For nearly 15 years, Willie Watson has been a former member of Old Crow Medicine Show, the popular Americana band. But it wasn’t until this September that he truly became a solo artist, releasing what he considers his debut album after putting out the covers albums “Folk Singer Vol. 1” and “Vol. 2.”
He held off on making what became a self-titled LP was because “I just really put myself down,” he says. “I had plenty of confidence but I was just too hard on myself. At this point I knew I had to get another record out, and the last thing I wanted to do was release another ‘Folk Singer’ record, and that part of my career wasn’t really panning out.”
Watson says he had known that he was “good,” but “now I know that I’m fucking awesome. I sing so good. I want to try to get people to hear me how I can sing in other ways than they’ve heard me on records. I can sing better than on those folk records. I wanted people to known that I don’t sing like I’m from a barnyard, but that’s what those last couple of records sound like, and I can’t deny it.”
Two songs of note on the new album are “Slim and the Devil” and “Real Love.” Watson says “Slim” is the oldest song on the record, having kicked around for more then five years. It was inspired by the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
“It affected me,” he says of the “Unite the Right” event. “I knew that town well and the streets they were walking down I had busked on with Old Crow. [Old Crow bandmates] Ketch and Critter’s high school buddies were living there. It was kind of like our town. It sucked.”
He says the song was also informed by a poem he read in the book “The Black Poets” by Sterling A. Brown called “Slim Greer in Hell.”
“Real Love,” he says, “is a classic love song that I didn’t think I’d ever write. There’s plenty of classic, epic love songs and I just added a really good one to the world catalog. It’s going to be be played at weddings for years.” Written around the time he proposed to his now-wife, he says, “I was feeling the impact of our love and I was comparing it to all the other loves of my life. … I don’t know how we found it. I’m very grateful for it.”
Watson will bring his three-piece band to the Bowery Ballroom on Nov. 12 and Levon Helm Studios on Dec. 13.
“I had been solo for so, so long, and it was so, so hard and lonely. It was wearing me down and making me not want to do this anymore. It was draining my soul and draining my heart. So got a three-piece band and it’s fun again.”
That said, don’t expect Watson to rejoin Old Crow anytime soon. He said he was thrown out of the band for pushing back on musical directions he didn’t want to pursue. A recent tour in which he supported and sat in with the band was “OK,” he says.
“It was cool to be back with them and share the stage with them again for the first time in more than a decade,” says Watson. “It was healing. I hadn’t even spoken to Ketch in 10 years. It was amazing to sing with him again. Critter was there for one or two of the nights; to have us doing our three-person harmonies again was beautiful and the world probably needed it — I needed it.
“They get to do what they do with me out of the way. Ketch has been able to write mediocre pops songs and play to a mediocre audience every night, and that’s fine. I have no interest in being in that band ever again. If the five of us wanted to do something and try to play music that I like, but I also don’t want to stand in anyone’s shadow anymore. For many years I tried to tell myself that I wasn’t in his shadow, and no, they like me too, but I tried to get out from behind him and I had a lot to offer.”
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