music as a place where spiritual, personal, and social questions can coexist. Their voices— weathered, instantly identifiable, and unconcerned with conventional polish— bring decades of lived experience to Marley’ s words.
The collaboration also illustrates the larger historical conversation running through World’ s Gone Wrong. Williams does not treat protest music as belonging to a particular decade. Marley, Dylan, Woody Guthrie, the Staple Singers, punk rock, gospel, country, and blues become parts of the same evolving continuum: music responding to the conditions surrounding the people making it. That lineage becomes particularly vivid on the album’ s closing song.
We’ ve Come Too Far
If some of World’ s Gone Wrong arrives with clenched fists,“ We’ ve Come Too Far to Turn Around” opens its hands. The hymn-like song features Norah Jones on piano and harmony vocals, providing an understated counterweight to the record’ s harsher edges. Williams and Jones had known one another through years
of overlapping performances and had developed a mutual admiration.
During a recording session in New York, Williams remembers hearing Jones casually playing piano and singing between takes and being struck anew by the depth of her musicianship. Jones ultimately recorded her contribution remotely because their schedules prevented them from entering the studio together.
“ She just overdubbed her part, you know, which really lifted the song,” Williams says.“ I just felt like it needed something else just to lift it up a little bit, musically.”
The song reaches even further into Williams’ past. As a teenager in New Orleans, she attended marches and demonstrations carrying her guitar. The songs she remembers singing were communal rather than individualistic— music designed to be learned quickly, sung together, and carried by a crowd.
The Staple Singers became a particular touchstone for the new track.“ I wanted something that I felt like people could sing to feel a unity,” Williams says.“ I felt like that’ s what was missing was being more
unified in the struggle, you know, bringing people together more through the music and all that.” That idea complicates any easy characterization of World’ s Gone Wrong as a record rooted in anger or cultural frustration.
Not to say there isn’ t anger in album. There definitely is. And Williams makes no apology for that. But beneath that emotion is a more universal idea about what music is capable of doing: giving people language for experiences they cannot easily articulate alone and creating, however temporarily, a common emotional space. Williams is willing to make an audience uncomfortable. She is less interested in leaving them hopeless.
The Writer Behind the Music
Williams’ relationship with language extends beyond songwriting. Her 2023 memoir, Don’ t Tell Anyone the Secrets I Told You, brought the candor of her music into prose, tracing an itinerant and often difficult childhood, her family, relationships, years of struggle within the music business, and the experiences that eventually fed some of her best-known
Tricia McCormack Dan Aguirre
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22 // BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE Fall 2026