“He’d Be Proud”: Don Williams’ Son on Unearthing Unreleased Music and Turning Decades-Old Recordings Into a New Album (Exclusive)

New music from Don Williams is here. Fans woke up to a treat on Friday morning following the release of Epilogue: The Cellar Tapes, a new LP from the Gentle Giant, who died in 2017.

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The 12-song album, which features never-before-heard tracks that the legend recorded between 1979-1984, came to fruition after an unlikely discovery.

In a conversation with American Songwriter, Don’s son, Tim Williams, revealed that his family uncovered the tapes in a storm cellar on their property, where they’ve been stored for decades.

Tim admitted that he was initially “lukewarm” about touching the tapes. However, at the behest of his late dad’s longtime manager, he decided to get them digitally converted. When he did so, he discovered that, remarkably, his dad’s vocal tracks were in near-perfect condition.

“There wasn’t any degradation through the years,” Tim marveled. “They still sounded like he had just done them last week or something.”

How Don Williams’ Epilogue: The Cellar Tapes Came to Be

Everything changed with that discovery, and Tim got to work executive producing the album. First, he had to determine which parts of the recordings were usable. Everything else, he came to determine, would have to be carefully reconstructed in the studio.

For the latter situation, Tim and Garth Fundis, who handled recording and mixing, turned to musicians Don had worked with over the course of his career.

“They were familiar with what Don would want and the kind of subtleties that the music had,” Garth explained. “They could kind of have a head start knowing what the what the flavor would feel like.”

Throughout the whole process, the men had one goal in mind.

“More than anything wanted it to sound like, ‘What do you know? Daddy actually did a another record back in 1980 that nobody’s heard,’” Tim said. “We just wanted it to sound like that, so it was real important that people understood what what it was supposed to sound like.”

How Don Williams Would Feel About His New LP

The finished product is one that both Tim and Garth are positive Don would approve of. That’s largely the case because they knew Don liked all the songs on the album, even if he didn’t get the chance to release them.

“We never felt like we put some [songs] away because we didn’t like it or we changed our minds about it. It was just when we were sequencing, sometimes there’s a couple of songs that might sound similar to something else,” Garth explained. “… The songs stand the test of time.”

Garth added, “As somebody who spent a lot of time in the studio over the years with Don, I can tell you he’d be tickled for everybody to hear this.”

Epilogue: The Cellar Tapes, Tim said, is “a testament” to how his dad worked.

“They were things that he had taken to the complete finish for what he wanted to do, and then for whatever reason, they just decided to go with something else,” he said. “But I think he would be proud of it… He felt like he owed the listener, the fans, the very best that he could give them.”

Photo by Jim McGuire