Joy Williams has a lot going on right now. Her sensibility EP VENUS (Acoustic) debuted at #1 on both iTunes and Amazon singer/songwriter charts when it arrived on 7/22. The EP contains solo acoustic performances of five songs from her 2015 VENUS full-length, the artist’s first release since the dissolution of The Civil Wars, plus a pair on non-LP songs, “Someone to Love You,” and “Venus,” which oddly enough wasn’t on the album of that title.

“Before VENUS was fully produced, I began by recording these songs as they were first written: with just my voice and a guitar,” Williams points out. “There was always an energy to these raw recordings, a kind of subtle mystery within the simplicity. I needed to go on a creative sonic journey for myself for the full solo album, and I did. But over time, it’s like these songs kept asking me to look at them again, and share them in their rawest state. As if the music I’d taken to outer space asked to be sung on the front porch again—and I listened.”

Williams also plays a recurring role in Cameron Crowe’s Roadies (Showtime). “Cameron and I met on Twitter, of all places,” she notes. “A love of music made us online acquaintances, but meeting up and talking about music turned us into friends.”

Their friendship led to an audition and the part in the series. “While making music and acting in a show are two different animals,” she says, “there is some crossover: the art of creating something together that you could never make on your own, improvising in the moment, following your instincts, and how you have to tap into your own story to make an idea spring to life.”