Born in Woodland, California, and having spent portions of his childhood in the Pacific Northwest and the mid-Atlantic, singer/songwriter and guitarist Will Stratton debuted with his first full-length album, What the Night Said, in 2007, at only 18. No Wonder followed in 2009 and New Vanguard Blues arrived one year later. The magnificent Post-Empire, Will Stratton’s fourth full-length record, was recorded in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and came out in 2012, released by French label Talitres Records, focussing, again, on Stratton’s insistent fingerstyle guitar playing, descended as much from British folk icons like Bert Jansch and Davy Graham as from American avant-gardists like John Fahey and Robbie Basho, but with a newfound urgency to his lyrics and his singing and an increasing dissonance in his harmonic sensibility. This was the turning point of his musical careeer, and, after another great and introspective record, Gray Lodge Wisdom,  out in 2014, again on Talitres, Stratton debuted for Bella Union label in 2017 with Rosewood Almanac. Stratton’s seventh album, The Changing Wilderness, out in 2021, saw him shift focus from inward-looking to outward-examining, an approach he stuck with for the first-person character sketches that populated 2025’s Points of Origin, released on Ruination Records (U.S.) and Bella Union (in the rest of the world) in March 2025.

What Will says: “I started singing the lyrics to what became Bardo or Heaven? as I rode my bike on a summer afternoon several years ago, as a huge amount of wildfire smoke blew over from the west coast, hovering high above us in the Northeast as it dissipated over the Atlantic Ocean, giving the light and the air here in the Hudson Valley an otherworldly quality. It’s a song that begins by describing the feeling of dissociation in the face of the unreal. This is something I rarely experience, rarely enough that I thought it was worth writing a song about. And then I think the tone of the song transforms into something like acceptance. Ultimately, I decided that this song was enough of a narrative to fit alongside the other songs of this record, most of which can be uncontroversially considered as short stories. I have to say that it feels very strange, obscene, even, describing this song and the other songs on this record in the wake of the recent fires in Southern California. Most of this album was written as an attempt to read into the past as a way of engaging with the future, but as often happens with art informed by climate change, sometimes real life outpaces the boundaries we attempt to set for ourselves.“

“Temple Bar is the story of some regulars at a bar in a little town on the periphery of the East Bay, a town which has historically acted as a sort of crossroads between the Bay Area and the Central Valley, sometime in the late 60’s or early 70’s. These characters all appear as narrators on other songs on the album, including on the previous single, ‘I Found You.’ There’s Charlie, the pool shark-turned-trucker with a rough childhood; Roger, the student radical who flees to the wilderness; Lena, the painter who becomes a real estate agent; and Leonard, the one who stuck around. I tried to make the supporting instruments in this song (fiddle, pedal steel, saxophone, electric guitar) rub shoulders with one another in a way that is complementary to these adjoining stories.” 

“I Found You opens the album alongside Jesusita, which together comprise the story of two brothers, estranged through no fault of their own, trying to survive in a world that gets less hospitable to them the longer that they’re alive. In I Found You the narrator is a runaway and a petty criminal until adulthood, when he gets a job transporting automotive parts all over the Pacific coastline. He ekes out a solitary existence in the forests around Mount Shasta, but he foresees no end to his work as a trucker except dying in his sleep in a wildfire.“

His Mixtape:

Maggie and Terre Roche – Malachy’s (1975)

The Roches in all their incarnations are, along with Big Star, filed in my mind as an act that was too good for the middling American culture of the 70’s. Many people view their collaboration with Robert Fripp as their high water mark, perhaps rightly, but the album Seductive Reasoning is great in its own right. These songs are filled with such rich and humanizing details, even while they sing about being the subjects of male scorn and condescension, as on this song.

 

Cameron Winter – Love Takes Miles (2024)

This album has rearranged my brain a little bit. Cameron Winter’s lyrics and forms are so intuitive, like they’re from deep in his subconscious. This music feels timeless to me, like they’re greats, although if I keep playing it so much it may get so seared into my memory of this time that I never associated it with any other time. This song feels deeply true to my own experience of love (that it takes time and effort in order to be most meaningful).

Jerry Jeff Walker – Then Came The Children (the version off of Too Old To Change, 1978)

This whole album and especially this song feel like they are both about the act of aging and coming to terms with the passage of time, which is something I find very comforting. I have no idea what he’s singing about here, really, but the imagery is beautiful and weird, and the delivery is tender and raggedly perfect.

Aldous Harding – Leathery Whip (2022)

This album is an all-timer for me, and this is a perfect album closer. The way she embodies different personas as she changes the timbre of her singing voice on this album is remarkable. The final turn of the chorus, where the classical guitar enters and the chords shift, gives me goosebumps. The production is sort of vividly surrealist, and reminds me of Let England Shake, a PJ Harvey record that John Parish also had a hand in. This album was a major inspiration for me when mixing Points of Origin.

Ry Cooder – How Can You Keep Moving (Unless You Migrate Too) (1972)

There were a few albums of Ry Cooder’s in the 70’s where he was interpreting songs that were written and became hits in the Great Depression, and this is one of those. He takes these songs and makes the pocket in them so deep, but he manages to still place the lyrics at the front of the listening experience, which I really appreciate. This one is particularly timely—a lot of the others, like One Meatball and How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live are very straightforwardly economic, almost to the point of being suprapolitical, but this one is very pointed in its description of the paradoxical existence of being a migrant without a home.

Alex Dupree – Wish You Had Got To Me First (2022)

I think this is one of the greatest country songs ever written, and hopefully one day it’ll get the reputation it deserves and make Alex a wealthy man in the form of lots of lucrative writing gigs. It’s about a love so painful and inconvenient that it’s crushing. I can’t think of a better topic for a country song.

Gilberto Gil – Expresso 2222 (1972)

I think if Gilberto Gil wrote his music in English, the English-speaking world would rightly consider him as one of the greatest songwriters and overall musicians to ever live. This song and most of his work from about 1967 through about 1973 is one of the all-time unstoppable runs of popular music, in my opinion. Most of the lyrics are lost on me—I look them up and read them in translation, but of course that isn’t the same as hearing them and comprehending them in real time. This song is about a train as a metaphor for the transformative experience of using psychedelics in London as a political exile, as far as I can tell.

Sluice – Fourth of July (2023)

Sluice is one of the best bands going right now, and I love this record so much. This is my favorite track off of it. There is a dry immediacy to these recordings that reinforces the immediacy of the songs themselves. I have rarely encountered lyrics like these, which transport the listener into such a vivid experience of the outside world via sense-memory. 

Here is the complete playlist.

Points of Origin is out now via Ruination Records (U.S.) and Bella Union (in the rest of the world). Look HERE for more information Will Stratton.