At first glance one notices the embroidered Virgin Mary on his baseball cap, entwined by red roses. His eyes seem to bashfully evade eye-contact, looking down through the big horn-rimmed glasses, while he holds on to the guitar on his knees, strumming it aimlessly. Somehow the impression of the shy nerd he exudes, matches the words he uses to introduce himself during a conversation with BMG Nashville during March of 2019:
"My name ist Stephen Wilson Jr. I'm from Seymore, Indiana - southern Indiana or Kentuckiana, as they call that. I moved here to be close to music, became a scientist and started writing songs - and now that's what I do. I'm a song-scientist."
On March 24, 2023 Stephen Wilson Jr released his first EP via Big Loud Records, right after he was signed as an artist to the label. The project is titled "Bon Aqua" and comprises 7 songs, 6 of which have been previously released. Only the duet 'American Gothic' with Hailey Whitters is a new cut.
It gives Stephen Wilson Jr the opportunity to introduce himself as an artist, since he has already started to make himself a name as a songwriter with big names such als Old Dominion, Brothers Osborne, Tim McGraw and Caitlyn Smith ('I Can't') who have all recorded songs written by or together with him.
Refering to the American indie-rock band Death Cab, he refers to his own music as Death Cab für Country. Or as musicrow.com translates it: "[He builds on] indie rock, grunge and country to create a unique sound influenced by artists as diverse as The National, Willie Nelson, and Nirvana."
A foundation that reaches back into the 1990s as examplified by 'Year to Be Young 1994', one of the songs on the new project which he first released in 2020 and which lives on youthful memories by pointing out: I must admit I felt the flame, Kurt Cobain, a Fender Mustang, MTV brought me up ...
Tell yourself you're gonna live forever
Fire's burning and I'm still holding the torch from 1994.
But the projects actually starts with a much more sinister song called 'the devil' which worries about a world, where trust seems to have gone lost and nobody cares about anybody anymore:
On 'American Gothic', which Stephen Wilson Jr wrote together with Benjamin West and Hailey Whitters, he says: "We met some years ago writing songs and she had this beautiful idea inspired by her favorite Grant Wood painting to showcase parts of the American cultural fabric using nostalgia and the same duality that the painting seems to represent."
The classic country theme of wishing to return back home to ones roots can be found in the barking 'Hometown'. But not without well-versed word plays around contrasts and the quest for meaning.
Much more somber does 'Holler from the Holler' sound. Written with Craig Wiseman, the first line sounds like a revelation by Stephen Wilson Jr himself, when it says: I was kinda quiet as a kid growing up, first twenty years man, I didn’t say much, taking all the shit that the poor folks are given.
But then it quickly turns into a description of disordered environment. A hotbed for what the accompanying video to the song implements in such a haunting way, that it starts with a content warning: "The following video contains material that may be disturbing to some audiences, including violence that might trigger trauma for those who have experienced domestic violence. [For help call the National Domestic Violence Hotline.]"
It won 6 independent film festival awards for the way it brings the serious topic of domestic violence center stage.
Much easier to swallow is the song 'billy. It returns to the well-known country topic about folks from the country, but avoids using the catch-phrase 'you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy'. Instead it points out, that you can call him Billy, but the hills still come along with it. Once a hillbilly, always a hillbilly.
The project conludes with the optimistic 'The Beginning', which notes, that the world is still spinning, even though the end has been predicted right from the beginning, many times over. "This video was shot in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic which gave us many limitations with production", Stephen Wilson Jr says. "But that being said, we tried to speak to the lyric of the song with images that bounced around the world showing the cultural differences that exist in us all. My personal upbringing involved a lot of Christian-based apocalyptic fear and I always wondered how humans were supposed to progressively co-exist rooted in that to-what-end philosophy."
Stephen Wilson Jr was raised by a single father who introduced him to the sports of boxing. At the same time his father almost naturally became the most important reference person in his life. Which lead to a very traumatic moment in his life, when his father passed away in 2018. So deep, that the song 'Hang In There' came from it. It is not included on the current EP, but it helps to understand the human in the artist Stephen Wilson Jr a little more.
"It’s been 2 years since he’s been gone. I wrote this song for him and recorded it live in my backyard for the anniversary of the worst day of my life. But it also marked the beginning of new things. Things within me that I didn’t know existed. The only way I can explain it was my brain was re-wired in an instant."
"Doing 95 mph going north on I-65 in the middle of Kentucky trying like hell to get there before he passed, I said goodbye to my best friend and father on an iPhone 8. The same one I’m typing this on. I’ll never get rid of it, an upgrade is impossible. He was our everything. The driving felt like falling. He was so damn tough and calm and his last words to me were, “Everything’s gonna be okay, buddy. Write a good song for me. I love you, I love you, I love you...”. Seconds later, even though I was still a 100 miles away, I knew the exact moment he was gone and that’s when it was."
On May 20, 2023 song-scientist Stephen Wilson Jr will bring his Grunge-Country to the world-famous Royal Albert Hall in London, England for the very first time.And by the way, the name of his first EP comes from the little town of Bon Aqua in Tennesse, where not only the majority of the project was written and the respective videos shot, but -to bring it all full circle- the town from the mid 19th century got its name from a mineral well with good water nearby.
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