Willy Mason: Ready to face the world
It looked like he was all washed up at 19 but the songwriter is back with a new album and tour
By Alex Hannaford
Published: 11 May 2007
Back on track: Willy Mason
The "new Bob Dylan" label was always going to be a hard one to live up to. Add to that the constant touring, the relentless interviews, the sleepless nights, and the drinking, and it's no wonder that, at 19, Willy Mason felt washed up.
But, unlike so many of his contemporaries who seek a couple of weeks in rehab as a short-term fix, Mason moved back home to Martha's Vineyard for six months and let his mum, well, mother him. It seems to have worked: Mason is back with a new album and tour. And he's still only 22.
The last time we met was in 2005, shortly after the release of Where the Humans Eat - a mature, folky debut that reviewers decided warranted comparisons, lyrically at least, with Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams. Even back then, at the end of a short tour of the US, Mason confessed that he was missing home. "I love the nomadic lifestyle but I am a homebody," he said. A comfortable upbringing by inspirational parents on Martha's Vineyard - an island off America's east coast - meant Mason's Kerouakian dream of a life on the road would only ever be part-time.
Today he's in a bar in New York's East Village, about to play the last of his US support slots at nearby Webster Hall. "I kind of realised if I was going to be playing shows every night and doing interviews every day then I had to adjust, but I didn't really pull it off the first time round," he says between sips of beer.
"I still don't know what happened exactly. But what it came down to was that my performances and my songwriting had turned to shit. My health was shit, and I wasn't thinking at all. My brain just shut down. It was like I was in a river and the water was rushing so fast, the only thing I could do to survive was to go with the flow."
The story goes something like this: Mason's mother taught him guitar when he was 10. A musician friend of Bright Eyes' singer Conor Oberst heard one of his songs on a Martha's Vineyard radio station, then Oberst signed him up to his label and asked him to support him on a US tour. Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe then caught a Mason gig at Texas's annual SXSW music festival, and he was eventually signed to Virgin.
"Everything happened in such a way it was almost magical," Mason says. "It was incredible. But it distracted me from the quality of what I was doing. I became more devoted to this fatalistic thing that seemed to be happening to me instead of the music. And the only thing that kept the spell from being broken was alcohol, staying up all night, sleeping on floors, and sleeping with women, because I was chasing this fantasy rather than the music. I got carried away. And it was good to just get back home, you know."
Like other tortured rock'n'roll souls before him, Mason was struggling to cope: "I've always felt slightly isolated from people, so it got me wondering what it was like to really connect with somebody. I could walk in some place and just chat for hours. But I could never fall in love. I'd never crossed a certain line. I needed to learn how to trust people enough to show them who I was and to be honest."
When I ask him why he found it so hard to get close to people, he replies: "I think it was a mixture of things. When I moved to Martha's Vineyard I was eight years old and everybody was very wary of outsiders. So I was immediately isolated and felt like I had to fight to even understand the mentality of the town and culture. In addition, my parents had split up when I was eight and my father has a history of clinical depression so I didn't see him much for a couple of years. And when I did, he was fighting to put on a show to make us think he was OK, which caused me to keep my distance."
Mason is the sort of fragile spirit that needs mothering. But he's ready to get on with his life. "I'm a bit older. I have responsibilities to my parents. I came home to sort my head out but we were about to lose our house so this time round I don't have the luxury of running off to try to find myself. I need to support them."
If reviews of his second album If the Ocean Gets Rough are anything to go by, the spell at home seems to have paid off. Lyrically, the album works through Mason's torments: "Riptide" chronicles his return home, and in "We Can Be Strong" he sings of being "back on mamma's couch". "With that song I came home feeling all 'woe is me'," he says. "But I soon realised I was having the same experience as about half my friends who had just come home from college. We were all just trying to figure out what path to take."
In the past year, Mason has notched up support slots for Beth Orton, Radiohead and Sondre Lerche, and has just recorded a duet with KT Tunstall. He's happier now, and is savvy about the industry he's stumbled into: he speaks of "fulfilling his commitments" to his label, and "integrating his agenda with theirs".
One particular agenda involved heading out on a UK tour of fans' living rooms. And he managed to get Virgin to pay for it all by combining it with a promotional tour of radio stations. Fans would email Mason via his MySpace site, he'd confirm a date with them, and then turn up in a hired Nissan Micra (also paid for by Virgin) and play to between six and 60 people.
"I'd get there and their mums would offer me a cup of tea. Sometimes it was the mum who actually invited me," he laughs. "I started in Sussex and the girl was just about to graduate high school. A bunch of her friends from school came, her mum brought out snacks, and her piano teacher accompanied me on 'So Long'."
His present UK visit is his first headline tour for two years. After that, he has one more record to release under his Virgin contract, and then, he says, it's "up in the air". "We'll have developed a working relationship. But their budget's getting tighter every year and I'm getting older and my creative life is diminishing." He says there is so much "other stuff" he wants to do, and you get the impression Mason isn't a one-trick pony. "It's just ideas right now," he says. He's still a pleasant chap - just as he was at 19. But he's more guarded - at least when it comes to dealing with the "industry". It seems that Mason, at 22, is far more worldly wise. Or maybe he's just grown up.
'We Can Be Strong' by Willy Mason, featuring KT Tunstall, is out on 14 May on Virgin; his UK tour continues to 24 May (www.willymason.co.uk)
