Country music artist Sam Williams, son of Hank Williams Jr., came out as gay in the music video for "Tilted Crown" and during a recent appearance on Apple Music's Proud Radio With Hunter Kelly.
In Williams' new video, he kisses his boyfriend on camera for the first time — a move suggested by co-directors Alexa and Stephen Kinigopoulos.
"At first I kind of thought that, 'I'm tackling something else with this.' And I thought that maybe that's for another project," he said on Kelly's Apple Music Country podcast. "But again, I felt like I was promoting invisibility, like I wasn't being visible and wasn't being myself. And I just thought it was the perfect opportunity to just show who I was."
The new song appears on the recently-released Glasshouse Children: Tilted Crown, an expanded edition of Williams' debut album for a major Nashville label, 2021's Glasshouse Children.
The singer-songwriter added that he'd considered referencing his gay identity in a music video for prior track "Snow Angels."
In the "Tilted Crown" video, an older man who happens to be a country singer pushes masculine norms on a young boy.
"That's not necessarily playing my dad, that's playing society as a whole ... pointing young kids in [the] direction of like, 'This is what girly girls do," Williams said. "You wear this pink bow and you go to Sunday service.' Or, like with little boys, 'You go hunting. ...' [or] 'This is what you're supposed to be doing, son.'"
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Williams further stressed that his experience with his father doesn't align with what plays out in the video. Instead, those scenes reflect the broader culture of growing up in small-town Tennessee.
"My relationship with my dad wasn't really like that at all," he said. "He didn't push me to be in music. He pushed me to go hunting, I do have to give him that. He did push me to go hunting. I just wanted to clear that up just in case. ... It's a little bit hard for me to watch because it's just so honest, and it just brings back so much. And it's all there on the surface."
Williams specified in the interview that he identifies as gay and uses he/him pronouns.
"I've never said that to anybody else," he explained. "I mean, people at my label know and people in my personal life know, but this is the first time that I've ever been, besides a show or two, that I've ever been this public about it. And it is scary, but it feels good."
In his interview with Kelly, Williams recalled coming out to his sister Katherine Williams-Dunning, who died in a car crash in June 2020. The siblings' relationship is among the music video's themes.
"I told her a few months before then — in Alabama, of all places — on the back of a four-wheeler," he shared. "We were driving on a four-wheeler about to go eat somewhere, and I just felt called to — and I just felt like I had to, like I was hiding so much."
