1.
There’s a plaza at the intersection of 75th Street and First Avenue in the Upper East Side mostly occupied by pigeons, passerbys and the wandering, transient citizens of New York. It’s an odd place to conduct an interview. Perhaps that’s why Willis Earl Beal wanted to meet there last week to talk about his forthcoming album Nobody knows..
If there’s anyone who understands the ephemeral, fortuitous and murky nature of life, it’s Beal. He is the unlikely offshoot of an avant garde folk movement that has erupted in pockets—Cass McCombs’ wanderlust songwriting, Bonnie "Prince" Billy’s Kentucky blues-punk—over the past few years. But Beal still stands out as an outlier, even among artists who make similar music, even among those who grapple with the dissonance of subsisting from art.
When we met, at 2 p.m., Willis is reclining on a dirty park bench. His face veiled in a dark mask. He’s totally unfazed by my arrival, sips casually from a brown paper bag and puffs a haze of thick, flavorful cigar smoke. There’s an antisocial air about his activity. Still, Beal is warm and animated as he talks, an adept conversationalist and a convincing campaigner for a different kind of lifestyle.
"If you’re part of any industry—beyond the money stuff because that’s a whole other issue—you will make money based on people’s ability to understand what you are,” Beal said toward the beginning of our hour long conversation. “If you can be put in a box, then it’s easy for the public to reach you and then it’s easy for them to decide if they want to give you money. As an evolving person, like we all are, I don’t know how to sell myself and I also don’t know if I want to continue doing that."
He emerged through an unlikely Found magazine cover story in December 2009, a four page interview with writer Davy Rothbart led the magazine to also release a limited collection of his poems, art and the initial CD of his first album Acousmatic Sorcery. A lengthy Chicago Reader profile in 2011 added to the conversation and Beal’s story became something of an enigma.
The singer was subsequently signed by XL Recordings who re-released his initial album Acousmatic Sorcery in 2012. Approximately a year later, after gaining media attention and touring internationally, Beal will now release not one, but two albums. Nobody knows. will come out in just a few weeks on September 10, but he has plans to drop a second album this winter.
"If you can believe it, I’ve already recorded another record in addition to Nobody knows.," he said. "We’ll do it around Christmas time and charge people a few extra bucks. I really wanted to give it away for free, but I can’t just give shit away for free. I consider it to be the experimental version of Nobody knows., I want to call it Who Knows. Nobody knows. is my straight record as far as I’m concerned."
Creativity’s a beautiful thing. Having to tell people to pay attention to it is not a beautiful thing.
"All these songs kind of materialized at the same time, but the way I organized the playlist, it should’ve come first. But everything happens as it should. When people hear that record, the first three songs they won’t even believe it’s me. It’s more dense lyrically, the songs are longer, and I’m singing in more of a baritone rather than that high soul register. I’m doing kind of a Scott Walker imitation. Creativity’s a beautiful thing. Having to tell people to pay attention to it is not a beautiful thing."
2.
Something that people did pay attention to with fanaticism was Earl’s stint of homelessness in New Mexico when he began to record music in earnest. In 2007 he left Chicago for the arid desert city and lived as a nomad, even papering Albuquerque with flyers that included a hand drawn self-portrait and his personal phone number.
"My homelessness is over-publicized. I went to New Mexico because I had some romantic ideas in my mind, and I’d never intended on continuing to be homeless," Beal said. "I’m just another delusional pseudo-hipster. That’s all I am. So as far as my homelessness is concerned, I think that people want somebody who’s authentic and authenticity like anything else is subjective.
My homelessness is over-publicized. I’d never intended on continuing to be homeless. I’m just another delusional pseudo-hipster. I was in a self-imposed squalor and I thought that I was fucking Bukowski or Jack Kerouac.
"I was in a self-imposed squalor and I thought that I was fucking Bukowski or Jack Kerouac, but all I really was was another nut doing nothing with life. Not doing nothing, but just living some type of bygone dream, and I imagined it so vividly that it makes me think that I willed it to occur."
What was the wildest thing he dreamed or willed into being? A friendship with dream-rock goddess Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power. One of Beal’s most famous drawings, includes her standing next to him on the cover of his first album Acousmatic Sorcery, and with their collaboration on "Coming Through" off of Nobody, his vision has become reality.
"When I was in Albuquerque I imagined all of this very vividly," he said. "That doesn’t mean I knew it was actually gonna happen. But I said I’m never gonna go to a concert or write her a letter. I’m never gonna try and contact her. So she called me one night, I was watching a movie with my girlfriend.
"She said that she went to Tokyo and somebody told her about me inexplicably. And she looked me up, she dug me, and she just called me up. She wanted to talk to me and she got my number through my management. So, now Chan is my friend. Knowing her is a real testament to the power of some kind of faith, some kind of belief."
This underlying faith in the directional order of the universe informs Beal’s output. He’s always been the kind of artist that leans more heavily on creative impulse than technical prowess, even denying his musical skill for the larger suggestion of sound creation and layering. He often performs with pre-recorded sound tracks instead of live instrumentation. Previously he performed with an old school 2-inch audio reel, and although his latest tour features support from a full live band, his take on folk has always been in a different from the traditional acoustic setting.
"I do actively create music. I put sounds together," Beal explained. "That’s the process that I used for Nobody knows., but I’ve also talked about how I don’t know how to play anything. It’s very difficult to talk to seasoned veterans of the industry and the art and say, 'Oh, I’m a multi-instrumentalist.' I’m just not a musician in the conventional sense of the word.
"I'm like a hip-hop producer, if he became a folk artist, and I like to point that out because I’ve talked about how I record before—you know, layering sounds. That’s how I look at it. But for some reason when a rapper stands on stage and there’s music that’s coming from somewhere, nobody says, 'Oh, well he’s not playing a guitar.' They just say, 'Yeah, he’s a great artist or musician.' But because I’m a folk artist and I don’t want to hold a guitar—I don’t know if people are saying this and maybe I’m just self-conscious about it."
I'm like a hip-hop producer, if he became a folk artist, and I like to point that out because I’ve talked about how I record before—you know, layering sounds.
The hip-hop analogy really isn’t too far off for Beal, whose live performances are routinely electrified by powerful vocal acrobatics and unconventional behavior—at his New York City performance this past Monday, he belted a song from atop a stool and swigged his own whiskey from a paper bag. Seeing possibilities within the levels of music industry personality, Beal even imagines his own rap counterpart.
"I was talking about crafting an alter ego—2 IGNIT," he laughs, carefully spelling out the MC title. "He would be a sensitive gangsta rapper. It would be really, really huge beats and he would have all the swagger of a modern-day trap artist, like a Riff Raff, but he’d be talking about really, really mundane, mediocre things but doing it with a bravado. And I’d be sing-rapping, kind of like Nelly."
3.
Currently though, Willis has been busy assuming the identity of another character—albeit one that’s based loosely on his own life—in the Tim Sutton directed film Memphis that debuts at the Venice Film Festival at the end of August.
"Sutton had a vision in mind but it was essentially was for me to be an exaggerated form of myself,” he said. “He had written a character prior to knowing me, that’s what I realized it was. So I was going into all of these African-American communities, and I grew up in a community like that: an impoverished African-American community."
"I felt isolated, alienated, I didn’t really feel like I belong. Not because I’m better, just because I didn’t feel like I belonged. Now I’m in this community again, but with a big fucking camera on me, having to communicate with real people who aren’t actors, they’re just being themselves. But I’m being a version of myself... and it got fucking hard after a while."
Beal faces the same problem with performing his music live. Countless artists have sounded off on the exhaustive grunt work that is touring, but to recreate emotional experiences every night is what really wears him thin.
"I have to do live shows because I can’t afford anything right now,” he admitted. “Having to recreate authentic emotion on stage becomes an inauthentic activity very quickly. All my money’s gone and now I have to go out and make some more. But I’m a big star? You know, it’s bullshit. But there’s a lot more to this professional musician stuff than gets publicized. It looks very glamorous, but it pales in comparison to going to someplace where you feel good and doing something that you feel good about."
Doing something good and doing something that earns enough money to survive are two very different things. In fact, it almost becomes more problematic when the job is something so personal, or at least started off that way. For Beal, having a voice without giving in to the specter of fame is the crux of the issue.
"I realize for pragmatic purposes, if I wanna have a voice and be heard—which we all do—I’m going to have to be a part of something for a temporary period of time. I’m going to have to make what they call ‘currency’ and become kind of a capitalist in order to merge with the system and maybe be a small catalyst in breaking it down—showing people that somebody who looks like them can be a part of it."
"But don’t decide that you want to become famous and don’t decide that you want to make a lot of money. Your goal should be expression, expression meaning traditionally artistic themes or whatever it is you decide to commit yourself to."
Having to recreate authentic emotion on stage becomes an inauthentic activity very quickly. All my money’s gone and now I have to go out and make some more. But I’m a big star? You know, it’s bullshit.
For Beal, what he’s committed to is creating music that’s a heady variety of sounds that feel both alien and chillingly familiar. His is a strain of art that reflects a vividly personal experience, something that feels increasingly rare in our commerce-driven industry. He’s a man full of mystique, recalling the likes of Van Morrison, Otis Redding and even Leadbelly in his powerfully focused, intimate art. While everyone else is focused on making—making money, making art, making a product or content—Beal is concerned with being.
"Every artistic act is just a recreation of something that was already in existence." Beal said. "It’s creative for me to just sit here and look at reality as it is. I don’t have to touch it, draw it, write about it. It is infinitely creative for me to just sit here and look. Nothing belongs to anybody."
Nobody knows. is out September 10 via XL/Hot Charity. Willis strongly suggest you buy it in the physical form which includes a manifesto he penned to accompany the record.
