Stephen Wilson Jr. was racing home to Indiana to see his dying father when his sister called to tell him he was running out of time. Partway there from Nashville, he pulled over to have one more conversation with the man he was named after. “I said goodbye to my dad on an iPhone 8 in my car in the middle of Kentucky,” Wilson, 45, says. “His final words were, ‘Write a good song for me.’”
Since that September day in 2018, Wilson has made good on that promise and, in the process, has become one of country music’s most electrifying new artists. In 2023, on the five-year anniversary of his father’s death, he released Son of Dad, a debut album that continues to grow an audience through hard-hitting, personal songs like “My Father’s Son,” “Patches,” and “Grief Is Only Love,” carrying themes of working-class existence, hard-won redemption, and perseverance through tragedy.
“Stephen is a little outside the box, but it all comes down to great songwriting. He has these great wordplays — like, ‘My patches got patches,’ that’s just so different,” says Dierks Bentley, who recently released the collaboration “Cold Beer Can” with Wilson and who lost his own father in 2012. “I connect a lot with Son of Dad, because my dad had such a big influence on my life.”
But while Son of Dad has lots of country fans, its skeleton is firmly indie and alt-rock. Wilson — whose uniform of oversized glasses, cardigan, and baseball hat makes him look a little like John Denver fronting Nirvana — describes his music as “Death Cab for Country.”
“I’m very much an indie-rock kid at heart,” says the songwriter, who used to be the lead guitarist in a band called AutoVaughn that toured with Cage the Elephant and Portugal. The Man. “But I’m a country songwriter. I write songs from a rural perspective and a blue-collar perspective.”
Despite possessing a bachelor’s degree in microbiology and a résumé that includes a stint in research and development at Mars, the food company, Wilson captures the blue-collar point of view exceptionally well. At a recent headlining show in Nashville, he debuted a new song titled “Gary,” a shout-out to the tradesmen who do the unheralded yet essential work that keeps the world spinning. “I want that to be celebrated, because I grew up in a generation where you go to college and to hell with the trades,” he says. “But Garys, they get it done.”
Wilson is cut from that same cloth. Raised, along with his brother and sister, by a single father in southern Indiana, he grew up in garages and boxing rings before he lit out for Tennessee to enroll in college. His family ran a body shop, and his dad was an amateur boxer who taught his sons the sweet science. You can see hints of Wilson’s pugilistic skill when he performs, bobbing and weaving across the stage while hammering, percussively, at his acoustic guitar. (“I’m not a very good drummer,” he says, “so I take it out on the guitar.”) When he’s nervous before a show, he’ll shadowbox in his dressing room, and on off-days on tour, he spars at local gyms. “You can really get a slice of a city’s culture by going to their boxing gym,” Wilson says. “They’re usually in the gnarly part of town. Everybody in that gym is fighting something.”
For Wilson, it’s the void left by his namesake and hero, the man who gifted him his first guitar on his 16th birthday. In concert, he speaks often about his dad. “People have gotten to know my father, and in a weird way, he’s more alive than he’s ever been,” Wilson says. He also shares humorous anecdotes of growing up Pentecostal and watching exorcisms performed, only to awkwardly run into the person who had the demon cast out later that afternoon in the grocery store.
It’s that juxtaposition between faith and fact, sweat and science, that makes Wilson and the songs he writes so fascinating. Some fans see him as an unlikely therapist. At a concert in New York last year, a young fan in the front row held up a sign that read “Your lyrics will heal the world.” Wilson doesn’t know quite what to make of it, but he says such displays are increasing.
“We were playing in Louisville the other night, and a guy, in the middle of the show, with tears just rolling down his face, proclaimed from the balcony: ‘Stephen Wilson Jr., you saved my marriage and you saved my life,’” he recalls. “I don’t know how to explain it. Music is magic, man.”
