Willie Phoenix & the Soul Underground will open the final date of the current Watershed Hitless Wonder Summer Tour 2026 at the Treelawn Social Club (15335 Waterloo Road, Cleveland OH. 44110) this Saturday, August 8th. Doors at 7 pm, music at 8 pm. Here’s what Willie’s been up to, recording-wise.
On June 26, Willie Phoenix released The Blues Ain’t Pretty, just in time for Comfest. Measured in the conventional way, it was his first new project in almost two years. Soul Bender - a six song EP - arrived at Comfest in late June 2024, only a few months after the ten-song Save the Angels.
That makes it sound as though Willie took a two-year break. He did not.
I can say that with some confidence because I first recorded Willie more than thirty years ago, in 1995, when he was performing with Jerry Hanahan and Jim “Kozmos” Cummings for the Columbus cable program In Your Ear. Our regular recording relationship began in 2009. For the past seventeen years, we have kept a standing Wednesday night date at my studio for Willie to rehearse, record, or usually do both at the same time.
That history is worth mentioning only because Willie’s process can be hard to see from the outside. Public releases tell only a small part of the story. In Willie’s world, the next record is usually taking shape before anyone realizes the last one is finished.
Everything Is a Recording
Willie records everything: rehearsals, run-throughs, new ideas, old songs approached from a different direction, and performances that the other musicians may not realize are being considered for an album. Colin Gawel once discovered from the credits that he had played rhythm guitar on two tracks on Save the Angels. That is not an unusual Willie Phoenix story. If something happens in the room and Willie likes it, it may become part of a record.
He also keeps working on songs after most artists would have declared them finished. A title may remain the same while the arrangement, instrumentation, length, and sometimes nearly the entire song changes. His transformations can include writing entirely new lyrics over the foundation of an existing song. What looks like a duplicate on a list of files may be a materially different recording. What sounds settled on Wednesday may have acquired a new bridge, a different rhythm, or an entirely different personality by the next session. Sometimes he takes songs recorded years ago and reinvents them for current projects.
Between Soul Bender and The Blues Ain’t Pretty, Willie moved through twelve different variations of the project before arriving at the nine-song album that was released. These were not twelve public albums. They were twelve serious attempts to decide which collection of songs belonged together and what the project wanted to be. Across those variations, Willie considered 56 distinct songs, returning to some repeatedly while replacing or transforming others. The project names changed along the way, and so did the artwork. In all my years working with Willie, this was one of the most extensive periods of revision I have witnessed.
Most musicians would call these drafts. With Willie, they are closer to alternate universes. Each one was a plausible record until the next group of songs pointed somewhere else.
Meanwhile, the Past Kept Moving Forward
The other reason the two-year gap is misleading is that Willie’s older work was becoming more visible at the same time. Fervor Records began bringing recordings from several periods of his career back into circulation. Its releases included We Love Noise, Not a Butterfly, Flower Machine, Friends, Happy Vibrations, Hanging by a Thread (a 4-song ep from The Buttons), followed by a reissue of the 1971 self-titled album by ERIC, the Marion band fronted by Willie Creagh before he became Willie Phoenix.
The recordings also began finding their way into film and television. “Do It All Over Again,” recorded in 1990, was used in the documentary The Python Hunt. Most recently, ERIC’s moody, organ driven “Waiting” appeared in the series premiere of the MGM+ crime drama The Westies. A song recorded in Ohio in 1971 was suddenly accompanying J.K. Simmons and a new television drama fifty five years later.
There is something fitting about that. Willie has always been focused on the next song, but the songs behind him have never stopped traveling. While we were building new projects on Wednesday nights, recordings made decades earlier were finding listeners Willie could not have imagined when he made them.
Willie, Watershed, and the Long Way Around
The story also circles back to Watershed. Willie produced the early demo that helped the band find its way to Epic Records, and Colin has never forgotten it. Over the years, Colin has played with Willie at larger shows, created the Willie Phoenix Tribute Machine, and led the effort that resulted in the corner of 16th Avenue and High Street being named Willie Phoenix Way.
This summer, Watershed is looking back with a fifteenth anniversary edition of Joe Oestreich’s memoir Hitless Wonder and the twenty-six track collection Hitless Wonder: The Definitive Cuts, 1990–2025. The collection reaches back to the band’s early recordings with Willie, and Watershed is supporting the release with a Midwest tour.
That is a good rock & roll story, but not because everyone has come full circle. Willie does not spend much time traveling in circles. He is usually moving toward the next song. The better image is a long road on which people keep meeting again, a little older, carrying more music, and still helping one another along.
The Record We Can Finally Hear
The Blues Ain’t Pretty is the public result of that two-year period, but it is not the whole result. Behind it are twelve other possible projects, songs that changed shape more than once, weekly sessions that never really stopped, and a catalog that was simultaneously being rediscovered through Fervor.
So, Willie Phoenix did not return after two years away. He never left. He was writing, rehearsing, recording, rearranging, rejecting, recovering, and starting over. That is what he has done for most of his life. The album is simply the part of the work that finally became visible to the rest of us.
And if history is any guide, the next Willie Phoenix record has already started (and it has). It may just have a different name by next Wednesday.
WILLIE PHOENIX & THE SOUL UNDERGROUND @ COMFEST 2026 (WATERSHED’S COLIN GAWEL GUESTING ON SECOND GUITAR)
Brian Eastman is Willie Phoenix’s chief engineer, at Eastman Studio.