Episode 55: Willy Tea Taylor
Willy Tea Taylor is a gifted songwriter: a storyteller, a truth teller. His recent record, The Great Western Hangover, features an all-star cast of musicians who bring rock and roll energy to Willy’s superbly crafted songs. Willy sat down with us at Tell You What! Studios for a wide ranging, highly entertaining, and insightful conversation.
We hear about Willy’s early years writing poetry and fronting high school rock bands, and then learning mandolin and banjo on a winding and adventurous path that eventually led Willy to his instrument of destiny: the four-string tenor guitar. Willy discusses how important connecting with people is to him, how music done right can be physically healing, and the unorthodox ways he comes up with his songs. Also covered: heroic doses of LSD, dashboard percussion, barstool wisdom, taxidermy.
There is no question that Willy Tea Taylor’s life as a singer/songwriter was predetermined – his role realized the moment he wrote his first song. His inspirations drawn from two separate wells: living the life of a cattleman’s kid and experiencing true visionaries music like Greg Brown, John Hartford, and Guy Clark. The image of Guy Clark and friends sitting around the kitchen table loaded with ashtrays full of butts, half-smoked cigarettes, food, and booze on one Christmas Eve in 1975 burned into Taylors’s soul. Those guys, swapping songs without pretense, lit Willy Tea’s fire. And ever since, its led purpose with passion – finding a hang by curating relationships through musical friendships that get him closer to his own Clark style kitchen table.
From his early days co-fronting The Good Luck Thrift Store Outfit, to singing solo in countless cowboy bars, to pitching countless wiffle ball games, Willy Tea has never lost the vision. Now Willy Tea Taylor has taken his vision of the “hero hang” on the road, and his talented traveling band The Fellership is made up of his fantastically talented buds who play Willy’s songs with a brand of reckless abandon and utter humility that spits in the face of pretense. The way The Fellership plays Willy’s songs is the way they demand to be played and, in their short time together, they have been awe-ing every audience lucky enough to see them.
