Later, when he plays his acoustic country folk, they will all sing along to his first single, Oxygen — “I wanna speak louder than Ritalin, for all the children who think that they’ve got a disease. I wanna be cooler than TV, for all the kids that are wondering what they are going to be” — and the room will be so packed that people will be sitting out on the stairs. Right now, however, it’s me who is sitting on the stairs, with Mason huddled over a roll-up and an acoustic guitar, strumming as he talks.
Mason grew up on Martha’s Vineyard. His parents — Jemima James and Michael Mason — were folk musicians, who moved to the Massachusetts island looking for a place where their son “could learn something from the community”. “The thing about the island is that you’re not confined to your parents, your school or your house,” he says. “You can walk about the place, meet people, a lot of open people. There are no chain stores.”
Despite this upbringing, it wasn’t until his parents split up, with his father having a breakdown in the process, and he moved to a school where kids listened to Nirvana that he actually picked up a guitar. Eight years on, this precocious 20-year-old is ready to release his first album, but has already written another album’s worth of material.
“I was playing the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas, March 2003,” he says by way of explanation of his big break. “I’d had a demo played on island radio, been picked up by Bright Eyes’s Conor Oberst after dodging backstage to play him my songs, but I was just playing a late-afternoon showcase in an empty club. There were only four guys in the audience, but I thought, ‘I’ll just sing it anyway.’ When I got off stage, the four guys walked up to me and said they were DJs on BBC Radio 1 and they wanted me to come over and do a show. And that’s when things started happening.”
One of those four was Zane Lowe, Radio 1’s early-evening new-music enthusiast. He started playing the rough mix of Oxygen almost nightly and his audience pricked up their ears. Lowe’s discovery led to a UK tour, a deal with Virgin, sessions on Radios 1 and 2, plus assorted commercial stations and a number of sell-out dates. Meanwhile, although his album has been out back home on the indie label Team Love, he is not doing anything like as well Stateside. He is in no doubt as to why he, and countless other alt-American acts, reach Limey but not Yankee ears.
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“In America, the market is so limited, and that’s because we don’t have the benefits of the BBC,” he says with the passion of a convert. “The mainstream media is a lot less informed than yours is. It’s not taking what it could out of the community that it’s in. It’s not finding the good stuff. The good stuff is out there — it’s a huge country with so many people doing such amazing things. It’s only a matter of time before people start figuring it out for themselves. You can burn CDs and buy recording studios even if you’re on McDonald’s wages. The plates are shifting.”
Of course, from time to time he can sound naive and breathless as he grapples with his world-view. He has been reading some American history recently. “I’m trying to understand what we are as a nation,” he says. “We’re a place where people go to reinvent themselves and reinvent culture. It’s a place that promises cultural freedom, and that’s what people are looking for when they go there, but it’s a constant struggle to achieve that.”
He grapples for a metaphor and discovers a blend of David Byrne and apocalyptic prophecy: “It’s like, in coming to America, they’ve burned the house down and then they have to build it themselves,” he explains. “But there are forces that find it profitable for people not to know how to use a hammer, so that they have to buy the house instead. It’s a constant struggle to keep people from being confused — the vice is tightening down on people’s minds.”
Hunched on the stairs, it feels like I’m at a 1960s party with a stoner muso, defining the world in terms so simple, they will one day break his heart. But then, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of naivety now and then. Who would want to be cynical at 20?
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Where the Humans Eat is released on February 28; for live dates, see www.willymason.com