Stephen Wilson Jr. did not take your typical path to being a Country music star, first making stops as a scientist and an amateur boxer, but it did shape him and help pave the way to winning the CMA Award for New Artist of the Year.
LISTEN NOW: Stephen Wilson Jr. with Katie & Company
"I don't think I'm interesting, but it has provided, I guess, a wealth of dialogue and narrative to to pull from," Stephen admits during an interview with Katie Neal. "I've been habitually quiet most of my life, so I got to work a lot of jobs and kind of keep my mouth shut and listen and take notes, and from those learnings that's where the songs kind of came from."
"Science is a big part of my process, Having a hypothesis or an idea and then testing it against the world," he adds. "It is pretty much what science is, but doing it in a controlled setting and doing that experiment over and over again and trying to keep your emotions out of the results. That's, I think, what songwriters try to do at the end. You wanna have an emotion to start with because I'm more in the emotion business than I am in the music business, at least that's what I think of it as. So it's got to start with an emotion, but then you kind of got to separate your emotion from it to get to the truth, because then you'll have, they call user bias, and then that'll affect your results."
The analytical comes face to face with the creative for Stephen Wilson Jr. in the process, with a heaping dose of talent swirled in the center. "Being a trained scientist has helped me kind of remove my emotion from it, but then the creative side of me and just all the wealth of experiences and emotions that I went through has given me a lot to authenticate an idea from, because it has to kind of start with my own emotion, because if I've felt something, most likely somebody else has."
The fascinating science of songwriting is in full swing on Stephen's song, "Gary," which he admits was tested and thought about in a very scientific way. "I tested that one a lot, in a lot of laboratories," he shares. "I had to start with a metaphor that everybody could relate to... I started to basically, you know, think of Gary as a subspecies, a human, like a Gary as an organism, not so much just a name for a person because it was to me more of a stereotype or a garyeotype, so to speak. So if you could classify that organism, how would you do that? And that's how I approach Gary, is almost like how Jane Goodall would approach a chimpanzee or something, kind of like studying the Gary's in the wild because, you know, the Gary's are going extinct."
To hear much more of the Wilson Jr. method and his journey to Country music success, check out the full conversation above.