Willie Watson looks deep in the mirror on his first album of original songs

Willie Watson. // photo credit Hayden Shiebler

Back in February, we got a chance to catch a few sets from musician Willie Watson as part of the Folk Alliance International Conference at The Westin Kansas City at Crown Center, and we were just gobsmacked at how good his songs were. The founding member of Old Crow Medicine Show’s self-titled album—his first consisting of original material—released on Little Operation Records back in September, meaning everyone now gets to hear the songs with which we fell in love with so many months ago.

Watson also plays Knuckleheads this Tuesday, Nov. 19—a venue a little more open to the public than the conference, allowing the general public to catch these songs live. We spoke with Watson ahead of his Knuckleheads show to discuss the challenges of bringing these new original songs to life.

The Pitch: We got to see you perform some of these songs at Folk Alliance this past February, and back then, you talked a lot while you were performing about the nervousness you had in stepping out and doing this. Has that nervousness worn off a bit?

Willie Watson: Well, that was at Folk Alliance and that was the first time that me and the band were taking these songs since we’d recorded the record. It was the first time that anyone was going to be hearing these songs in the life that they now had. I went out and did these songs before they were recorded, and some of them just didn’t take life until they’re on tape.

Once they’re on tape, that’s a different story, but then, once that record’s on people’s turntables, and really, once you’re singing those songs to people, that’s how you recorded them, that’s how they go now, that’s how they’re gonna hear them. A lot of that apprehension came from that—I could put my finger on, that I know about. Then there’s all the internal stuff that might be freaking me out that I’m not telling myself is real, or I won’t even allow the thoughts to surface because I’m just doing my job.

I’m just doing the same thing that I’ve done for 25 years: Go out there and play my songs, play whatever songs, sing in front of people. The material has never mattered that much to me, but now that it’s a batch of all me, and not me and Ketch Secor, or me and Ketch and Critter Fuqua, or me and Gil Landry and Dave Rawlings, or me and anyone else—It’s just a batch of songs that’s just me, so that changes everything for me, and I didn’t realize how huge that was going to be.

I didn’t realize what that was going to feel like. I had no idea what it was like to make a record of mine and then put it out. That’s the thing that frustrates me. A lot of that nervousness comes from the subject matter of all this stuff. It is so tender, and so, here I am in front of people, exposing that—It’s heavy, it’s hard, and emotional.

At Folk Alliance particularly, I was a mess there. That was an emotional wreck, and I was crying in front of everyone. I did this little, weird set for Bose speakers, and I just cried my eyes out in front of like five people sitting literally five feet away from me. I had to go sit in the corner for a second, literally. I don’t know what was going on at Folk Alliance. It was just a huge deal to take these things all out for the first time. I can’t stress enough. It was just like these like little babies that were getting shown to people for the first time.

Now that you’ve gotten a chance to play these out over the summer, have you shaken off some of that?

Yeah, all of it. I’m out there with Sammy and Ben now, and we’re just playing shows. I’m not vibrating. I mean, I have a lot of energy. I do seem to have this endless well of energy since the anticipation of the tour started, like “We’re going on the road next week!” kind of thing, and once I realized that and within that place, I just got all this energy and I still have it. I’m a little tired from the last run, but I still have it.

So, it’s me, Sammy, and Ben—We got our three-piece band, and we found our groove on this last run. It was like a warmup. It was for us to work out the kinks and the tour. We didn’t go to the big cities yet.

We did good, and I think we got our music sounding good ’cause we can play a certain way and go out and have not played together for two months and then go out and maybe play a few songs before the show to acclimate ourselves with each other, then go out on a stage and think we’re doing pretty good for four or five nights. But then something kicks in later—You find your groove and the band gets solid and you learn how to play it with each other again ’cause you go away for two months and you do forget how to play with each other a little bit, unless you’ve been playing together for ten years. Then you fall into place real easily.

Well, you have such a well of songs to draw from. Your first two albums are all more traditional songs, so you’ve got a lot of songs in your wheelhouse.

Someone like me, I don’t retain information all that well, necessarily. If I don’t sing a song for a while, I’m gonna forget most of it, so my catalog changes a lot, and it’s not always all that big. I made folk singer records, and, basically, my catalog of traditional music has kind of been those songs. But, people want me to sing, and I can sing you some other songs but they’re not going to be as good. I don’t sing them every night.

What I have to pick from on stage and on shows is it does get limited to what’s in the world. Look, believe me, us musicians, we want to get out there and sing you obscure songs that you’ve never heard, that you’re not going to hear again after that night, and I dug around and found the coolest old Bascom Lamar Lunsford song that no one else is doing. It’s got some hooky catch that people are going to love, and I would love to do that every night and come up with a new one for the people, but no one really wants that. Us musicians want to change things up, and then people think, “Yeah, play something new,” and they’re going to go up and get a drink midway through because it’s not the song they heard that they love on the record. When people come to a show, all they want to hear are their favorite songs on that record.

Anytime I want to introduce some new song, especially in the middle of the show—save it for the encore. If you’re going to do something obscure that no one in that audience has ever heard before, save it for the end of the show or the encore. They’re going to go and get a drink, and you want to keep their attention.

Was getting the songs that are on this album together a difficult process for you? You’re no stranger to writing songs, but how was that experience for you of getting together a collection of songs and realizing that you wanted to record them?

Well, I didn’t find it difficult because there was no pressure on me. I was just in a place in life where I wasn’t super worried about what was happening tomorrow, and I just didn’t have any pressure on it. I couldn’t sit here and say, “Well, I haven’t done this for ten years. I better get doing it tomorrow, and it’s gotta happen right now,” so I didn’t.

I started feeling urgency towards the end of it when I had the songs, and I was like, “I got all these songs, and I haven’t had a record in seven years.” Then, the urgency story sort of sets in, but there was no pressure, and I had all the time in the world. The whole attitude and ideal that I carried through the whole process was to just be free and just don’t say no to yourself every day on the paper. Stop saying no to the things you’re writing on the page. Just write them.

I go back and look at stuff that I’d written five years ago. It was just a note that I would have wrote half of a verse and half of a chorus or a verse and an idea of a chorus scribbled out on a page. I look at it five years later; I’m like, “Well, I wrote that. That’s fucking awesome,” but, at the time, five years ago, I was like, “This is stupid stuff.”

People are trying to understand what’s going on with this record. A lot of journalists have their own ideas like, “Former bad boy, former roughy, former rowdy rascal, now sensitive man.” I’m like, “Whoever said I was rowdy? In what interview did I say I was rowdy? In what record did I say I was rowdy? When have I been Mr. Bad Guy?”

This is not about that at all. Nothing’s confessional. It’s just reflection, trying hard, looking at the truth and trying to do better. I’m not sitting here saying, “Hey, everybody, look at what I did!” I don’t know where anyone’s getting these ideas. We don’t sit down to write songs and have all this intention.

For me, it’s just sit down and write the song and just don’t say no to the line you’re going to put on the page. Intention is about the furthest thing from anyone’s mind when you’re writing a song. I mean, I would hope so. Honestly, one of the people that have all these ideas and want to have a conversation about what they’re going to write about that day, you’re probably going to write bad songs. It’s why all the songs in the world pretty much suck.

The concept record that Old Crow put out is also the album that you have the most songwriting credits on and that’s Tennessee Pusher. With Old Crow, story songs are a big thing, but that album is a tale from start to finish and it feels like this record is very much about telling stories.

It’s just how it happened. I didn’t necessarily see how this stuff fit. I didn’t see how “Mole in the Ground” was going to fit on this record. “Harris and the Mare,” I could see, and there’s other stuff we recorded that we thought was going to maybe fit next to “Mole in the Ground” and make “Mole in the Ground” work, but those things aren’t on the record. Only “Mole in the Ground” is because “Mole in the Ground” somehow where it ended up in the record, to me it does fit in the story somehow. Even just musically, and even just in feel, it fits into the arc of the record.

Again, you know, talking about that last thing, as far as that intention, none of this is planned. I didn’t sit down and say, “I’m going to write this whole record about myself and think about it, and this is going to be this is what I’m going to do, and in two years, I’m going to have these songs finished.”

I wrote songs about everything. I wrote songs about how my friends are bass players just to write a song. That wasn’t any part of the talk. It’s just writing. We’re just working, and, for me, that work can be a struggle, so if I’m going to have a big idea and try to stay within those boundaries, well, that’s going to just be a disaster, man.

As another way of expressing yourself, you’re making videos for the record. How has that experience been for you? Like, “Real Love” is a very heartfelt song, but the video also stars your wife. How is it making a music video with your wife? What is it like having to jump back into making music videos again?

At my house, too. I didn’t want to do that. It’s like, “We want to do it at your house.” I’m like, “Absolutely not.” In the world I grew up in, people in the spotlight or entertainers or musicians were private. They didn’t have MTV Cribs come out, and we get to see their houses. That was crazy. You didn’t see rockstar houses. That was part of the allure. That was part of why we liked them. In my head, I don’t want to see Bob Dylan’s house. I don’t want to take a tour. I don’t want to see him in his living room.

I don’t, personally, so I don’t understand why people want to see all this social media stuff. I don’t understand why they want the video in my home. It’s not interesting to me. I don’t get it. I truly don’t understand it. But everyone else in this business does, and I got these new people working with me who are awesome and who understand that this is what people want. Again, this is why I say I don’t fit into the world. I don’t understand it. I don’t, It’s crazy. It’s not interesting to me, and it sounds bad, too.

Anyway, back to the video. I didn’t want him to have to be in my house, and Mindy certainly didn’t want to be in the video. She doesn’t want to be on camera. She’s really shy. She didn’t want to have pictures taken of her. She’s just a shy, regular person. She’s not seeking attention like us musicians.

But yeah, we did it. Then we settled on it being in the garage, which made it better for me. And then it ended up better because it was like the shop, and people found that interesting. I had to be able to do that to understand it, and now I understand what’s cool about it. I didn’t understand what was cool about it and I was saying no. Right up to the moment we were doing it, I was still hesitant about it, but I get it now, and now I see people’s comments, and they’re saying like, “It’s so cool that it’s your shop,” and “I didn’t know you sewed,” and so then that lets people know more about me, which I have to admit, I like that.

Once I get the feedback from people about doing these videos, and they say, “I love the video,” and “I love that I get to see your shop and what you do,” I’m like, “Oh, I love that. I love that you see more of me.” I get attention now. That’s what I always wanted, and I have to admit that. I’ve learned, I’m comfortable with the camera now, pretty much.

If someone’s kind of filming me doing my day-to-day stuff, on the bus or something, someone’s on the road filming us in the dressing room, I get a little weird, but, if we’re doing a shoot and stuff, totally fine with the camera now. I used to be really, really scared of those camera lenses and I can look at it and I can not worry about what my face is doing.

Being on camera has been hard for me. I worry about my face constantly. I walk into a room, and I’m just thinking my face is doing stupid shit. Don’t do stupid shit with your face. I try to not be as expressive. I know that my eyes can get really big, and I can look crazy, and my face gets really intense, and I don’t realize that it’s that intense.

In my head and in my mind, my face is not that intense but I have footage of myself sometimes, and I’m like, “Holy shit, that guy is crazy. Why are his eyes bulging out of his head, and he’s yelling for no reason? He’s not mad, but he just needs to settle down.” It’s hard, it’s trying making all kinds of videos.

We made the one the day we recorded “Real Love.” The day before, I had had an idea for “Already Gone.” I was just like, “Whoa, it’s the record cover, and we’re going to be filming it. He can just set the camera up right there where we shot that picture. I’ll just stare the camera down.” I knew I couldn’t see myself because those lenses are really big and they can put up this screen in front of them where it’s basically a mirror.

They put that screen up and I could just watch myself, and that was hard—to look at myself making that video, and as I was doing it, I was like, “Oh, I can’t handle it,” ’cause I don’t stare in the mirror. In the bathroom, brushing my teeth and stuff, I don’t sit there and stare at myself. There’s people in the world who love to look at themselves in the mirror, and they spend hours doing. There’s couples that get together and look at themselves in the fucking mirror for hours about how beautiful they are.

My God, torture. That sounds like hell on earth. I can’t look in the mirror for more than fucking five seconds. I don’t do it. I had to do it for that video. I got myself into it with my fucking idea, and here I am doing it. I’m like, “I’m going to break up. I’m going to lose it.” What you’re watching there is a guy trying real hard not to break down into tears.

Willie Watson plays Knuckleheads on Tuesday, November 19. Details on that show here.