The Lone Bellow Continues to Build on Their Musical Legacy with 'Love Songs for Losers'

Eric Ryan Anderson The Lone Bellow

Zach Williams' life changed the moment wife Stacy walked into it.

"My wife and I grew up together," says Williams, 40, to PEOPLE. "We met when we were 12 at summer camp. I rode the friend zone for a decade and learned a lot about myself. And then, we fell in love. And then, we got married real fast and real young."

It was during that first year of marriage that Stacy had her accident.

"Nobody saw what happened," Williams recalls of his wife's horse-riding accident that occurred in 2004. "I think that the horse ran her under a [tree] limb. She was diagnosed quadriplegic, which means you can't move from the neck down anymore."

Suddenly, Williams found himself serving as a caretaker for a woman who could no longer feed or bathe herself. "I was 23 years old," explains Williams, whose wife underwent treatment at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta. "It was an out-of-body experience. I lived there at the hospital."

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To pass the time, Williams learned how to play the guitar and sing at the same time. He started seriously writing in his journals. And then, he started showing up at any open mics he could find for the mere chance to just finally play his music.

"Live music became this very cathartic thing for me," he remembers. "It's how I processed my grief, my worry, my anxiety."

And while he was doing that, his wife began making a miraculous recovery.

"In 2005, Stacy regained the use of her arms and legs and last year I wrote her a song I called 'Unicorn,'" Williams says of the song he co-wrote alongside Trent Dabbs and his Lone Bellow bandmate Brian Elmquist.  "I'm the kind of person whenever I am in that moment and I really want to express my feelings to someone, my words always fail me."

But this time, words did not fail him. In fact, on the entirety of The Lone Bellow's new album Love Songs for Losers, the Brooklyn-born, Nashville-based trio made up of Williams, Elmquist and Kanene Donehey Pipkin exquisitely found the words to describe the unspoken feelings that humans undeniably feel in a way that feels like home.

Take for example "Wherever Your Heart Is."

"How do you scrape away the logistics and mundane part of life and see the real beauty in the day," Williams prophesizes of the song he wrote alongside Elmquist and Luke Preston. "People do that every single day, but it's always going to be something that we have to fight for. And that song is putting words to that fight."

Recorded entirely in the supposed haunted home of the late Roy Orbison, Love Songs for Losers serves as The Lone Bellow'sfifth full-length album and the anticipated follow-up to their most successful release to date — 2020's chart-topping Half Moon Light.

Courtesy Dualtone Love Songs for Losers Cover Art

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Adding to this success story is Williams' participation in the new Magnolia Network show The Williams Family Cabin, which follows Williams and his wife Stacy as they transform a cabin while juggling careers and kids, including their four children — 13-year-old Loretta, 11-year-old Betty, 9-year-old Hazel and 6-year-old Harlan.

"I've been touring for 10 years, and during all of that time, Stacy has been the one holding down the fort with all of our kids," says Williams about his wife, who serves as the owner of Patina + Co. "So, when she was like, 'I want to start my own company,' I was like, 'Yeah, I mean, you've carried me for this long that I want to carry you now.' Being here to now watch her do her thing is so very beautiful. It's like watching a butterfly ballet."