his musical career — and a core ethos of the Americana trio The Lone Bellow, which is performing at Harris Hall in Aspen on Wednesday night.
“I think that live music can be a very fun, exciting, but also … healing time for a community,” Williams told Aspen Public Radio. “And it's such an honor to be able to come into a town, bring everybody together, kind of center ourselves around one thing for an hour, hour and a half and then send everybody home.”
The band, which includes Williams, Brian Elmquist and Kanene Pipkin, is on a 10th anniversary tour; their self-titled debut albumwas released in 2013, with hits like “Green Eyes and a Heart of Gold,” followed by half a dozen more records over the subsequent decade.
The milestone has prompted Williams to reflect on The Lone Bellow’s history and its future, he said. The band formed in New York, where Williams moved with his wife after she recovered from temporary paralysis; now, they’re based in Nashville, another music mecca.
The band is still performing soulful harmonies and earnest lyrics — the 2022 album “Love Songs for Losers” is full of gut-punch tracks about heartache, hopeless romanticism and humanity. But they have more control over the sound now that they’re producing their own records. They’ve also embraced the way music and live performance can be part of “something bigger.”
“I'm on a journey to try to figure out how to make art and then get out of the way of it at the same time,” Williams said.
The Lone Bellow’s performance in Aspen is part of the Roaring Fork Sessions series, which focuses on Americana, roots and bluegrass music. Tickets for the 8 p.m. show in Harris Hall are available at aspenshowtix.com.
