Holly Williams photo by Autumn de Wilde, courtesy of Mercury Nashville.

"I'm such a blatantly honest person," says Holly Williams, "and I love to listen to an album and think the artist is truly sharing their life with me. I like to feel like I'm really getting in and knowing that person."

With her debut album, Here With Me, for Mercury Nashville, Holly has succeeded in creating the type of album that would easily find a place among the works of her favorite artists. Penning the majority of the album's 11 tracks, Holly writes with piercing clarity on situations plucked from her life. While these songs come from extremely personal places, Holly's emotional honesty and commanding vocal performances give Here With Me a timeless quality that only gets richer on repeated listens.

Though still in her 20s, Holly has been using music to tell the story of her life and those around her for the better part of two decades. Starting at age eight, Holly filled a notebook she called "Holly's song folder" with her own compositions, though the lyrical content was far beyond the comprehension of your typical elementary school student. The first of these songs, titled "Who Am I," told the story of a woman in her 20s facing a broken marriage. Holly's penchant for addressing life's ups and downs through song was clearly established at this point, as was her songwriting method.

"The way I wrote then is the way I write now. A song comes to me in its entirety. The chorus and melody come at the same time, but I didn't really sing my songs for many people back then. It was just kind of the first hints of what I would do later."

As Holly grew older, her interests ranged from modeling and fashion to interior design. Her love affair with songwriting came back to the forefront at age 17 when she picked up a guitar, learned a few chords, and discovered her gift for crafting music and lyrics was still very much intact. As her high school friends continued on to college, Holly took a different path -- striking out on her own to make music. Giving herself one year to pursue her dream, Holly began booking shows for herself around Nashville at age 18.