THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Originally from Georgia and now based in New York, Willow Avalon’s musical journey began with her first word: ‘Elvis.’ She grew up playing piano in church and taught herself guitar at age 12, using songwriting as a form of escapism. She plays, writes and produces her music alongside a small group of collaborators, crafting a sound that refreshingly blends classic country and Americana sounds.
Raised on soul legends like Roberta Flack and Sly Stone, Willow got her start playing in rock bands near her tiny hometown. “It’s got one stop sign, a biker bar that doesn’t allow women, a Baptist church, a liquor store that got run out by the Baptist church, and that’s about it,” says Willow, who also spent much of her childhood working on old cars.
By age 14 she’d landed a gig opening for Drive-By Truckers in nearby Athens, a revelatory moment in her journey as a musician. “I remember seeing how their music touched every single person in the room, and I realized I wanted to do that too,” she recalls. Naming Lucinda Williams and Bonnie Raitt among her longtime inspirations, Willow continued crafting songs but struggled to find time for music as she worked to make ends meet. “For a while writing songs was just something I did before I went to sleep for a few hours between nannying and waitressing double shifts,” she says. “I was so poor and my guitar only had four strings, but music was my little release.”
Eventualy, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter made her way to California and eventually settled in New York City, where she resides in a Hell’s Kitchen apartment transformed into her own outlandish wonderland. Several years after leaving home for Los Angeles, Willow inked a record deal that quickly fell apart, a turn of events that led to her independently releasing her debut single Drivin’ in 2021. As her audience expanded, Willow gained overnight fame via a massively viral 2022 video in which she gave a tour of her apartment, showing off her now-departed pet possum Bowie (whom Willow often dressed in sweaters and cowboy hats) along with such thrifted treasures as a set of medical encyclopedias from the ’40s, a Stainer violin with a rattlesnake tail stuck inside, and the antique typewriter on which she writes many of her lyrics. By the following spring she’d signed her deal with Atlantic and began preparing for the release of Stranger, a five-song project recorded with a group of close friends and collaborators at the famed Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village.
A self-described lone wolf when it comes to songwriting, Willow has long used her lyrics as both an emotional outlet and a conduit for self-understanding. “My upbringing was so turbulent and I went through a lot of trauma that I still haven’t fully processed — but I process it more and more every time I write a song,” she says. “I hope that by telling my story it’ll help people to see that you don’t always have to play the cards you were handed; you can do whatever it takes to change those cards. That’s what I did, and sometimes it was scary and I didn’t know if I’d make it out OK, but it got me to where I am today. Now I’m releasing a body of work that I put so much love into, and I couldn’t be more proud of it. All of this music is so wholeheartedly me — it’s me with my heart on my sleeve.”
