The Beat Surrender

Willy Mason first jumped onto my radar after a tip from a fellow Beat Surrender colleague (cheers Small Beer) around 2 and a half years ago. At the time his main competition seemed to be David Gray and Jack Johnson when it came to the singer songwriter field, not exactly what you’d call stiff for someone as enigmatic and talented as Mason.

The guy was impressive both on record and in a live setting, his Oxygen single hit the top thirty after a good deal of support from Radio 1 and his tour sold out. Luckily three of us managed to blag our way in to see him at the Cockpit in Leeds and he didn’t disappoint, this despite drunken heckling with a friend of mine (a competition Mason won hands down).

Wind on a few years though and the choppy waters (see what I did with that?) of the singer-songwriter ocean have become a much tougher place to ply your trade these days. While Johnson and Gray may lurk in the background more serious competition has emerged from the likes of M.Craft, Jack Savoretti, Paolo Nutini and Josh Pyke, artists who have all released very good albums in the last 12 months.

This though isn’t something that I imagine would worry the easy going Willy Mason, he has a great deal of belief in his own talent (who else do you know that would play shows in peoples houses), has started his own record label (Grandma’s Basement) so has a better understanding of all sides of the industry and more importantly still has the most distinctive voice around at the moment.

The voice is what again drives his second album on, If The Ocean Gets Rough would be half the album it is with a different vocalist. Sure the lyrics are good, especially on the father/son relationship song The World That I Wanted which see’s his emotions scattered out in the open for all to see and yes We Can Be Strong is a commercially viable track that might get a bit of rotation on MTV if he’s lucky, but the real stars of the show are the tracks where you are drawn to his voice like a magnet.

Songs like I Can’t Sleep, Simple Town and the title track, all of which remind you in no uncertain terms of a young Bob Dylan. That is of course an easy thing to throw at him and i’m sure it’s been said before, but there is no hiding the fact that Willy Mason has that remarkable edge to his voice that I haven’t heard from anybody else aside from Dylan.

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