About a decade ago, Nashville was breathlessly trying to find the next Chris Stapleton, who had just vanquished “bro country” and resurrected a more authentic country sound with his debut album, Traveller. Alex Williams, an Indiana native with a mesmerizing, Stapleton-like baritone and a steely gaze, found himself in the middle of that search.
Big Machine Records signed Williams in 2017 and issued his debut album, Better Than Myself, that same year. He played a sold-out showcase at Nashville’s Basement East and hit the road with Aaron Lewis, another Big Machine signee. NPR gave the album a splashy premiere, and Rolling Stone heralded it as an example of a “real storyteller getting his legs.”
But Better Than Myself, while critically well-received, failed to become the next Traveller.
“I had no fucking clue what I was doing. I was 27 years old, and the whole outlaw country thing, I was really into that stuff, listening to Waylon… but I’m more of a hybrid thing,” Williams says over coffee and surreptitious hits on a vape in an East Nashville coffeeshop. “Now, I’m trying to be more of myself and not worrying too much if it’s country — because I’m not, like, a country guy.”
As it turns out, he’s more of a rocker, specifically the Eighties hard rock and metal that his father turned him onto as a kid. On Space Brain, his adventurous left-turn album out now on Lighting Rod Records, Williams pays homage to that music by covering the songs of bands like Mötley Crüe, Poison, Judas Priest, and Cinderella. But this isn’t a note-for-note tribute: Williams renders the songs as gritty, often brooding country odes. There’s no hair spray, no spandex, and no glossy production. The bulk of the arrangements lean toward ballads — a way to emphasize the genre’s frequently overlooked lyrics, according to Williams.
“I spent six months or so just trying to reimagine these tunes. There are great lyrics in these songs that I feel like get lost a lot of the time,” he says. “Mötley Crüe’s ‘Wild Side’ still resonates today.”
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Williams’ choice of songs to cover is what helps distinguish Space Brain. Instead of country-leaning layups like Skid Row’s “I Remember You,” Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” or Mötley’s “Home Sweet Home,” he attempted to tackle bona fide rock songs like “Youth Gone Wild,” “Look What the Cat Dragged in,” and “Wild Side.” Rather than crooning Guns N’ Roses’ ubiquitous 1988 ballad “Patience,” he opts for Appetite for Destruction‘s hard-partying “Night Train,” which gives Space Brain its title (“Loaded like a freight train/Flying like an aeroplane/Feeling like a space brain/One more time tonight,” Williams drawls).
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“I prefer more of the late Eighties bands with the blues-rock elements,” Williams says. “I made this record as a tribute to that music. My dad had a wooden case of CDs in the basement, from Tesla to Skid Row to Faster Pussycat and I’d just look at the album covers. I was like, ‘These guys look like action figures.’ I started doing deep dives into this stuff.”
The release of Space Brain underscores the long-running connection between Eighties hard rock and country music. After hair metal fell out of fashion in the early Nineties and its fans grew up, many of them gravitated toward mainstream country, which, like hair metal before it, was embracing loud guitars and big drums and selling hard rock’s message of the never-ending night (listen to nearly anything by Florida Georgia Line). “It was about the party and the excess in the Eighties, and then the Nineties brought darker undertones,” Williams says of hard rock’s transition. “Authenticity was a big thing.”
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Nashville is still acknowledging the Eighties rock fan base today. Dolly Parton released Rockstar in 2023, an album with guests like Judas Priest’s Rob Halford and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler. Earlier this month, Parton appeared with Mötley Crüe on a new version of the band’s essential power ballad “Home Sweet Home,” which debuted at Number One on Mediabase’s Classic Rock chart, and delivered a video message to Ozzy Osbourne at Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning farewell concert. Van Halen’s Sammy Hagar played Stagecoach festival in May, and last year, Halestorm guested on Brooks & Dunn’s Reboot II album, howling “Boot Scootin’ Boogie.” Hardy, one of country’s biggest current stars, courts both hard rock and country audiences with his aggressive sound.
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Williams, meanwhile, is cultivating his audience by following the lead of mentors like Cody Jinks — another metalhead who makes vital, resurgent traditional country. Jinks, who has his own stellar cover of AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll),” duets with Williams on Space Brain’s rendition of Osbourne’s “Fly High Again.”
Williams admits he too flies high every now and then, even if he doesn’t indulge in Sunset Strip-level excess. “I still need to feel like a space brain,” he says, taking another quiet pull on his vape. “Doing this Eighties metal thing has really helped me find myself.”