It’s a new day for Joy Williams.

The popular female vocalist has taken up playing her own instrument, expanded her songwriter’s palette and abandoned the traditional label—all in an effort to be true to herself and create art on her own terms. And while this might surprise those simply wanting more of the same, the result is a happier artist and, hopefully, an energized fan base.

Nowadays, Williams is not only writing her own songs, but looking to place hits on the albums of others. American Idol alum David Archuleta grabbed one for his debut, and more are certainly on the way as Williams recently signed with Warner Chappell—the famed publishing house that also features in-house writers Sheryl Crow and Timbaland.

Still, an artist longs for their own room to breathe, and Joy recently sat down to talk about just that—finally debuting some new material under her own name after a three-year hiatus. 

CCM:  A good place to start seems to be the amount of time since we last heard from you. Obviously, you've been writing, but why the delay since the last album?

Joy Williams:  At this point, I have been concentrating so much on co-writing that I haven't made much time to write for myself. The EP [One of Those Days] is the first love child coming out. [Laughs] Literally, that came as a major serendipity. I was working with my friend, Jeremy [Bose], who actually ended up producing this EP. We had been given a task to write a commercial for Arby's and ended up writing this song called "What Can I Do (But Love You)." I was like, 'Wow, this is a weird Willie Nelson style song. It's old meets new.' I loved it, but we were too late for the contest. So we ended up not getting that.

Four weeks before that, we had been sitting down for a TV pitch idea, and within a half hour had come up with the song "One of Those Days," and I was just literally talking about what had happened in the last week. The filter was totally off, and I was just wanting to vent on how bad the week had been. [Laughs] So it was birthed out of those random afternoons where it was originally for something different or for other projects, but then when I went back to [these songs] again, I thought that I would love to sing them. I wanted to perform them and not let them gather dust in some song catalog somewhere. There's life in them.

CCM:  Does it feel good to get something out there again?

Joy:  It does. It's really invigorating. It causes a vast array of emotion—excitement meets curiosity meets some nerves. Ultimately, I'm just really stoked to be able to do this again. I didn't realize that I had missed it so much until I started doing it. This new season is only the beginning of a lot more years of making music. I'm excited about what that might look like, and I'm on tiptoe about it all.