On the Road Again
Willie Heath Neal Has Yet to Run Out of Highway

Willie Heath Neal has always had a restless streak. He’s established brief residences in Florida, New Orleans, Nashville, California and Atlanta (more than once), but his first real gig playing music was a show in Singapore. That’s peculiar in and of itself, but doubly so when you consider that Neal, who these days specializes in your basic rabble-rousin’ honky-tonk-style country music, grew up in a foster home in Rome, Georgia, with a goal of becoming an illustrator rather than fronting a band.

It was the Navy that took Neal to Asia and the Middle East in the early 1990s, and more importantly provided an escape from Rome, where like so many small town young adults he faced a rather mundane future had he remained.

“It was either [enlisting] or I went to work at one of the many mills or power plants around there – it was the sort of place where everybody married their high school sweethearts, and there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to get out,” Neal tells me by cell phone while driving to that night’s show in Winston-Salem. “I had a partial scholarship to the Savannah College of Art and Design, but I chose the military over that.” It was while serving in the Navy that Neal formed his first band, a forgettable outfit with fellow soldiers that bashed out punk rock tunes at USO events. It was the easiest kind of music to play (aside from avant-garde, assuming you can fool enough people), which is a plus when your skills are still underdeveloped.

“You didn’t know what you were playing, really,” he says of his raggedy punk days. “I grew up with [country music], it’s part of my heritage. It’s always been in my life… I knew the words to ‘Hey, Good Lookin’’ before I knew the words to any nursery rhyme.”

I ask him if he can remember deciding he’d outgrown rudimentary punk rock in favor of twangier American fare.

“It just kinda was a natural progression. As I got older, and began to know what I was playing and why, I began trying to say something with writing instead of just coming up with words for a song. And you know, there’s not much of a difference between country and the punk stuff. I guess as I got older, I wasn’t as angry.”

You were sadder.

“Yeah!” he laughs. “Divorce’ll take it out of ya, man!”