Singer-songwriter, poet, actor and multi-instrumentalist Willie Watson has announced his first-ever solo album of original material - over 20 years into his career. The former member of Old Crow Medicine Show has been a part of numerous musical projects, soundtracks, and films and has now released the self-titled ‘Willie Watson’ via Little Operation Records and More (Thirty Tigers). Watson recorded the album in Los Angeles with producers Gabe Witcher and Kenneth Pattengale along with a crack band of players including Paul Kowert on bass, Dylan Day on guitar, Benmont Tench on keys, Jason Boesel on drums and new massive talent Sami Braman on fiddle. The collection of songs is honest and potent, an unadorned reflection of Watson’s life, his mistakes, his traumas, and his gratitude to still be here, to still be alive, and to still be loved. It's the type of record that can’t come early in one’s career and was won after a life of hard battles and difficult lessons, which Willie explained more about during our fascinating conversation when we recently caught up over Zoom ahead of the release.
Appreciate you taking the time to hang out and chat today, it’s an exciting time with bringing this project out and I know this isn’t the first thing you have ever put out yourself but, these being original songs to think as it being your debut album when you have been in the industry for so long, must be a little bit of a weird thing to hear and get your head around. “Man, it is a weird feeling to get my head around and to be forty-five where I’m ok that I’m just doing that now is crazy to me that I’m ok with it. When I was twenty-five, if you would have told me that it would take until you are forty-five years old when you will finally get stuff figured out, be able to express yourself and put out the record that you have always wanted to put out for your entire life, I would have thought no way! I don’t want to wait that long, that’s not how I thought it was going to look like.”
You’re obviously not the first person who had their introduction into the industry as part of a band, where you had success and then decided to do things yourself but like you said, it’s taken a while and it’s not often it’s a long spell between that and putting out a solo project. The counter to that and I think this was something you had said in the run up to the release was that you really need to have lived and be able to know what you really wanted to say, it’s self-titled so it allowed more of your story to be lived so have more story to be able to be told, I guess. “Yeah and a lot of people do leave bands and go on to make a solo record but they do it different. I think this is the thing that has separated me and I’ve actually separated myself over my career when I immersed myself in the folk world and got immersed in being an interpreter of songs early on, my experience informed my decisions when I was on my own and as a solo artist, which I think hindered me a lot. People are on at me saying not to dismiss those two previous records or they don’t like me saying that about those records so I cover my own ass and say, hey what I was trying to say was that I’m not mad at this, I’m not resentful about the past, it’s just a time that is over. I can’t look back and say, I wish I had done things this way or I wish that I had made this record fifteen years ago as soon as I was out of Old Crow because I did kind of try to and it is what I wanted to do, where I got my foot in the door and started writing songs. I wrote a couple, I kind of remember some of them and I didn’t like them enough, then all of the fear, all of the doubt and all of the self-deprecations came in and squashed everything even though I had loving friends who tried to help me out where without it I don’t know if I would have survived.”
You mentioned about people having comments on Instagram, I saw the post that you put up saying how you had almost lent on doing other people’s folk songs for a long time and now you felt you were at a point where you were able to stop leaning on these but at the same time you were not totally moving away from this. What was it that made you feel that now you were now able to untie yourself from this or was there a specific moment that allowed this? “The whole thing wasn’t all realised until after it is all done. My whole life has led up to here and since the beginning all I have ever wanted to do was to be at the front and not part of a band. Dancing around the living room floor with a tennis racket with a broomstick for my microphone stand, that was the Willie Watson show and that’s where it started. Slowly over time and the modern world, the structure and being forced to conform to how it operated, people like me believed the things that I was told. My whole life I’ve had to wrestle with what do I believe that all of these people are saying and where the voices of negativity come from, the deciding how much of it is true so it’s been that constant wrestling match.”
The song I want to touch on is the last song which is 'Reap 'em in the Valley' where you go from talking about there being a lot of noise with all that goes on in Los Angeles to regressing as you talk about growing up in New York state. You introduce a big character who is pretty central to the song where you paint this wonderful image of Ruby Love on that night at your friend's graduation party. Apart from having an incredible name which nobody could ever forget, how did you become aware that Ruby Love was a guy who liked to play a lot of folk music? “Will and Beren Argetsinger along with their dad just spoke so highly of Ruby and revered him. He lived in New Hampshire or somewhere in New England, I think but the Argetsinger’s always talked about him. Sam Argetsinger, who was Beren and Will’s dad, he played a little guitar, knew some chords and the only stuff that he really knew was what Ruby taught him and he was his old college friend. His name was always around that scene and around the farm when we were hanging out with them. We were excited about it because he was going to bring Cuban cigars, we were teenagers and they were cool with us hanging out smoking cigars with them and stuff.”
The other thing in that song and the reference to the orchard is you talking about cider which I’ve typically found when I have been there, it isn’t as common in the States as it is over here. “New York state does the best cider in the whole world, we have the best apples, we are an apple state and known for it as like cider central. We have the same weather in New York state as you guys.” This project has nine songs on there, just in terms of length, how hard was it to settle on what would be on the album and leave it at that length? “That sort of relates to everything in the process of where I’m at, the attention behind this, how did I get here, what decisions did I make, was there a moment where I decided that this was what I was going to do, how I was going to step away from the folk singers and really right up until track listing, sequencing and what songs are going to go on the record. Looking at ‘Mole In the ground’ that was something that I never thought was going to fit and we recorded a few other older songs too like ‘Black Snake Moan’ and another Blind Willie McTell song so we tried a bunch of other stuff because I wanted to be careful about making a giant move. In my eyes it shouldn’t be a giant move and in my head I’ve always known how to do this.”
There’s all of this perception around it and people’s perception of what is he doing, how is he doing this or why is he doing this, when to me it’s just what I’m doing in my day to day. Even selling all of this stuff has been a new experience to me, having to market this record is very new to me but to me I’ve just made this record. I didn’t go into the studio to make money, I recorded these songs because they are beautiful, I love it, I feel intensely about it and I want it to be a certain way where I just care about them a lot. I’m trying to do this because I want to so badly. It was what’s the whole angle, how do we sell this, what’s the story for the record but the story was just that I wrote a bunch of songs with my friend where I really went deep and was not afraid to write about feeling and I was afraid to put like diary entries on paper. The music that I listened to wasn’t diary entries whilst the music on pop radio was. Neil Young songs and Bob Dylan songs when I was a teenager weren’t diary entries, they were way deeper than that so I never wanted to do diary entry pop songs, I have higher standards for Willie Watson than that.”
The fun part is that the record gets to come out for people to hear as you recorded it but then you get to start playing it live as looking at your tour dates, you’re quite busy until the end of the year and I guess that love of playing to audiences has been the thing that has been constant. “That always moves it forward further and I guess that’s a big reason why I love to get out there on the road. That’s what I love more than anything about this. When I was younger I thought making records was this precious thing and it is, there is part of me that always will be but I’ve had to let go of a lot of that as I didn’t like anything that I had ever done. I like this record, I think I will still like this record because this record makes me feel like a fan of myself where I like my music and I like the recording of the music that I have made.” Well from me, I really like the album a lot, it's one that I kept going back to amongst all of the other new records that I've been listening to recently and I think the thing that tells me I properly like something is when I think man, this would sound so good on vinyl. I’ve seen that vinyl is one of the things that you have been doing as part of the marketing along with showcasing some of the jackets that you make so whilst there are plenty of new things to think about beyond just putting out the music, there must be some things you are able to have a lot of fun with. "Yeah, it has become fun and I've had to learn that. I had a version to all of that like revealing personal information when it came time to recording the video for 'Real Love' when they said they want to shoot it in my house and I was like absolutely not. When I put pictures of myself inside my house on Instagram, you can't see much of my house but they want to make the video inside of my house? I don't know if it's my age but being an entertainer, an artist, a musician, a singer or whatever in this day and age is very different where I think younger people have very different expectations of what I did. In my head we're doing this for a reason to get on MTV or the radio rather than getting followers on a little phone screen, I wanted to play big shows and be in front of many people playing those concerts, that’s what I wanted to do as a kid. I get all worked up when I see crowd reactions of people loving the people on stage and I have to admit that sort of adoration is something that I crave. When I was writing the songs with my friend, we were just writing the songs and later on it became what are the songs about. Now I know what they are about and it was just about me writing the songs.”
Well, I appreciate your time this morning and I really do like the record. I definitely think you should be very proud of it and well and was truly worth waiting all this time for so I’m sure people are really going to enjoy getting to hear these songs live when you get out on the road. “Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Everyone keeps telling me that we are just getting started but with three singles coming out off the record before the whole thing and part of me feels we started way back then and it’s coming to an end but we haven’t even got on the road yet and I think as we get out on tour people are going to be lining up out of the door where I think it’s going to go really well and I look forward to seeing that. I’m confident that is what is going to happen.”
Willie Watson released his new self-titled album on September 13th via Little Operation Records (Thirty Tigers) which is available HERE. Willie will head out on a major North American tour kicking off in June and wrapping up in December. Highlights include the Tractor Tavern in Seattle on November 6th, the Basement East in Nashville on December 3rd, and The Bowery Ballroom in New York City on December 12th.
Find tickets and full tour dates on his WEBSITE whilst you can see all that Willie is up to by checking out his socials on: INSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTIKTOK & TWITTER.