Van William didn’t plan to drop two records in the same year—he just accidentally lived through enough emotional combustion to power several albums at once. Waters released one album, and not long after, his first solo EP The Revolution emerged. But for William, the distinction between the two projects isn’t subtle. “Ninety-nine percent Van William,” he says of his attention and energy. The Waters record was a chapter closing; The Revolution was the new oxygen.
These songs didn’t fit inside his earlier bands—Port O’Brien’s ragged folk storms or Waters’ conceptual pop sheen. They weren’t built for committees. They were born at the end of something, and the beginning of something else, in that liminal emotional hallway where you can’t tell if you’re grieving, shedding, or finally waking up.
“These last few years have been super heavy,” he says. He doesn’t oversell it. He doesn’t have to. A breakup cracked open the interior of his life. His father retired from commercial fishing in Alaska, closing a family era stretching back decades. The shock of so much change in such close proximity left him in a kind of free fall. The only thing that made sense was to retreat to a cabin in the Sierra Nevadas—no Wi-Fi, no cell service, just him, his dog, and a long stretch of silence—to write his way through it.
It was therapy by necessity. “The most personal, gut-wrenching thing I’ve ever done,” he says. Not confession for confession’s sake, but the hard kind—turning the chaos into something malleable, something that could become a song instead of a burden. He didn’t want the lyrics to feel like surveillance footage. He wanted them open enough that someone else could graft their own heartbreak onto them. “I’ve always found it hard to relate to super literal songs,” he explains. “If you translate your experiences into emotional journeys that someone else can attach their life to—that’s the goal.”
The timing of The Revolution, though—this is where life got weirdly cinematic.
The title track was written long before the Democratic primaries, long before the geopolitical teeth-grinding that followed, long before “revolution” became a daily headline. It was personal then, a conversation between two people trying to save something fragile. But the world shifted, and suddenly the song carried extra voltage. The line You want a revolution / you want a short solution / try to see eye to eye could apply just as easily to a relationship falling apart as it could to the Bernie-versus-Hillary fissure—two visions, same hope, wildly different paths.
That overlap wasn’t intentional. But once it appeared, William couldn’t unsee it. “It became political without me trying to make it political,” he says. The song is still about two people talking past one another, but the frame expanded. In the cultural whirlwind that followed, the song began to feel like a mirror.
He’s a longtime political thinker—someone who sees the country like a battered but beloved novel he refuses to stop reading. “I genuinely love this country,” he says. Years of touring the backroads—blue states, red states, tiny towns tucked into corners of the South, cities in the Northeast—left him with a belief that most people are good, or at least trying. But he’s not blind to the shadows. “There’s a lot of lingering darkness,” he admits. The friction between those truths lives inside the record too.
First Aid Kit appear throughout the EP, their involvement rekindled through a serendipitous, booze-softened reunion at a party after years of drifting apart geographically. William had first toured with them during their earliest days, the kind of mutual-shock moment where two young bands realize they’re watching each other turn into something. When they reconnected, they fell into step instantly—“best friends,” he calls them. He had imagined “Revolution” as a duet from the beginning, and when he sent them the song, they responded immediately with the kind of enthusiasm only true believers can summon. They appear on multiple tracks, adding the spectral harmonies only they can deliver.
Even stranger is how the rest of the material seemed to predict the national mood without trying. “Fourth of July” has that built-in romantic Americana glow, the kind songwriters have gravitated to for decades. But now it carries extra weight, especially sitting next to “Revolution.” And the full album arriving the following year will feature a track called “The Country,” written long before the real-world fissures deepened. “It’s insane how outside events changed the meaning of the songs,” he says.
Travel, heartbreak, political anxiety, and the long quiet of the mountains stitched themselves together into something that feels both personal and unnervingly timely. William talks about America like a place worth fighting for, even when he’s exhausted. Maybe The Revolution wasn’t written about politics, but it found its way there—because everything eventually does.
And maybe that’s the whole point: personal revolutions and national ones aren’t all that different. Both require you to decide what’s worth saving, what needs to be rebuilt, and what you’re willing to destroy in order to start again.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "Revolution" below!
