Til Willis’ recent trilogy speaks volumes

Last November, Lawrence’s Til Willis released three full-length albums simultaneously. There were two solo albums, Hackles and Tin Star, as well as Cars Etcetera, recorded with his full band, Erratic Cowboy. Together, they added up to a staggering 41 songs.

“I tend to write a lot, and be writing all the time,” Willis says with a laugh. “The guys in the band like to joke that, on any given day, I have half an album ready to go.” Willis sounds breezy when he says this, but with this kind of output, he can afford a little nonchalance.

The three albums, he says, are meant to work both as individual pieces and as one cohesive block, with each record complementing and contrasting the other two. You can hear, for instance, Cars as a trek across the open prairie, Tin Star as a loll at home next to the fireplace, and Hackles as a campfire evening in a hollow somewhere.

Both solo albums have an inviting, ramshackle feel to them, but Cars Etcetera is a bit different. On Cars, Willis says, he wanted something more rounded than on the solo recordings. And its full-band sound is the auditory embodiment of seasonal affective disorder, with Willis and Erratic Cowboy more stark in their Americana.

“We were going for a more polished element with the band, but we’re not very polished people,” Willis says.

He’s not exaggerating. Most of the songs on all three albums weren’t cut in a professional studio. Tin Star and Cars Etcetera were recorded entirely at Willis’ home. Some of Hackles was laid down at home, too, with the other part of that record made in what Willis refers to as “a little cabin” in his hometown of Ouray, Colorado.

“The cabin, built in 1990, was a bit of a refuge for me when I started recording Hackles,” Willis says. “It’s very small — one room, essentially — and just felt like the right place to begin work on those songs. I can still hear its reverberation, particularly on songs like ‘Savior’s Things’ and ‘Gravity.’ The rough-hewn timbers of the cabin, I suppose, are a bit like the rough-hewn sentiment and story of the songs started there.”

Hackles came from a batch of songs that Willis says he’d been working on for almost five years. It’s a solo record, but its electric elements make it roar, starting at the top with “Savior’s Things.” Throughout the album, you can pick up on the fragments and the frayed edges, the signs of a half-decade’s tinkering.

Tin Star, on the other hand, was done in a day.

“I got up one morning and recorded it,” Willis says. “The next day, I mixed it and just let it be what it was going to be. Some of the production choices I made were because I was thinking about those early Leonard Cohen albums when I made it. They would use these massive amounts of reverb on things, which made it intimate but, at the same time, put in a whole different space.”

But Tin Star doesn’t sound rough or rushed, an ease that Willis attributes to the comfort in which he recorded it. When he doesn’t have to worry about buying studio time, for one thing, time becomes fluid, the creative process easier.

“It’s nice to be able to record at home,” he says, “because nobody’s looking at the clock and worrying about paying for time when we’re working up parts and everything. I like starting off without an idea of what direction I’m going when I start to record them, because then it gets to be more of an exploration of the tune.”

None of that explains why he put out all three albums at the same time rather than spreading the wealth a bit. When I ask him why he did it this way, he refers again to his prodigious writing habit. It was simply time, he says, to pre-empt a possible logjam.

“It needed to be cleared,” Willis says. “It might have been more beneficial to release them separately, but a decision was made — almost more of a challenge to myself, like, ‘Do I dare do this?'”

Besides, Willis adds, the landscape of the music industry is so uncertain that a little gamble doesn’t hurt.

“The horizons keep shifting the further you walk, and you just have to take each one as it comes, even when it’s too dark to see the path,” he says. “Your flashlight only goes so far.”