Her new EP, Losing My Accent collects a dazzling run of new music, including such deeply personal songs as Every Storm, If I Don’t Like You, Love You To Death, Learning Curve and Things That Fall. Its title track of the same name sees Williams pondering her British identity in L.A., which has affected her more deeply than she at first realised.
“Every new person that I meet will be able to tell I'm not from California or from the States, but they will immediately think I'm Australian,” she says. “People can't believe I'm from England for some reason. I do think part of it is just because it is hard for people to tell the difference between all those accents. Living in the States, all my friends have different American accents, so I’m surrounded by the culture. I've definitely picked it up.
"My dad tells me my intonation is not British anymore. I still sound a little bit British, but everyone at home is like, ‘You have an American twang’. I love having a British accent, but I realised my accent has really changed.”
After one such occasion when someone apologised for incorrectly guessing her accent, Williams shrugged it off, but felt differently about it by the time she got home. “I was actually really sad that people can't recognise I'm British,” she shares.
“And it wasn't because they got it wrong, but it was just because I was like, ‘I've really changed’. I've now been in the States for such a big period of my life, and it feels weird to be letting go of a little bit of my childhood, or to be growing up and changing. It was this realisation of, ‘Wow. I'm really far from home, and I've definitely changed a lot’.”
Williams’s previous EP saw her take inspiration from influences spanning classic Disney scores, Chet Baker, The Beach Boys to Sara Bareilles, Laufey, and John Mayer. With Losing My Accent, her real life experiences took on more of an influential role in shaping the sound of the EP:
“For my last project, I had a very clear idea that I wanted it to be one story told through many songs,” she explains. “But with this one, it wasn't as clear cut as that. I was looking at the song selection and I felt like it was a window into being in your mid 20s and having that – not a midlife crisis – but the famous quarter life crisis that everyone seems to be having.
"It's that thing of transitioning from being a kid to being an adult. I got married, so I found the love of my life, and I was learning to love someone forever, and I was watching my friends lose the people they thought were the loves of their lives, and also, people start thinking about their parents differently.”