Willis Earl Beal
Evenings Kiss
Ltd 7"
Willis Earl Beal isn’t an easy person to find. He isn’t on Facebook and never had a MySpace page. All he had was a flyer tacked to the wall of a used bookstore on Chicago’s west side. It started “I want friends & stuff” and ended “I am not a Weasel”, signed WILLIS EARL BEAL and a phone number.
His debut single Evening’s Kiss recounts a trip to a local diner, where a waitress who Beal found attractive worked: Beal would dress up in a suit in an effort to impress her but on this night something felt amiss. “I felt like ‘Jesus Christ, I’m just a fraud. I’m here and I’m deluding myself into thinking that this person is actually interested in me,” he says. He took some paper out of his bag and scribbled down some heartbreaking lines about losing out on a desired dream, about “the evening’s kiss got me fading away.”
As the Summer came to an end, Willis plotted his journey back to Chicago. While he traveled across America he continued to receive phone calls as the flyers made their own journey. One caller introduced himself as “Mos Def” and together they plotted to write a script based on Willis’s life, with Mos playing the lead. Another asked for help with his homework. Someone using the name Steve The Tranny asked for career advice and the two planned to audition for
a new show called the X-Factor. Neither made the cut.
The 11 songs on his debut long player “Acousmatic Sorcery” are taken from a series of recordings Beal made while living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He arrived there without a plan or enough money to live off and began singing warm, visceral and moving tunes to help him cope while sleeping rough. He spent the days drawing and printing up flyers, distributing them all over his new city. Eventually Beal found work as a night porter at a motel. It was during the late-night shifts that the 27-year-old musician from the south side of Chicago taught himself to make music.
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