On the Rise
Willow Avalon

Avalon’s success on TikTok was entirely accidental: the publish of that clip coincided with another – the 25-year-old Georgia-born singer and songwriter with her adopted possum son Bowie, now sadly departed. The runaway numbers on both clips led to Avalon being able to make rent through her videos. Regardless, she's mostly a luddite – more at home with repairing cars and rewiring lamps – who didn’t touch a computer until the age of 15. “I can take your carburettor out and put it back in,” she enthuses. ”I do house restoration, rewire electrical outlets, any fixtures!”

Her iPhone, she tells me, is for business; her family can only get in touch with her on a 1950s rotary phone . “I will not respond otherwise – I have 516 unread text messages and 300 missed calls on my phone right now. Having a phone that rings is a lot better because I have to answer it - otherwise it annoys my neighbours.”

Avalon’s backstory is ripped straight from the pages of Flannery O’Connor. The child of outsider artist and musician Jim White, her parents broke up when she was very young. She grew up in the shadow of their animosity for one another, clashing constantly. “I had very polar-different bonds to my parents,” she tells me. “My mom was a very small southern woman who suffocatingly loving while my dad was very detached and cold and he wrote a song about me when I was a baby because he couldn't say that he loved me.”

Her only constant was instability. Leaving home at 15 - and her home state at 17 - she was thrown into adulthood at the deep end, enduring the most turbulent of teenage years. Always moving, Avalon made ends meet with a variety of of jobs to pay the bills and rarely had time to sit and reflect. “I”m very well versed in the the whole pick-you-up, let-you-down thing,” she explains. “Where I came from, you don’t complain about your problems. You go to church, talk to the Lord, and then you just suck it up and handle it.” Avalon and the Lord didn’t get along, she adds: "but I had myself and I had music. I have what my dad calls tunnel vision - if I’m determined, I block out everything around me to make it happen.”

She signed her first deal at 18. “It was like a dumpster fire,” she laments. “It was a publishing company and they signed me for an indie label they were going to make and I was going to be the first roll-out artist. I was due to deliver them 8 songs but I’m an over-achiever so I delivered them 16… and then they never paid me.”

The pandemic hit; the label idea was shelved and the company was bought out. Avalon had her contract cancelled and put out her debut track “Drivin” herself. “It was an unmixed and unmastered MP3. The cover photo was taken on an iPhone 5 that my girlfriend took on the day it had to be submitted on DistroKid.”

Ever the resourceful publicist, Avalon swindled a billboard space to promote the track in LA - right in front of another that was plugging an ex-boyfriend’s band. “They had the 20ft one, I got the 48ft one above it,” she tells me. KCRW put the track in rotation and then a sync on Riverdale followed and suddenly Avalon had the funds to buy back her masters and publishing which her former label was withholding.

“I thought that I was going to finally be able to do everything when I signed that deal,” Avalon explains. “Buy my family a house and do what I feel I was put here to do – which is to make music that other people can relate to and help them understand that things aren't always going to be bad, you know.”

Avalon’s songwriting bears the hallmarks of resilience and a life lived, hitting melancholic sweet spots with a grandiose flourish that recalls Stevie Nicks, Jackson Browne and Reba McEntire. Lyrically she’s adept at transforming even the darkest chapters of her past into something intrinsically poetic. “‘Drivin’ was about when I was 15 and addicted to cigarettes because I was dating a 25 year old man who I was hopelessly in love with,” she explains, “and he was actually just a predator, you know, and ended up getting run out of town for taking upskirt pictures of women.”

Her songs, she believes, have come straight from her own survival handbook. She’s never had real therapy other than state-mandated counselling, ”because of the situations that I grew up in as a kid. And it was court-ordered, and I had to go but I was also doing so many illegal things in that timeframe that I was never able to be honest in those sessions, because I was in fear of what would happen to people that I loved.”

Instead, Avalon would push through whenever she felt sadness creeping in and write a song. “All of them are wholeheartedly honest and from the heart,” she tells me with a shrug.

“Stranger” – the first song from Avalon on her new deal with Atlantic – is a sharply melancholic lament on connection that channels trans-generational trauma and the warped representations of love Avalon grew up with. “It wasn’t the all-American thing, you know? Mom and dad and happiness. A lot of it was really toxic – both people trying their best but neither were really cut out to be parents.”

Avalon wrote the song after leaving LA for New York following a painful breakup. “I ended up with someone for three and a half years. We were engaged, and we almost got married, and I had stability for the first time in my life – but I started noticing these walls I’d put up that I couldn't get over and this mistrust… like everything was doomed and that’s when we broke up and I moved here to New York.

“The song is about me wishing that I had a little bit of a different foundation for me – going into love and being able to have lasting relationships that didn't require so much internal monologue and work.”

She’s on better terms with her parents these days. Her father, she tells me, is her best friend. “He’s the greatest guy ever”, she gushes, excited that he'll be spending Christmas with Avalon and her sister Sadie together for the first time in 20 years. They both came to her defence after the Caleb Simpson apartment tour video led to the inevitable nepo-baby accusations, with White providing a tour of the broken down – and far from palatial – exterior of the family home.

While it's really just the start of her career, Avalon feels like a “90-year old in a 25-year-old body” - forever vigilant and battle-worn. “When I wake up every day, I crackle and snap and pop because I've been in war mode for the past 10 years. Deep down, I am a still a recluse. I'm a hermit. I would like to be in my house with my books, by myself - but I'm getting better about the internet!"