Jack’s long awaited video for “One More Day”, written by Jack, Kevin Costner, and Adam Box (Brothers Osbourne) and features guitarist Gary Rossington (Lynyrd Skynyrd) will be released Wednesday August 10th. The video was shot in Los Angeles at Kevin Costner’s stunning home, directed by Mark Gillard (Munich, Minority Report).
🎥”ONE MORE DAY” MEDIA PRE-WATCH HERE: https://youtu.be/SC8wXP-H0Tc
Kevin Costner says,“We are all trying to live our lives the best we can. Sometimes we fall short, but we keep on trying to feel like we’ve done our best. When it comes to an end all too quickly & we meet our maker, I’ve always felt that if I’m standing there, the question I would ask would be could you just give my good friend “one more day” to take care of anything that needed to be taken care of ? I believe asking him that would be the greatest gift I could ever give my friend, and that was what I was feeling when we wrote “One More Day”.
Jack is a highly prolific songwriter with TV placements on”Yellowstone”with Kevin Costner and Modern West,“Renegades”( Kiefer Sutherland),“Miracles from Heaven” (Jennifer Garner) & major label cuts with Gregg Allman, Uriah Heep, Steve Earle, Blackfoot, Montgomery Gentry & Black Stone, Oak Ridge Boys, Jeff Bates, Molly Hatchet, Lance Miller and many, many more.
Jack has had an incredible life with soaring highs and crushing lows. Growing up in a violent and abusive household, he left home at seventeen to become a marine, a broiler chef, and a roadie with The Who. Jack recently spent time with Roger Daltrey in the U.K.
Look forward to connecting with you regarding your interest in the epic H. Jack Williams!
Website | Instagram | Youtube
About H. Jack Williams
You’d be hard-pressed to find a life, a career, or a body of work quite like that of singer/songwriter/performer/composer H. Jack Williams.
Jack himself credits equal parts luck, talent, and tenacity. “My whole life, I’ve gone out and gotten stuff done,” he says. “I think I have unique emotional connections within me, and I’ve always found a way to make that connection musically.” But for one of Nashville’s hardest-working songwriters and most in-demand co-writers – and now with flourishing work in film and television – it’s been a one-of-a-kind 40+ year ride with some of the biggest names in Folk, Rock, and Country. And in many ways, he’s just getting started.
Raised in the tiny town of Eureka, Florida, Williams began writing songs shortly after his 1971 discharge from the US Marines Force Recon. It was while working in Atlanta as a trained Escoffier chef and moonlighting as a roadie that Williams went after his first break by knocking on Richie Havens’ hotel room door. “Banged on it all night long,” Jack laughs, “until he opened the door and I handed him a cassette.” The Woodstock icon invited Jack to New York City to be his opening act, eventually playing on and producing the demo that got Jack a $500 advance from Clive Davis (who insisted on first playing Jack the demo of ‘Mandy’). By 1974, Jack was back cooking in Atlanta when he spotted a tour bus belonging to The Who. Still, in his chef whites, Williams approached the road crew and boldly asked for an introduction to Roger Daltrey. “I knew Roger loved songwriters,” Jack says, “and Pete Townsend knew songs.” Williams was ushered backstage that night and spent the next few months on tour with the band, eventually signing a deal – his first – with the publishing company owned by Daltrey, Townsend, and Who manager Bill Curbishley. For two years and dozens of unmentionable road stories, Jack was mentored by one of the greatest acts in rock history.
Towards the end of his Who deal, Williams got a phone call from Ken Hensley, lead vocalist and primary songwriter of UK proto-metal rockers Uriah Heep, who invited Jack to move to London as the band’s first outside in-house songwriter. Jack jumped at the invite, and amid opening UK shows for Havens and demo sessions with neighbors like Alvin Lee and George Harrison, Uriah Heep would record four of Jack’s songs for the Gold albums Innocent Victim and Firefly. But it was a group of fellow small-town Florida boys that triggered the next chapter of Jack’s career. “Lynyrd Skynyrd came to London for their Knebworth concert”, Jack explains. “I got to know the band, played Ronnie Van Zant some of my songs, and he suggested I come to Florida and be part of the Southern Rock scene.”
Williams moved back to the states, founding the Sarasota-based band Streets Of Ice, landing cuts with acts like Blackfoot and Molly Hatchet, and writing with Gregg Allman. Dickie Betts became a good friend and began producing the Streets Of Ice project. But when the band imploded just before signing their major label deal, Betts suggested that Jack’s songwriting skills could find a full-time home in Nashville.
With a $50 loan and a one-way bus ticket, Williams landed in Nashville and signed a publishing deal with The Oak Ridge Boys, who soon recorded Jack’s songs ‘Seasons’ and ‘Everybody Wins’. Jack then had his first major hit, co-writing – with The Allman Brothers Band’s Warren Haynes – Gregg Allman’s ‘Just Before The Bullets Fly. But when the mid-‘90s Country Boom began to fade, Williams returned to his culinary background, opening restaurants in North Carolina, Memphis, and Olympia, running kitchen teams on research vessels in the Aleutian Islands and the Azores, and with supply ships during the Gulf War for which he earned a Medal of Bravery from President Bush. “I’d also played clubs in Seattle, which is how Leonard Chess signed me to a writing deal with Chess Records,” Jack adds with a laugh. “So I guess we can add ‘Blues Artist’ to the list, too.”
Williams returned to Nashville in 2005, owning a catering business while landing cuts with artists that included Montgomery Gentry, Black Stone Cherry, and on the Miracles From Heaven soundtrack. He signed a new publishing deal with Lynn Gann Music Enterprises in 2015, scoring even more cuts that included Canadian artist Aaron Pritchett’s Top 10 hit ‘Dirt Road In ‘Em’. “When it comes to commercial radio stuff, I can write like a gunfighter,” Jack says. “But at a certain point, I couldn’t write another line about drinking beer in the back of a truck with a girl. I needed to find the soul of my music again.”
Jack began writing songs reflective of his lifetime of not only struggles but his continued sense of hope. He would soon – in more ways than one – find his voice. “Pete Townsend once told me, ‘Always hire a great singer’,” Jack explains. “I never believed my vocals were strong, which is why I always used other singers for my demos. But I began participating in singer/songwriter nights here in Nashville and got the kind of reaction I’d never received before. When I started to sing what’s in my heart, everything began to change.”
Williams soon began co-writing with Academy Award winner Kevin Costner, whose band Kevin Costner & Modern West had recorded two of Jack’s songs (including the Top 20 hit ‘Love Shine’), leading Costner to cut four more Jack tracks for his 2019 Tales From Yellowstone album. Jack signed with Anthem Entertainment for additional film & television work and has since collaborated with award-winning Welsh composer John Hardy. And after nearly five decades of music and adventure fit for a dozen lives, his 2020 emotional gut-punch EP Already Dead – produced by Brothers Osborne’s Adam Box – became H. Jack Williams’ first-ever solo release. “I feel like a 20-year-old singer/songwriter again,” Jack says, with the combination of fortitude and poignancy that still defines his life, his career, and his very best work to come. “I’m a survivor, and I keep pushing forward. I believe that my A-game has just begun.”
Thanks
Gayle & Ben
Be the first to comment