Artist Profile: Will Roesner
Will Roesner, the indie-folk artist, has chased a feeling of the “right” sound across the annals of his discography and, with his most recent project Fairy Music, has lit into another thread of creative energy, inscribing his innate sense for stripped-down pleasantness onto the comforting record.
Roesner’s musical journey began, paradoxically, in a largely non-music listening household. He received his first guitar as a gift when he was a child, and his taste was primarily formulated by the pop-leaning bands of his adolescence; Nirvana, Green Day, and other similar groups composed his musical environment.
After years of toying around with his instrument, and primarily covering Led Zeppelin songs, Roesner felt empowered to make his first attempts at writing his own songs; the only problem was, he could not find satisfaction in the things he was writing.
With a finely-tuned ear, Roesner slowly turned toward a folkier sound, influenced by his parents’ love for Neil Young, and, as he more closely explored and experimented with the themes and motifs of folk that genre, he found himself gravitating more and more toward a more specific sound: one that he found pleasure in writing and transcribing.
“I think most of what inspires me is my own relationships with people and the relationships of people that I'm witnessing on a daily basis. Certain things seep into my writing; I kind of get hyper-fixated on random stuff.. whether it's some movies by a certain director or things of that nature, and I lived in the South for a long time and I grew up in a rural area of Maryland, so I feel like folk is somehow a little bit inherent [to my sound].”
Through folky overtones, Roesner discovered a vehicle for expressing what he found to be most interesting about life and music: an intersection of his daily experiences and his yearning for creative output.
His first two projects, Spirit, Hello and Farms and Stuff, captured his budding energy for and prowess in crafting condensed, almost mythical tracks; they encapsulated the sound that, in short, sounded “right” to his ear at the time.
In fact, that pursuit is what has driven Roesner’s creative activity for years. The project that followed his first two releases, August, was a song-of-the-day challenge; he would write and record a song daily and require himself to have it uploaded to Bandcamp by the end of each day, obliging himself into a constant state of creativity.
This helped shape his ear in a more advanced fashion and, in a way, helped him to temporarily overcome what he describes as a perpetual state of writer’s block.
“I feel like I'm kind of in a constant state of writer's block while also constantly wanting to make stuff, so the only thing that can keep me going is if something about what I'm doing excites me. I can't just keep doing the same thing over and over again; there has to be something that feels exciting and special and specific to that project.”
For a while, Fairy Music, which he describes as a scattered collection of songs that served to provide that feeling of excitement for him, filled this need, but, now, he has begun a more unified project: one with a thread of sounds and subject matter that he feels best encapsulates this pursuit of the “right” sound. As Roesner continues this pursuit, and as his folky undertones bubble to the surface once again, this project is certain to be special: an advancement of the innate sense that Roesner has displayed to this point.