“People like Victoria Williams don’t come around very often,” writes Josh Kun: “Part front-porch soothsayer, part quirky bayou princess, and part eternal child, Victoria Williams writes songs of indescribable originality that embrace the earthly and the divine with wit, charm, and understated vision. She makes the line between songwriter and storyteller even more difficult to discern than it already is.”
“Everyday poetry” is, as Kurt Wildermuth has noted, Williams’ aim. She sings “imaginative, unpredictable, sweetly melodic paeans to shoes, a frying pan, a merry-go-round, the lights of a city, the statue of a bum,” “the moon, a clothesline, weeds, and wobbling-yes, as in the form of irregular motion;” thereby celebrating “seemingly commonplace objects and acts.”
Then, with ‘Holy Spirit’ she “extends the physical to the metaphysical.” In this song, as Steve Stockman has described: “Williams is looking everywhere she goes and the song finds the Spirit on Lake Bistineau and in the New York City subway. In the former she is singing with friends around a campfire and in the latter receiving the generosity of a stranger.”
‘Holy Spirit’ is a song based on the experience of paying attention to commonplace, everyday objects and acts within which the Spirit of God – the Holy Spirit – can be found. As Simone Weil claimed, “Attention, taken to its highest degree,” – “absolutely unmixed attention” – “is the same thing as prayer.” That is because, it “presupposes faith and love.” “If we turn our mind toward the good,” Weil writes, “it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.”
That is what we see in ‘Holy Spirit,’ where, in addition to the campfire singing of 'Kumbaya' by Lake Bistineau and the New York subway song with a whistling stranger, Williams also finds the Spirit on mountaintops, beneath the stars, in churchyards and in bars:
“I have seen it on a mountaintop
I have felt it beneath stars
I have felt it in a churchyard and even in some bars”
What is it is that she finds, sees and experiences there of the flowing of God’s Spirit?
“It will make you laugh, make you cry, make your heart go ping
Yeah the spirit, holy spirit will make you shout and want to sing”
This is – both the song and the experience – “Utterly joy pumping!” Making this, as Stockman writes, a “declaration that is perfect on … Pentecost Day.”
Michelle Shocked, who has covered ‘Holy Spirit’ and “sings it still sometimes, whenever the Spirit moves her,” describes Williams as a “pal, a peer, a playmate, an inspiration” noting that she was someone who seemed out of place on the LA punk circuit, as “how often is there a simple place for anyone this great, this natural, this instinctive, this deep, this pure, this true?” And yet, she reflects, Williams “is more often in place, more in time and beyond, than all the rest of us can ever hope to be,” as the Spirit “moves whenever Sister Vic sings.”
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Michelle Shocked - Yes, God Is Real.
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