Amber Carly Williams shares a song for the moments her father might forget
Grief has a way of reshaping time. One moment stretches endlessly, the next slips through your fingers before you know it is gone. For Ōtautahi artist Amber Carly Williams, her new single 'To Be Like You' was born in that suspended space, written in the wake of her father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. It is not a song about answers or resolution, but about the ache of memory and the fragile ways we try to hold on.
'To Be Like You' carries the immediacy of a song that arrived whole, almost uninvited. Williams first shared it on stage at Auckland’s Big Fan, where the response made clear that this was more than a fleeting expression. Later, she brought it to life in Melbourne with longtime collaborator Terence O’Connor, capturing a sound both stripped back and full, carried by guitar textures that feel at once intimate and unshakable. Listening to it now, Williams admits it has taken on new weight, as though she had written it for a version of herself still to come.
Williams has already carved out her place across Aotearoa’s live circuit, from festival stages to songwriting camps and support slots alongside some of the country’s most exciting names. But it is in songs like this where her artistry feels most defined, revealing a storyteller willing to stand still in the storm.
'To Be Like You' is a moment to sit with, to let memory shift around you, to accept that love and loss often move in the same breath. For Amber Carly Williams, it is the beginning of a conversation with herself, and with us, about what it means to remember.
