The Hobbyist #15: An Interview with Songwriter Will Stratton
The songwriter chats about day jobs, touring, and riding bikes
Photo by Anna Victoria; graphic design by Thomas Euyang
California-raised, New York-based Will Stratton writes songs like they used to. Ya know, back when music meant something! I kid, but there is something delightfully retro about Stratton’s music, especially his brilliant 2025 LP, Points of Origin. I was introduced to Will’s music via Dan Knishkowy, who runs the excellent Ruiniation Record Co. Dan pitched me on doing something with Will over at FLOOD, which we ended up doing. I would implore you to read Will’s track by track breakdown of Points of Origin here. Anyway, Dan sent me this record and I quickly became obsessed.
Take the opening notes of “I Found You,” which features a piano so intimately recorded you can hear the hammer hitting the string with each note, to the pedal steel and woodwinds entering the frame like a gaggle of friends reuniting after too many years away from one another. Then, there’s Will’s opening line: “I lost track of family when I was 19.” It’s deeply familiar but alien, too. His writing reminds me a lot of Thomas Pynchon, a comparison I very much do not make lightly.
The characters in Points of Origins are drifters and spinsters and outlaws and misfits, charming and broken and ruined and saved. I want to get to know them, to live in their world, a space that Stratton makes available and inviting throughout the course of Points of Origins. While the album was reason enough to track down Will for this interview, I found him a particularly apt Hobbyist interviewee because music is not his full-time job. He has basically dissuaded himself from the idea of ever earning a living through music. He has a 9 to 5 and he makes music when he can. He tours with PTO and gigs on weekends. It’s a job, he just doesn’t get paid for it. We also talked about bicycles, because riding bikes is fun too.
There’s a lot of good stuff here re: the passion it takes to be an artist but not a professional one; the obligations necessary to exist between these fractured worlds; and how giving up on a dream allowed him, paradoxically, to live that dream in a more comfortable way. Check it out below and please tell a friend to subscribe. Also below, Points of Origin, an album you should buy right now.
What do you do for your day job, if you don't mind me asking?
Will Stratton: I'm a paralegal. I supervise a team of paralegals that puts together visa petitions for musicians, mostly, but also actors and other artists who come to the States to tour. It's a contentious time right now.
Do you work for a big law firm?
WS: It's a small law firm. I shouldn't name the company, but we’ve got 25 people working and it's divided into general immigration and performing arts immigration. I supervise a team in the performing arts division.
Did you get into it because of your relationship to music?
WS: Kind of, yeah. I've done this for about 15 years, with the exception of a year that I taught music at a boarding school up here. I answered a Craigslist ad just out of college. I'd been looking for work for six months. I graduated into the great recession of 2008, 2009. I spent six months living at my brother's place unemployed and then applied to this sketchy sounding job on Craigslist. That’s what I've done since then.
Did you ever have professional full-time musician aspirations?
WS: Yes, especially my early years working in New York. When I was first doing this job, I was playing a lot of gigs in the city. I'd play three or four a month, and I was trying to get a booking agent, trying to get signed to a big label, and so on. Part of it's just being jaded, having gotten older, but I do feel like I've witnessed the dissolution of a certain version of the music industry. When I graduated, streaming was still kind of in its infancy and the implications hadn't really fully dawned on me or a lot of my peers. I had had one record come out and I made a decent amount of money off that, especially for a debut album that came out on a small record label. I thought, ‘Well, if I keep doing that, if I keep making records, I can build some momentum and maybe eke out a living through touring and royalties.’ Ultimately, that fell apart through a mixture of health complications on my part and really needing the kind of health insurance I can get from full-time employment. Watching friends of mine go into debt while on tour made me realize that I’m much more attached to the music creation part and I'm less attached to the subsistence part.
Has separating your art from the commercial side of the industry allowed you to retain some of the joy and wonder?
There are a lot of very mentally resilient people out there making it work full time. They're just super talented and super dedicated. I do think that I've sidestepped a lot of the mental health pitfalls of trying to make it work as a full-time musician without having a cushion.
How did you go about recording Points of Origin while balancing a 9 to 5?
WS: Well, this record took four years to make, which was due to working full time and I got married last year. Every record I've made is a version of the same process. I enter the process with a set of songs and lofty illusions about doing it a particular way, usually a way that's based on an idealized version of record making from the past. I've made records where I did it the Elliott Smith way and record everything myself, having control over every aspect of the process. I've also made records where I did it the mid-60s Bob Dylan way with musicians in the room and lots of bleed in the microphones and capturing the actual moment of communication between the musicians.
Every time I make a record, it falls short of those initial goals in terms of the process. What I end up doing is a recording session or a set of recording sessions with some other musicians. Then I spend months, or years, in this case, editing and redoing and overdubbing things on top of those original sessions, which is a crazy way to work. I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody, but through trial and error, it seems to be the only way that I can actually finish a record with the limited resources that I have.
Once you bring it outside of that initial session, are you doing these overdubs edits at home?
WS: Yeah, most of the overdubs were done in my basement here in the house. About nine months ago, I started sharing a studio space here in town with a fellow musician, Martin Courtney of the band Real Estate. He's working on a lot of projects there as a side income to his touring income. I spent a lot of evenings and weekends in there overdubbing by myself and doing the final mixes of the record and all of that. But a few musicians who are on this record recorded themselves and then just sent me the tracks and then I mixed them in that way.
How long have you been in Beacon for?
WS: We moved here in 2015. The year before that I was teaching across the river in Cornwall for a year at a boarding school, which was a crazy experience. I could not do that for more than one year, but my girlfriend, now wife, found a really cool job at a foundry doing metal finishing for sculptures in the area. We just moved across the river and we've been here ever since.
I'm sure every person that lives in New York City tells you how jealous they are, but that sounds amazing.
WS: It's cool. It's the kind of town where people move to have kids. I feel like prices here have gotten so similar to the city that it's really hard to have an independent music scene here. You have to go to Kingston or New Paltz where rent is just a little bit cheaper for that. But yeah, it's a very nice place. I'm really grateful to be close to hiking trails and biking trails and natural beauty.
You’ve described Points of Origin as a West Coast album. What makes it that way in your mind?
WS: Most of the songs are set in California. It's preoccupied with West Coast wildfires and a certain combination of cultures that I think, well, still exist in California, but existed a lot more in the sixties through the nineties and has gradually been subsumed by the tech industry.
When you tour are you taking vacation days? Are you working remotely?
WS: I am taking vacation, yeah. Because I've worked at this place for so long, I have a fairly generous PTO package by American standards, so I'm able to take off some time. I would love nothing more than to just take off a whole month at a time or a year at a time and just book as many shows as I can, but I'm doing this delicate balancing act where I have to keep multiple parties happy.
I know you mentioned really enjoying the process of making albums. Do you enjoy touring in the same way?
Yeah, I really like playing shows. I go back and forth on it. I go through peaks and troughs of self-esteem as an artist, and sometimes I just like recording and the shows are kind of an afterthought, but right now I'm in a period where I've developed such distinctive versions of these songs that are meant to be played solo with guitar arrangements rather than the studio arrangements that are on the record. It’s been a treat to play those by myself and make the songs into ideas that don’t match the album. There's something really intense about the connection that you can create with an audience in a small environment. For whatever reason, folk clubs and small rooms just feel really good. I can do a run of small folk shows and the feedback really helps keep me going. It's very energizing.
Part of shows are an obligation to promote the music. Does that outweigh the joy of playing gigs? Or is joy the main impetus for performing live?
WS: It's mostly the joy. I do have an obligation to go to the UK and Europe to promote things for Bella Union because for a small label they've been pretty generous in terms of the push that they put behind the record. There is kind of a professional obligation there, but it's kind of like a somewhat stressful paid vacation for me. I'll be on PTO, so if I break even, I'm pretty happy. That's usually what ends up happening. I don't ever go super into the hole because I don't have the resources to hire a band, My overhead is quite low.
The motivation to tour in the States is all personal. I want to see more of the country. It's been a long time since I've done any touring in the States, and it's always been much more difficult for me than touring in the UK or in Europe just because small artists have it hard here. I do really enjoy it, and I would like to just get back out on the road and see a bunch of folks that I haven't seen in a long time.
I know you're from California originally, but what brought that world back into your purview with this record in particular?
WS: I guess it's a couple things. Back in 2020, 2021, and 2022, there were some really big fires in California and here in the Hudson Valley you could smell and see the wildfire smoke. That was a surreal experience and made me feel connected to California in a way that I hadn't felt in a long time. I also spent a lot of time during the pandemic and after the pandemic talking to my parents who were both in their seventies and grew up in California, which was a particular cultural heyday for the state. Most of my extended family still lives in California, and I don't see them that often. I was missing this idea of a place that sort of resembles but doesn't completely line up with the actual existent place. That idea compelled me. As I started to write about climate change and wildfires, I was drawn into this idea of fictionalizing my thoughts as a way to get deeper, to drill down into them.
When you’re not working or making music, what do you like to do?
WS: Aside from music stuff, I also like to mix other people's music. So other musical stuff is a big part of my life, but my main hobby that I picked up during the pandemic is riding bikes. I've gotten kind of deep into that world and I really enjoy it. It's been extremely helpful from a physical and mental health perspective. I’m not somebody who is super inclined to exercise regularly, unless there's some kind of transcendent aspect to it that's fairly easy to achieve. Finding biking, especially in this area where there are a lot of hills to climb and ride back down, has been really kind of miraculous. It really prevented me from further losing my mind during the pandemic and during the last few years.
What kind of biking do you do?
WS: When I was first getting into it, gravel bikes were the hot new thing. And then I got super into Rivendell, which is a particular bike brand. They’re a cult favorite brand and connected to this larger subculture of people who like retro style cycling with friction shifters and a lot of simpler, cheaper components and steel frames. There’s kind of an emphasis on being able to fix things yourself and not have to invest in hydraulic brakes and electronic shifting and all of these new forms of biking technology that have been put on the consumer in the last 10 or 15 years by the biking industry as a way to make more money essentially. It’s a very consumer-oriented hobby.
There's a lot of emphasis on brands, which I'm not crazy about, but there's also a real ethos of buying old bikes and retrofitting them to be able to handle larger tires and wider gear ranges and things like that that will allow them to be ridden, kind of like old school mountain bikes. It’s a niche version of cycling, a smaller subculture related to the larger culture.
And do you go out in the morning before work? When's your ideal cycling time?
WS: It depends on the time of year. Winter's obviously really hard with all the ice and the salt. If it's during the week, I'll go out on my lunch break and I'll bike through Beacon. I've got a set route that I'll have variations on that takes me about an hour. That's a good weekday exercise. A lot of hills and a lot of flat parts where you catch your breath. On the weekends I like to do trails and I also really like going into the Catskills. There are some roads and some gravel paths up there. The climbing is a lot more interesting.
Are you wearing a bib and jersey and all that?
WS: That's the other thing that I like about some of the so-called alternative cycling. It's a lot of people who like to wear normal clothes and wool. It’s stuff that makes you look super dorky when you're on a bike, but it's a different kind of dorky than the guys who are in all the spandex and stuff.