loisjeary talks to folkie willymason about playing gigs in stranger’s houses for free, the importance of oxygen and not being willie nelson

Willy Mason is “just trying to figure out what human beings are all about” and he’s doing it with little more than the hospitality of strangers, a guitar, and (in strange contrast to the folk troubadour image he’s acquired), a rented powder-blue Nissan Micra. Yet quite why he has ended up in Crawley on this voyage of discovery is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he wanted to sample the delights of a middle-class suburb, or perhaps it was the promise of free beer and an enraptured audience that tempted him to come and play this impromptu concert in a fan’s living room. Either way, having encouraged fans to invite him into their homes, he ended up on the doorstep of a surprisingly cool, calm and collected young lady, who, along with the assembled crowd of friends, family and a few other ‘proper’ fans, is playing host to Willy’s first ever UK house concert. He does not disappoint – performing two separate sets full to the brim with his beautifully crafted folk-blues he stuns everyone to an awed silence.

Later that evening, we stand on the neatly-kept front lawn and I ask him what on earth possessed him to put his blind faith in the goodwill of people he has never met. “I just wanted to have more fun. I get a lot more out of it. At a big show I just don’t feel that it’s fair – I’m giving everything away and I’m not getting anything. Here I’m talking to people, finding out about the town and it’s very interesting to me.” I wonder whether he finds it strange playing to a bunch of staring teenagers standing two feet away from him, as a mum passes round plates of nibbles. “Well, it’s as weird as anything else I’ve done related to music in the last couple of years. This is what my experience of music is – minus the microphone. When I was a little kid my parents used to throw these parties. In a small town there wasn’t a lot to do, so my parents would have people over and everybody would sing songs together. I was eight or nine and I would sit on the couch – those were the best nights that I can ever remember. That’s why I started playing music.”

Whilst arriving at a party where you know no-one and being the subject of everyone’s whispers and glances would be most people’s idea of social hell, Willy seems to revel in it. He spends the evening chatting to people about everything from cathedrals to ham sandwiches. Far from an awkward tortured musician, more comfortable with his guitar than with people, Willy displays a genuine interest in the good people of Crawley. “If I had my choice, this would be all I did. If this was all I had to do, then I could play here and then I could take a couple of days to go camping somewhere. I would actually get to see anywhere I wanted to go. Right now, I do this to balance out the other touring I do, which takes a lot out of me.”

Willy already has plans to play in someone’s mill in Wales and a house in North Yorkshire so we discuss the merits of both regions and since Willy grew up miles away from anything on the remote island of Martha’s Vineyard, we decide that it shouldn’t be too much of a culture shock. In contrast May will see Willy embark on one of those draining tours on a month long trek around the UK. I suggest that from what he has said he won’t be looking forward to it very much. “I’m trying to think of ways to make it more fun so I’m going to bring a band to play with me. I’m also trying to persuade the record label to let a band from home come out to support me. They’re called The Billionaires and they’re bombastic. I’ll take them on my bus with me and that will be fun.”

I wonder whether the rigours of success and touring mean he feels that he has lost touch with his own music. “I feel like I had lost it and then I got it back; but it’s always a fight. When I first signed a major record deal I did it as journalism. I never wanted to sign with a record label, but they offered me a one record deal that I could easily get out of and I was like ‘actually, I talk so much shit about record labels maybe I should see what it’s like to be on one and work with them!’ It’s really hard work being on a record label – if your interest isn’t in being really famous and making lots of money then it will get you in trouble. You’ve got to have those reasons so that on hard days you can know why you’re doing it. That way you don’t get pushed around by the label because you know what you need to get done and anything that doesn’t get you there you don’t have to say yes to.”
Does he sometimes wish that he wasn’t a soloist and that he had a band to back him up in arguments? “There were times when it would have been helpful. But there is also a lot of freedom in being alone too – like doing stuff like these house concerts. If I had a band I would rely on the label to pay for travelling, but since it’s just me and I’m willing to camp out, I can do it for almost free.”

He admits that he only recently re-signed to his label because his family were about to lose their house, and is sympathetic to musicians who may be accused of ‘selling out’. Having been discovered by Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes and nurtured by his label, Team Love, Willy acknowledges there was some tension when he decided to leave the nest.

“I never resent anybody who decides that they need to make money. Conor Oberst might have felt that way about me because I left his label to be on Virgin and I was making more money and had no time to hang out with them. But after a couple of years I had some downtime and went out to Omaha and met up with them again and there was no love lost, no resentment.” I ask him why he left Team Love, since it seems to fit his philosophy and music much better than a major label. “At the same time as I was with Team Love I signed a deal with Virgin in England and got a manager. Team Love had their way of doing things, which to me is far preferable, but it was causing them so much stress dealing with the manager and record label. It was like oil and water – they worked on two different systems of logic. I left so that there wouldn’t be that extra stress on them.”

Ask random people if they’ve heard of Willy Mason and they’re likely to assume you’re talking about Willie Nelson so will say incredulously, ‘isn’t he a bit old!?’ But sing them the opening lines ‘I want to be better than Oxygen/so you can breathe when you’re drowning and weak in the knees’ and they’ll instantly know who you’re talking about. ‘Oxygen’ is the song that, for better or for worse, has so far defined Willy’s career. With its simple musicianship and achingly pensive, slightly political lyrics, it is a lament for our generation. I ask him whether he realises the impact the lyrics have on the audience and whether, having played the damn thing so many times, the song still has the same meaning as it did when he wrote it.

“I wrote the song by accident and I wasn’t trying to say anything in particular. I knew it was a good song, but at that point I was writing songs in my bedroom, I wasn’t performing. The song hasn’t changed that much over time for me. For a while I didn’t play it at all but now I’m much more likely to play it in a room full of people because it just feels more right there.”

And there is Willy’s predicament. It is clear that for Willy Mason everything feels more right in a tiny room full of faces, where he can get something back from the people who take so much from his music. Yet despite the creative world that he inhabits, Willy is a slave to the tyranny of necessity as much as the rest of us. He’s just trying to find a way to pay the rent, craft his music and learn all he can about the human race whilst happening to have stumbled in to the role of potentially one of the most important musicians of our generation. Juggling the life he wants to lead and the life he has to lead isn’t an easy task; but if this night is anything to go by, it seems that he’s managing well enough so far.

Willy Mason’s second album ‘If the Ocean Gets Rough’ is released on 5th March and he plays Shepherd’s Bush Empire on 16th May (get your priorities sorted – revision and exams aren’t that important when the music is this good).