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wb Stephen Wilson Jr. He was a child, he often heard what he couldn’t to do. Even his late father told him, “You’re a poor kid. Rich kids go to college. You’re not rich.”
He still remembers the night he left for university: “I had been packing my bag for weeks, getting ready, and I woke my father up to say, ‘I’m leaving.’ He asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘College, Dad, I’ve been talking about it for weeks – a year, in fact.’ And that was the moment when he actually realized that I had done it. For them, it was not possible for someone like us to stay in college.
From the beginning, Wilson Jr. has developed his music career in his own way, rather than following the industry’s typical blueprint. When he was 40 he released his first single (“Nobody Told You About It***”) and his first album, father’s sonJust two years ago, there wasn’t much fanfare. However, since then, he has become a quiet sensation in the country music scene, gaining a die-hard fan following through word-of-mouth promotion and non-stop touring. Nothing he does feels like he’s doing it by the book. He has collaborated with Noah Cyrus on the beautiful, softly crafted single “If There Is a Heaven”, and worked with fellow country newcomer Shaboozy on “Took a Walk”, set on the film soundtrack for the Stephen King adaptation of The New York Times. long walkIn April, he performed a rousing performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the NFL Draft in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Last month, she was nominated for New Artist of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards.
During this time, father’s sonA deluxe edition of which was released earlier this year, is now getting the proper reception it deserves. A perfect blend of country, Americana, and the alt-rock and indie he grew up idolizing (he has his own name for this cocktail: “Death Cab for Country”), it’s heavily inspired by his upbringing and the eclectic characters and places that shaped him. Most important is his father, Stephen Wilson Sr., who died in 2018 at the age of 59, and whose last words were: “Write a good song for me.”
He wrote one after another. It features the poignant protest song “The Devil” and the screaming “American Gothic”, a sublime anthem steeped in childhood memories. They are vividly realized portraits of blue-collar life growing up in Seymour, Indiana; Corn fields, scrubs at church on Sunday morning, and a swim in the creek that afternoon. Many of them are also about liberation and perseverance – Wilson Jr. has experienced his fair share of both – while others, like “Billy”, pay loving tribute to the smart, simple lives by which he was raised. “Yeah, you can call me Billy, but the hills come with me/ Half mud blood, half mule whiskey/ When it all goes south I feel right at home/ Chevy trucks running around in my mouth,” he sings, “stretched like the skin of a brown mountain lion.”
His voice and his lyrics are as gratifying to the ears as the tinkling of ice in a glass of sweet tea. He talks the same way backstage at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire a few days after his birthday, on a particularly hot July afternoon. Wilson Jr. is attractive to look at: strangely ageless, with thoughtful dark eyes framed by wide glasses and a strong jaw that is often clenched (perhaps a habit derived from boxing, where it protects the fighter from impact). He told me, “I spent four years making this record about my dead father, and I went through hell doing it, so to see the impact it has on people is really profound for me.” “I’m grateful for every message, they’re like inspiration to me, because what I was going through seemed very mental at the time.”
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He’s talking about the time he quit his job as a research scientist for Mars (encouraged by his boss) to pursue music full-time, then signed a publishing deal in Nashville. “The first two or three years weren’t good at all – I didn’t have a manager, I didn’t know what I was doing… I was recording songs in my wardrobe,” he says. “It was what many people would call a tragic situation.” None of this should work on paper, he says, pointing to himself. “People laughed at me releasing music – agents, label people. Like, ‘Oh, you’re just putting out a little record, you had some itches, and that’s cool, but you’re too old to do this.’ They’re very quick to put a sell-by date on you, and in their mind, I’m long gone.'” But, as Wilson Jr. likes to tell fans at his sold-out shows: “I’m like cheese. The older I get, the better I get.”
Resilience was a lesson he learned from a young age. His first step into the boxing ring was when he watched his father fight other men at the local gym. “It prepared me for all this, because you can take a blow,” he says. “The thing is, you can die in the ring. So when I’m playing the NFL Draft in freezing cold Green Bay, I think the worst thing I can do is catch a cold.” She is fascinating to watch live – climbing onto the stage at Shepherd’s Bush and standing in front of the audience, dancing with nimble footwork. He says, “Boxing has set a high standard for what I can handle – I have to give all the credit to my father for that.” Her father taught her how to handle pressure. He smiles. “I think he knew it was coming my way.”
Wilson Jr.’s parents were teenagers when he was born: “They had what we call a shotgun marriage,” he says. “I probably ruined their lives in a lot of ways – that town and my grandparents actually made them get married, because they had no way of getting married. I wish I knew then what I’m doing now, because they were literally kids doing the best they could.” After his siblings were born, his parents separated; His mother remarried, and Wilson Sr. raised the children alone.
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He and his mother are still close. As a child, Wilson Jr. discovered poems he had secretly written on bills and scraps of paper. He recalls, “She used to throw them away – poems and bills – and she never explained why.” “No one taught him [how to write poetry]He just did it. He started doing the same, only instead of throwing away his poems, he turned them into songs. His father gave him his first electric guitar on his 16th birthday in 1994, the year his best friend Mark died in a car accident and one of his heroes, Kurt Cobain, also died. So it’s not surprising that grief plays a powerful role in Wilson Jr.’s songwriting as well.
My father wanted me to understand that death is a part of life, and you can’t hide from it
He says, “Grief is something that we’ve been trained to fear and perhaps avoid, as if you need to get it out of you as quickly as possible.” But his father encouraged him not to make it “mysterious”, and took him to the funeral where the body would be in an open coffin. “He wanted me to understand that death is a part of life, and you can’t hide from it.” He wrote the song “Sorrow is Love” about that lesson (“And I miss my father every day/The pain that I pray won’t go away/And the ones above show me the way/Yes, sadness is just love that has no place to go,” he testifies over a rush of strings and intricate acoustic guitar-picking).
A few months later, we talk again over video call, while Wilson Jr. is still on the road, now somewhere outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They have just released a new EP, BlanketA collection of four covers including his extraordinary interpretation of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way”. There is something offensive in it; A stormy, muscular menace that unfolds with jagged acoustic guitar solos. “I called the EP Blanket Because these songs are like nostalgic memories, kind of like a time machine,” he says. They’ve found a room in the backstage maze of another location; When we talk, he’s at work on a box of fishing tackle, unwinding lengths of wire and tying deft knots around lures, in preparation for a trip to a local pond before tonight’s show. He apologizes for cursing until I point out that I’m wearing a necklace with the word “F***”. it. “Oh,” he smiles. “Okay, so I’m very angry.”
With the exception of The Smashing Pumpkins, which formed in Chicago, Illinois, all of Wilson Jr.’s bands include Blanket The EP is from Seattle. He has long spoken about his love of the city’s alt-rock scene, particularly the vignette-style songwriting of artists like Cobain, Chris Cornell and Ben Gibbard. He says, “I think Cornell’s lyricism was really unique compared to a lot of writers of his era, because everyone was writing more abstractly.” “I thought that was wonderful too, but Chris took a completely different approach – almost Shakespearean, and the monster that was his voice would translate it.” Those songs were as important to Wilson Jr. as the hymns he grew up singing in Nazarene churches: “What I like about both is that they repeat the verse twice, and somehow give it new meaning the second time.”
The EP has been a wonderful exercise, not only because it gave them a chance to take a breather before starting work on album number two. “I needed a kind of palate-cleanser,” says Wilson Jr. “These songs were a good way for me to figure out why I got into music in the first place.” He is still mourning his father, but he knows he will never make another record about him. “I made that record in a state of great sadness – I started making it the day he died – but I’ll never be able to relive those years.” Ever the scientist, he describes the studio as a “laboratory” and the songwriting process as a kind of shorthand. He is still attempting to process his growing fame: “Man hasn’t been doing this for a very long time, performing in front of thousands of people, and I don’t know if it’s necessary for us to do that.” He flashes another sarcastic smile. “Yeah, I don’t think Darwin saw it coming.”
Deluxe editions of both the ‘Son of Dad’ and ‘Blankets’ EPs are available now. Stephen Wilson Jr. to tour North America through December 11