BILLY RAFFOUL AT SONGBYRD Billy Raffoul's anthemic debut single
"Driver" serves as a potent calling card for the 22-year-old singer,
songwriter, and musician. His signature sound is a rough-hewn,
low-timbered rock and roll that nods to the likes of Jeff Buckley,
Neil Young, and Joe Cocker, and is powered by Raffoul's gravelly,
soulful voice and deeply felt lyrics. "That's one thing for me -- a
song needs to be about something I've experienced or something someone
close to me is going through," Raffoul says of his sources of
inspiration. "I find myself going back to moments of time from the
past, picking apart these little experiences and building them into
bigger things. I want people to know that the songs are genuine, that
they've been lived in."
"Driver" is one of those lived-in songs. It was inspired by his family
picking up a hitchhiker one night after Raffoul and his musician
father Jody played a gig on Pelee Island in the middle of Lake Erie.
"This guy was really out of it, so he ended up staying with us for a
few hours," Raffoul says. The following weekend Raffoul told his story
of the hitchhiker to songwriter Simon Wilcox and songwriter-producer
Nolan Lambroza during a writing session in Los Angeles. "We turned it
into something a little more sentimental, in that maybe I'm not
singing about someone being lost on the side of the road, but maybe
someone lost in life who doesn't know where they're going or what
they're supposed to be doing," he explains.
Raffoul has been fairly certain of what he wanted to do with his life
from a young age. He grew up in a creative family in the small farming
town of Leamington, Ontario -- "the tomato capital of Canada," as he
puts it. His mother is an artist, writer, and teacher and his father
Jody Raffoul is a solo artist and hometown hero who has opened for
everyone from Joe Cocker to Bon Jovi. Raffoul's earliest musical
influences come from his dad. "The Beatles were like Jesus in our
house," he recalls, adding that he also listened to soul singers like
Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. On his tenth birthday, Billy received a
'British Invasion'-inspired guitar with a Union Jack on its front from
Jody and started teaching himself to play. By 16, had bought his first
real guitar -- a 1968 Gibson Les Paul Black Beauty. "It's the same
model and year as the only one Jimi Hendrix was ever photographed
playing," Raffoul says.
When Raffoul was in high school, he watched his dad headline a show
for 4,000 people at his school's stadium. "I remember in that moment
thinking, 'This is cool,'" he says. "I had appreciated music and
written songs up until then, but I didn't think I wanted to be a live
performer until that one show." Raffoul's first paying gig was playing
to long-haul drivers at a local truck stop. "For the next three or
four years I just put everything into it, playing out four and five
nights a week in bars from Leamington to Detroit and back."
Every so often Raffoul would get a gig singing demos for hire. "Just
getting paid hourly to be the vocalist," he explains. "One day I went
into the studio to sing on some Kid Rock demos. The guys heard my
voice in the booth and asked if I had any original stuff. I played
them two acoustic songs. They shot an iPhone video and sent it to my
now-manager, who used to work with Kid Rock. The next day we drove
down to Nashville."
Raffoul now splits his time between Nashville and Los Angeles where,
in between playing shows, he has been collaborating with other
songwriters and slowly but surely assembling his debut album. "Since
it's my first record it feels like I've been writing it my whole
life," he jokes. In addition to "Driver," Raffoul is proud of another
new song called "I'm Not A Saint," which emerged from a conversation
Raffoul had with his co-writer Julia Michaels. "We were talking about
things we do or that we shouldn't do, like swear too much, smoke too
much, lie too much, and it just flowed from there," Raffoul says.
"Forty-five minutes later it was done."
As he gears up to finish his debut album, Raffoul is also eager to
tour and see the world. "I'm putting everything into this record," he
says, "but I want to build my career on the live show. I want to be a
true working musician." He knows that makes him sound like a
traditionalist and he's fine with that. "It's more of the old school
way of doing things," he says. "But I think that even in this
ever-changing music business there will always be a thirst for live
performance and that's what I want to do. That's always been the goal.
Connect with people, one room at a time."
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03/03/2020 Last update