Keller Williams

Mr. Smalls Theater

Oct. 25, 8 p.m.

$22

412-821-4447

Performers love to… Keller Williams

Mr. Smalls Theater

Oct. 25, 8 p.m.

$22

412-821-4447

Performers love to sit back and listen just as much as they love to perform. Well, at least one does.

“I always consider myself a music lover first,” Musician Keller Williams said. “I’m always listening to different music.”

Williams uses tools such as Rhapsody, Pandora and even the ordinary radio to tap into newly released music.

“It’s something I’m into now, branching out and trying to hear the types of music I’ve never heard before,” Williams said. “There’s tons I go back to and listen to, but musically, there’s a wide variety.”

Variety seems to be a strength of Williams personally.

His genre of music has been described as funky, acoustic and electronic rolled into one. This was not intentional.

“It just sort of evolved on its own,” Williams said. “My first gig for money was in 1986. That was just from learning some chords and playing some songs on the radio.”

Between shows, Williams was a student who worked during the summer.

“Going out and playing on a stool made more money than those construction jobs,” Williams said.

But music wasn’t his career. It was something he did locally, he said.

When he began to travel and play as a career in the early 1990s, he didn’t travel far.

“I would try to open for bands on the weekend at different clubs,” he said. These performances became a cycle over the years.

“There was traveling involved, but it was on a regional level,” he said. “It wasn’t until I moved out to Colorado in ‘95 that I began to travel more.”

Soon, recording sessions accompanied his performances.

“It’s something I always wanted to do — make a record,” Williams said. “The first, ‘Freak,’ is tripping with energy. My records have definitely progressed since then.

“It’s definitely something I love,” Williams said about his music. “My mission is a relentless pursuit of entertaining myself. The fact that people pay a ticket price to watch me entertain myself blows me away. They want to see me having fun, I guess. I want to have fun and have that come across on stage and hopefully entertain the people who came to see me.”

Williams uses some improvisation on stage in his mission to have fun.

“I’ve always written and recorded as the songs come along, and I play whatever I want,” Williams said. “I try not to do the same show two nights in a row and to change things up in the venue since I last played there. The songs that I play are probably going to be different live then they are in the record.”

Conversations might inspire his song composition, but composing pieces is not a straightforward process.

“A lot of it kind of happens late at night,” he said. “Since I have kids, there’s not a whole lot of down time to sit and write. I have to go out of my way and stay up late, and that’s when it comes. It’s easy when it happens that way.”

Once written, it’s time to record. Williams has his own balance for the amount of technology used in a song.

“It’s hard not to use technology to clean up your sound,” Williams said. “But there’s a certain amount of organic-ness that I’m going for … I use a little technology to right some wrongs. I call it creative editing.”

For the future, Williams has a list of things he wants to record.

“I have my work cut out for me for the next two and a half years,” he said. “I’m confident I’ll be making records and music.”

This is probably a good thing, considering there’s no planned alternative.

“There is no backup plan and no turning back,” Williams said. “This is what I’ll be doing.”

Check out Williams’ Mypace page.