When Stephen Wilson Jr was a kid, he’d often hear what he couldn’t 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’d been packing my bags for weeks, getting ready, and I woke my dad up to say, ‘I’m leaving.’ He asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘College, Dad, I’ve been talking about it for weeks – for a year, really.’ And that was the moment it actually sank in for him that I’d done it. To him, it wasn’t possible for someone like us to be in college.”
Since the beginning, Wilson Jr has developed his music career in his own way, rather than following the industry’s typical blueprint. He released his first single when he was 40 years old (“Nobody gave a s*** about it”) and his debut album, søn of dad, just two years ago, to not much fanfare. Since then, though, he’s become a quiet sensation on the country music scene, growing a devout fanbase through word of mouth and non-stop touring. Nothing he does feels as though he’s doing it by the book. He’s collaborated with Noah Cyrus on the beautiful, tenderly wrought single “If There’s a Heaven”, and with fellow country newcomer Shaboozey on “Took a Walk”, which features on the film soundtrack for the Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk. In April, he performed an electrifying twist on “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the NFL Draft in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Last month, he was nominated for New Artist of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards.
Meanwhile, søn of dad, a deluxe edition of which was released earlier this year, is now rightly getting the reception it deserves. A perfect melding of country, Americana, and the alt-rock and indie he grew up idolising (he has his own name for this cocktail: “Death Cab for Country”), it is heavily inspired by his upbringing and the eclectic characters and places that shaped him. The most significant of all is his dad, Stephen Wilson Sr, who died aged 59 in 2018, and whose final words to him were: “Write a good song for me.”
He wrote more than one. There’s the poignant protest song “the devil”, and the squalling “American Gothic”, a resplendent anthem steeped in childhood nostalgia. They’re vividly realised portraits of blue-collar life growing up in Seymour, Indiana; of corn fields, exorcisms at church on a Sunday morning, and swimming in the creek that afternoon. Many of them are also about redemption, and perseverance – Wilson Jr has experienced his fair share of both – while others, like “billy”, are lovingly penned tributes to the smart, simple-living people he was raised by. “Yeah, you can call me Billy, but the hills come with me/ Half mud blood, half mulekick whiskey/ Feelin’ right at home when it all goes south/ Chevy truck runnin’ my mouth,” he sings, in a drawl “stretched wide as a tanned mountain lion hide”.
His voice and his lyrics are as satisfying to the ear as the clink of ice in a glass of sweet tea. He talks that way, too, backstage at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire on a particularly sweltering July afternoon, a few days after his birthday. Wilson Jr is striking to look at: strangely ageless, with thoughtful dark eyes framed by wide glasses, and a strong jaw that is often clenched (perhaps a habit picked up from boxing, where it protects the fighter from impact). “I spent four years making this record about my deceased father, and I went through hell doing it, so it’s really profound for me to see the effect it’s had on people,” he tells me. “I’m grateful for every message, they’re wind in my sails, because what I was doing back then just seemed so psychotic at the time.”
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He’s talking about when he quit his job as a research scientist for Mars to pursue music full-time (encouraged by his boss), then signed a publishing deal in Nashville. “The first two or three years weren’t pretty at all – I didn’t have a manager, I didn’t know what I was doing... I was recording songs in my closet,” he says. “It was what a lot of people would call a sad situation.” None of this, he says, gesturing to himself, should work on paper. “People laughed at me releasing music – agents, label people. Like, ‘Oh, you’re just putting out a little record, some itch you had, and that’s cute, but you’re too old to be doing this.’ They’re real quick to put a sell-by date on you, and in their minds, I expired a long time ago.” 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 learnt from a young age. His first stage was a boxing ring, after he’d watched his dad fight other men at the local gym. “It got me ready for all of this, because you can take a hit,” 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 guess the worst thing I can do is catch a cold.” He’s magnetic to watch live – bounding onto the stage at Shepherd’s Bush and squaring up to the audience, dancing about with nimble footwork. “Boxing set a high bar for what I can handle – I gotta give my dad all the credit for that,” he says. His dad taught him how to handle pressure, then. He smiles. “I guess he knew it was coming my way.”
His parents were still teenagers when Wilson Jr was born: “They had what we call a shotgun wedding,” he says. “I probably ruined their lives in a lot of ways – that town, and my grandparents, really made them get married, because there was no way they were gonna have a child out of wedlock. I wish I’d known then what I do now, because they were literally just kids doing the best they could.” After his siblings were born, his parents separated; his mum remarried, and Wilson Sr raised the children alone.
He and his mum are still close. As a kid, Wilson Jr discovered the poems she wrote in secret on bills and scraps of paper. “She would throw them away – the poems and the bills – and she never explained why,” he recalls. “No one taught her [how to write poetry], she just did it.” He began doing the same, only instead of throwing his poems away, he turned them into songs. His dad gave him his first electric guitar for his 16th birthday in 1994, the year his best friend Marc was killed in a car accident and one of his heroes, Kurt Cobain, also died. So it’s unsurprising that grief plays a powerful role in Wilson Jr’s songwriting, too.
My dad wanted me to understand that death is a part of life, and you can’t hide from it
“Grief is something we’ve been trained to fear and perhaps avoid, like you need to get it out of you as quick as possible,” he says. But his dad encouraged him not to “mystify” it, taking him to funerals where the body would be in an open casket. “He wanted me to understand that death is a part of life, and you can’t hide from it.” He wrote the song “Grief is Only Love” about that lesson (“And I miss my father every day/ The kinda pain I pray don’t fade away/ And the ones above guide me down the road/ Yeah, grief is only love that’s got no place to go,” he testifies, over swells of strings and intricate acoustic guitar-picking).
A few months later, we speak again over video call while Wilson Jr is still on the road, now somewhere outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He’s just released a new EP, Blankets, a collection of four covers that includes his extraordinary interpretation of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way”. There’s something aggressive about it; a stormy, muscular menace that comes to the fore with a jagged acoustic guitar solo. “I called the EP Blankets because these songs are like warm nostalgia, sort of like time machines,” he says. He’s found a room somewhere in the backstage labyrinth of another venue; while we talk, he works on a box of fishing tackle, unspooling lengths of wire and tying deft knots around lures, in preparation for his trip to a local pond before tonight’s gig. He apologises for cursing until I point out that I’m wearing a necklace with the word “f***” on it. “Oh,” he grins. “Well, then I’m pretty f***ing offended.”
With the exception of The Smashing Pumpkins, who formed in Chicago, Illinois, all of the bands Wilson Jr covers on the Blankets EP hail from Seattle. He’s long spoken of his love for the city’s alt-rock scene, in particular the vignette-style songwriting of artists such as Cobain, Chris Cornell and Ben Gibbard. “Cornell’s lyricism was really unique compared to a lot of the writers of his era, I guess because everyone was writing more abstractly,” he says. “I thought that was awesome, too, but Chris took a totally 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 love about both is they repeat the verse twice, and the second time somehow give it new meaning.”
The EP has been a wonderful exercise, not least because it’s allowed him some breathing space before he starts working on album number two. “I needed a palate-cleanser of sorts,” Wilson Jr says. “These songs were a good way for me to go back to why I got into music in the first place.” He’s still grieving his father, but he knows he’ll never make another record about him. “I made that record in a great state of grief – I started making it the day he died – but I will never be able to relive those years.” Ever the scientist, he describes the studio as “the lab” and the process of songwriting as a kind of stenography. He’s also still trying to process his burgeoning fame: “Human beings haven’t been doing this for very long, performing in front of thousands of people, and I don’t know if we’re necessarily supposed to, either.” He flashes another wry grin. “Yeah, I don’t think Darwin saw this one coming.”
The deluxe edition of ‘søn of dad’ and the ‘Blankets’ EP are both out now. Stephen Wilson Jr tours North America until 11 December
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