If you goWho: Stephen Wilson Jr.When: 8 p.m. Feb. 22Where: Thunderbird Music Hall, LawrencevilleTickets: Sold out

Stephen Wilson Jr., a hard-to-label country artist, can’t help but look at songs from a scientific view, having spent several years working in a food-science lab for Mars, Inc.

“I’m kidding, I’m a recovering microbiologist,” Wilson said on an earlier zoom call this month. “The clinical approach is a big part of it. Science is just a tool. I use this tool to live, but that’s the way it is. Just a truth detection tool and the contrary truth detection tool, if you use it correctly, so you can really eliminate the truths and the non-hits with it.

These truths are evident on their first album, “Søn of Dad,” which just gained a new deluxe edition on January 10 and includes two new songs and 10 acoustic performances. Filled with songs that explore his father’s death, navigating sadness, visions of his own, and more, the album garnered sublime reviews.

This is 16 months from the album’s original date of September 15, 2023, giving Wilson a chance to learn more about the songs and notice if they ring true.

“Because everything was hypothetical, so trying it in the world, you start having quite conclusive effects when you start experimenting,” he said. “It was wild to see the songs also evolve because what I like on records is that they are albums.

“They’re like a recording of a chunk of time — I think of them as a record-keeping exercise — and we have a record of where it was then, and now we’re kind of recording it as we go because that’s the thing with songs, they kind of evolve, they grow just like us.”

And just when the songs have grown, the crowd too. The majority of Wilson’s winter / spring / spring, adding a date of February 22 at the Thunderbird Music Hall in Lawrenceville. With the maximum public, more opportunities, as Wilson said, the box verifies whether their songs are written outside the doors or inwards for bias.

“User’s bias is a detriment of all the wonderful reports and the detriment of all the right results, in reality. He ruins the total experience. It is like a card house, so you should actually eliminate user bias or everything you hits. Therefore, there is this component, “he said. ” It all starts for me, with respect to the songs, it is like a hypothesis. I like it. It is a theory in the best case, then they fainted and review it around the world and back in those reports and those laboratories, I think the laboratories are places.

“Some of my labs at first were put with maybe 3 people, like a waiter, a forged user, and maybe another user, but you would gain knowledge. It wouldn’t be much, but it would be somewhat bigger than the day before. With science, the more vital your player numbers, the greater your knowledge, the more strength, the more conclusive your results. The number is much higher.

“I spent years making that record because I had so few participants to glean information from. Now I have quite a few more. When you play a new song in front of a thousand people, you get a thousand data points instantly. You can kind of start to plot those out on a map in your head and with your heart and kind of start to figure out what you got, whether it has any truth to it or maybe start that one over or just throw it in the trash.”

In a verbal exchange on zoom from his home outside the Nashville gates, Wilson discussed the pain of remedy through music, how to assume a canopy of nirvana, and expectations (or absence) for 2025::

When you were writing the album, was it therapeutic to process the grief through these songs?

They were gifts to help me kind of understand a lot of it. And all I really did was just kind of give them away. I didn’t write the songs for me. They just kind of showed up. I’ve been writing songs for a living and very seriously for quite some time. But when they showed up, I didn’t really know what to do with them. ‘Cause I was a staff writer for years. I was pitching songs to other people. I really wasn’t the guy I thought that would ever be singing them. And now I am.

So, when the songs appeared at that time, there was a little more than one stranger, like what is it? But now, when the songs look like, I have a destiny for them quickly. And before the album was released, we had no fans. Destiny is, therefore, this type of ethereal. You don’t know if it will land anywhere. But at the same time, you don’t care, or at least I didn’t care. It was not the purpose of writing songs so they could land somewhere. It was more just writing the songs that seem and letting all the great paintings do after that, and I wrote it, I wrote the songs. In any case, I don’t like it, I don’t care, biographical music, as too biographical, at least, where everything is you and your story, where you write in an inner way. I like to use my reports in my life to authenticate an emotion, but after that, look to write out from that moment, so it is not so much for me. I am very upset with me very fast.

You definitely noticed some evolution in the “søn of dad” songs from where they started to where they are now?

Demons, yes, the best time. And you begin to be informed a lot about how people. Because songs are provided for me for a specific reason, but they are provided to someone else for anything else absolutely another. Once again, because there are many other interactions and many other people, so many other scenarios. But at the same time, in the most strange way, I think we all live very, very similar lives, almost parallel. What makes everything work, because it is not individualistic. It is not really about me. It’s more about them.

It turns out that those “Søn of Dad” songs are universal and relate to many other people like the new one, “I Am a Song. “

It seems like it. It’s a song about songs, and I think everybody in a lot of ways — I come from it internally because I’m a songwriter, like a professional songwriter. I’m not even a hobby songwriter anymore — but I think a lot of people hear songs and they don’t really know why they’re listening to them and they don’t really understand the dynamics of the song and why it’s working. And I think, if anything, that song gives a little bit of an instruction manual or maybe like the blueprints.

You kind of start to see the skeleton of a song and you start to kind of understand it a little bit more. Just like if you were examining something you didn’t understand, you’d want to try to break it down into its components to see how it worked, anything from an engine to biology or whatever. I think it kind of shows some of those mechanisms behind the songs. It kind of shows the carburetor and the alternator. You’re not just getting in a car and driving like you’ve always done. You kind of start to understand the car a little bit.

What songs do you look back on as sort of bookmarks in your life?

There are quite a few. I mean, there’s a song called “Don’t Take the Girl” (by Tim McGraw) that was a wonderful e-book brand for me. I heard it on a school bus as a kid. I had never heard of it. When I hear that song, every time he takes me to that school bus. If life is like an e-book of 10 million pages and more, and it can be many more pages than that, I feel like the songs, it would be hard for your brain to go through all the pages and locate the paragraph and, hell, the page would be hard to locate, not to mention the paragraph and the actual sentence. And a non-delay type of song takes you without delay like an electronic marker, like you’re literally there and you see the highlighter in the paragraph and you’re reading it, and that’s how I think about them.

And then there’s a lot of rock’n’roll songs that take me to so many other places, outfits like Death Cab for Cutie and Postal Service bring me back in a lot of my young formative years, and then there’s grunge music and Soundgarden, which took me into some of my years the ultimate concerned and also very formative and looking to interpret what I’m going through in life. And it reminds me a lot, my circle of relatives and my hometown.

John Mellencamp, Dang, every time I hear him, he takes me on so many placements in my hometown because he literally painted my hometown with songs. I carry a coincidence that he is a truly complete painter, a genuine painter. So I have the impression that he painted actually, he just had other help with the songs. And I was lucky enough to live in his paintings because he was nailing it and I lived there. So I listen to “Cherry Bomb” or so many songs, like “Check It Out,” I can feel my baseball card packs when I listen to those songs and I can flavor the bubble that came here with it, (laughs) Bubblegum Super Rassis Who Who Who Who Who I got here with the baseball cards. This is a complete sensory experience, precisely what song you are forty-five years old (can do). It’s pretty wild.

You’ve covered Nirvana’s “something in the way. ” What sparked this and how are you making a vintage song of your own?

I don’t really try to make it my own. That’s really not a deliberate attempt. I’m probably very ADD, and I’m very bad at learning music. I’ve always been bad at copying people perfectly. I was always really good at learning music by ear and learning what they were doing, but I would never get to the point where I’d want to just do it note for note just like them. I would always quickly deviate and kind of go do my own thing and so that’s probably a flaw, a lot of people call that a flaw within musicians, and it’s kind of helped me out in that regard because I don’t really want to play it just like it was played. I quickly drift off and deviate into something else.

This song, I used to pay attention to this song over and over again as a kid, hiding in my headphones literally paying attention to this song. I don’t know why. It’s about a homeless kid in Seattle, not anything that I don’t relate to as a farm kid in Southern Indiana, yet I can relate to the excitement and feeling that Kurt (Cobain) was receiving, and that’s how I felt. I feel like that’s what I was looking to convey, kind of capture that aura and we didn’t think about anything else after that.

Even the design of the agreements, I have a tendency to play with him. With “something along the way,” I didn’t. I simply used the same chords he used, but I touched them with very different views. But with some songs like “Stand Through Me”, I would use substitutions to agree there. I do not replace the melody, but for any reason, it was more logical I was originally there. See if there are other verses under those stones.

I know 2024 was a pretty standout year in your career, so what are you hoping for in 2025?

Just to achieve that, I suppose. (Laughs) I have no expectation. I don’t do it. I had no expectations for ’24. It would be Mendacity if I said it did. This greatly exceeded everything that could have expected, so it turns out that Almaximum is a bit useless for me to make predictions or even expand expectations. Much of that work, whether he is a composer, a musician, a player, whoever they are. In this music business, expectations management is probably one of the maximum vital skills sets that you can learn, even before musicality, because it is a great expectations management.

You’re going to experience more rejection in one week than most people experience in a year. You get kind of calloused about it all. So as probably a protective mechanism, I don’t really set them for myself. And so really, I have a sold-out tour in the spring, and I’ve got a lot of other tours that we’re about to announce. And I really just hope, if anything, that I can just show up for each show and each performance or each interview or whatever it is and just be there. That’s all I want. And I don’t really want to be thinking about anything else, if I have my way. Now there’s a good chance I might be thinking about something else, but I’m going to do my damnedest not to.

Just be there, man. I think that’s half the battle.

Si Gowho: Stephen Wilson Jr. When: Feb. 8: 22 p. m. February Everywhere: Thunderbird Music Hall, Lawrencevillettickets: Sold Out

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