A couple years after returning to her home state of California, Joy Williams, once part of the Grammy-winning duo The Civil Wars, which disbanded in 2014, began to miss Music City. “It was the first time I really felt like I was saying, ‘I want to go home,’ and I meant Nashville, not California,” she says. The singer-songwriter, who grew up in Santa Cruz, was caring for her father, who had cancer; when he passed away in 2014, she felt pulled to return to Nashville, where she had first moved when she was 18.
She, her husband, and their son packed up and headed south, where Williams, 36, found joy in the simplicity of daily life, she says, like “learning to find the rainbow in the bubbles of the dish…
