Canadian Americana artist William Prince spoke to us when he came to Belfast with Midland’s recent UK tour, where he was the opening act. He talked extensively about the production (by fellow Canadian artist Liam Duncan, aka Boy Golden) on his upcoming fifth album, FURTHER FROM THE COUNTRY, due for release on Six Shooter Records in October. He also chatted about his First Nations heritage, his musical influences, intergenerational trauma, songwriting, the current state of the music industry and his golf obsession.
I'm fascinated generally by the producer/artist relationship, and I'm interested in your choice of producer, Liam Duncan, for this new album. We're familiar with his work as Boy Golden, of course. So how did this collaboration come about? I know you're both on the same label, Six Shooter Records, and you're both Canadian ...
Yeah, just like that. We're neighbours, essentially, just down the road from one another and being on the same label helps, and I'm just such a fan of Liam, and Boy Golden, of course. He's a brilliant mind, and I just wanted to work with somebody who, like all the great producers I've worked with, just feels music in that special way. We kind of warmed up to it, you know, we did a couple of songs together for Spotify, and then we ended up doing some Christmas music together, and then it was kind of natural to make a record together. We went that route, and it was really great. He's such a huge part of why this record sounds the way it does, he really was the glue for it all.
Unfortunately Lonesome Highway haven't had access to the full new album FURTHER FROM THE COUNTRY yet, but I understand from the couple of tracks that I've heard that it differs significantly in sound from your previous recordings?
Yeah, I was thinking more volume and a little more speed, a little more flash. I think the opening (title) track would kind of answer all that. You know, as you get to these places in the world, you kind of want songs that will move a crowd this size, and it's just opened my eyes to leaning into more influences. I grew up on rock and roll and country rock and as much as I love Johnny Cash and Kristofferson and all those guys, Dwight Yoakam was in there too ... and there's a little bit of everything on this record. It leans into all my influences, rather than tries to shutter them away or anything. It's a natural progression. Everybody around me is saying it's a very different record for me, but I honestly feel it's the most authentic to me that it's ever been.
Liam's own sound is obviously very different from yours and I would never have put the two of you together. Does he have a background in music engineering or production?
Those kids come from the school of making their own music, and so you naturally become an engineer, you become more knowledgeable, and all that stuff. And he's made all his own records and plays a lot of the parts on them, and he's just so cool. I wanted a bit of that to come and challenge my writing a bit, so I brought him all the completed songs. And then from there, we kind of chose different pieces of clothing for them to wear. So it's a very stylish record. We're looking for the next generation of audience that is gonna keep standing at the show and keep coming out to the show. I can't bank on what's left. I was hoping to fall in the same category as all my heroes, like Willie Nelson, but Willie is 90 years old, and there'll never be another Willie. There can only be me, myself, as William, and so Liam really helped me explore all that kind of stuff and keep it interesting. Having written a couple of hundred songs, I got to the point where my hands, my body, my mouth, everything just wants to do something different. If you're a good writer like that, you'll naturally seek something more interesting. So, it's really trying to impress myself now on album number five, that's always the first box to tick. Do I like this? Am I passionate about this? Are we gonna be happy singing this for the next two years?
And earlier in your career, would you have not felt the same way? Would you have taken a back seat and been led by producers or record labels? I imagined you would always have had control?
Yeah, I've always had hands on the wheel. And, writing all the songs helps with that. This record, I think I had a big inclination towards the natural tones of everything, so it was kind of like Hank Williams - let's put a mic in the middle of the room and capture this as naturally, as organically, as 'log cabin' as possible. But at same time, it's 2025, and the way to make music, and what you can do with music, is as involved and advanced as it's ever been. And so, I wanted to explore some different sounds, like electric guitars. It's kind of in the same vein of, well, not even that radical, but it's the year of 'Dylan goes electric', Highway 61. There's still storytelling at the heart of it, though. These are stories of my origin. I'm in a lot better place now, I'm happier, my career is in a much better place. And I just got married, I have a nine year old son that I love. So, on the personal front, I'm really satisfied. I'm really healing, more and more.
So you've been through hell and come out the other side?
Yeah and so the shit you've been through, you can kind of look back and comment on, with almost a layer removed from it. A big theme around the new track, For The First Time, is it don't break me like it used to. The whole idea is that I can go back and talk about some of these things. The concept of FURTHER FROM THE COUNTRY is realizing where I come from, a small community, the Peguis First Nation, to where I am in my life now, to looking to where we want to be - like in Midland's shoes here tonight, playing this room, playing all the rooms that they've played, and bringing a band and a crew. There's so much further to go, there's still a great distance in which to travel. I want to make music that's going to help warp speed us there a little more. And that's what I think this record will help do. And it really adds to the live show dynamic. It picks up the pace, injects a little boogie, a little blood. That's what I want. I want to feel alive when I'm out there. I'm in a very special place that I, for a short time, can help people escape and so those core songs about family and love and grief and gratitude, it's still all there. It's just painted in a different kind of texture. It gives me something to look forward to, knowing how far I have to go.
You've got great stagecraft, you're well able to hold an audience in the palm of your hand. Has that always been there, or has that been something you've had to work at, just by playing out over the years?
Like I say, you put your 10,000 hours into something, and it slowly starts to look more natural to the passerby and it comes from a lot of hard work, by playing the cafes and always writing and performing. But, you know, I had a great teacher. My dad was a very confident speaker and he was also a chairman of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then he got back into preaching, to bring our family back together, to get our lives back on track. My parents went through a lot and separated for a short time, and no one really knows this. So the church was a way to kind of bring us back together. And then I just wanted to be with him in the country band. I always wanted to impress him and live up to his expectations because he was my best friend, and he was a great, great dad. And so I was lugging amps around, tuning guitars and playing in his country band as a kid, helping them sell CDs at shows, and it really helped shape the path I'm walking today.
Can you tell me a bit more about the Peguis First Nation? Was it pretty unusual for members to become Christian? (William proceeded to give me a pronunciation lesson - it's 'peg-wis'!)
The whole Christianity thing and its relationship with First Nations people, Indigenous people, in Canada is very complicated, as you might know. I can't fault what those kind of institutions can help people get through, when you have nothing, when it feels like you're out of options and there's somebody in the universe to turn to to make you feel less lonely. I can't knock that because I've lived in that spot for a long time. My grandfathers were all preachers, and one of the oldest churches in Peguis is the Peguis Memorial Chapel. It stems from my namesake, my great-grandfather Chief Peguis, and he met Queen Victoria in the late 1800s when they were signing the treaties of 1871. He had four wives at the time, and took on this new face of Christianity, changed his traditional name to William King, the King of the Indians, and from that, he asked Queen Victoria 'what do you call your sons'? And she said, 'Well, all my sons are princes', so the surname Prince stemmed from that meeting. So Chief Peguis, aka William King, chose one wife, who was my grandmother and made a family, and that's where the lineage of chiefs from the last 50-60 years came from:- it's my grandfather Albert Prince, William Prince, Edward Prince, George Prince and so forth. And then with democracy, they decided to bring about the public vote so that the community could elect their leader. That was good foresight, I think.
What size nation is it currently?
The land mass itself is 75,000 square kilometers, and the actual number of people that would be affiliated is pushing 14,000 by now, but only 7,000 - 8,000 live on the reserves. I'd say it's about a 50:50 split now of people living off reserve. They have to do that to find better housing, to find better jobs, education, these things are not readily available in the community where I'm from.
Did your father speak the native language?
He spoke pieces of traditional language from his parents and my great aunt, so once in a while he would say a phrase or a word and teach me a little bit.
But there are still people speaking it?
For sure, but it's definitely a dying language. So, it's up to this very interesting new generation to harbour that responsibility. I don't know if it's gonna last.
How do you look after your voice when you're doing a lot of touring and generally playing out? Do you have to avoid late nights and alcohol?
Well, I'm very lucky that my voice has held up with not the best care! I have some bigger moments in a couple of songs, but I go out there and it's mostly just the elevated version of my speaking. Hydration, you know, boring as it gets and you just gotta sleep and take care of it.
I can have one whiskey night, one or two, no more than that. I won't try to push it more than that because I start to notice my voice thins out a bit. And I quit smoking cigarettes coming up on six years ago now, and I'm so thankful that I stopped and it's helping.
I know you play a lot of golf. I suppose you don't get to play when you're touring?
Well, just just recently in Canada, we found a couple rounds. I've golfed way up in Dawson City in the far vast corner of Canada, and the Top of the World Golf Course, and I went to Yellowknife and golfed. Just recently in Ontario I managed to squeeze in a few holes with my my guitar player. But I would love for that whole system to happen where we pull into town, get a good sleep, and we can be on a tee box by 8:30am, and then back in time for sound check after nine holes. You're in the land here, Rory McIlroy is home-grown!
You say you're in a really good place now. How does that affect your songwriting? Does that mean we're going to get nothing but boring happy songs from William Prince from now on?!
Funny how happiness is ‘boring’ ... unless you're swimming in pain, unless you're unless you ARE drinking five nights a week, or you ARE out there missing your family? I don't believe that suffrage makes great art. Being happy is still a very active process for me and still choosing to get up, and I have all these imprinted things that I don't want to live with forever. That's just part of how I was raised, and the effects of that intergenerational trauma on my parents, mostly my dad, and his mood would affect the whole house - that's not the kind of life or house I want to have for my wife and son. He was a great dad, but you knew when he was upset, and he'd be upset a while, and so would we. So, choosing a happy, boring song is more work than just laying back into sad memories or why everything is so fucked up these days and really disappointing in terms of a lot of our leadership, in terms of a lot of our family connections and just how the world is spinning these days. Attention spans are getting shorter, less and less importance is being placed on the actual art itself and more on the content around it. Also the quality of song is changing because of the change in how we receive music and what music even makes money. I think about this all the time, how we're subjected to some of the most mundane, boring music on the day to day. You walk through the pharmacy, you're in the airport, you're in a popular chain restaurant, and there's a dozen artists that you're forced to listen to all day long every day, and I don't know why we can't just turn around and look inward and say, we can make this better for the future. This might be one of the shittiest generations of music there's ever been, and it's sad because of how far the technology for it has come. Pop music will always be that way. I got to be careful what I say there, because I admire and love so much music. But yeah, popular music, for sure, is not really trying hard to change things. That's why I love that nostalgia is going to save the music industry and the movie industry. Oasis and Radiohead going on tour, and Pearl Jam's still out there kicking and you see the difference in the show between actual hard working rock music icons and TikTok icons who seem to be born every day. There are children with a far more vast following than I'll probably ever have, just because there's a machine behind them, and it's cheating. I climb the battle of being First Nations, almost 40 years old, and I'm writing old country songs versus there's a pop package out there, every week there's somebody new, and it's a world driven by a lot of white supremacy and a lot of people in charge selling back to their audience representations of their core audience, and so it's tough. That's why I love where I'm at today. My songs got me here opening for this great band and being a part of this tour and us becoming friends and sharing great songs on stage. So I still hold out that good faith for it. There's a lot of great music out there too that is refusing to bend and give way, and I hope I fit in that category for all of my days.
Interview by Eilís Boland