Album Of The Year: Willie J Healey - Twin Heavy

Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, Willie J Healey leads us into a secret world of ready-made classics. 

Influences are an inevitable part of making music. They act as navigational devices to a place of golden discovery. They’re the seasoning over a luke-warm idea, that sprinkle of fairy dust that allows the music to take flight. But too much of it can be a bad thing and you’re left with a tribute album. Just ask Jack White what he thinks of The Black Keys. 

There aren’t many artists who can cross-reference the titans of the industry with such ease. With Twin Heavy, Willie J Healey has achieved this tricky feat. He’s struck the perfect balance and hit the jackpot. This is a record that bears all the hallmarks of a student of music graduating to 21st-century songsmith. 

Album opener “Fashun” catapults us into a pumped-up planet of psychedelia previously occupied by George Harrison. It’s a rousing affair punctuated with feel-good verses and sunshine lyrics that hammer their way to a guitar solo that could easily have been a substitute for Harrison’s guitar work on “Wah Wah”. There it waits, ready for maximum impact, one minute and forty-seven seconds into the record, shin-pads on, stretches complete. But “Fashun” doesn’t just feel like a nod to Harrison. It’s a beautiful mixture of the 70’s. One part glam-rock, two parts northern soul.

Therein lies the magic of this record, one song in. Twin Heavy is not only a portrait of Willie J Healey as a record collector but as someone taking the best elements of his favourite worlds and shaping them to fit into his own. 

By track three, he’s gently asking us to open our hearts to a folksy, campfire love song. “Big Nothing” is a throwback to a time when songs felt crafted and perfect melodies lead the way. The dust has barely settled before we’re propelled headfirst into “Songs for Joanna” - bluesy power-chords soaked in Lou Reed’s Americana. And then, as simply as flicking a switch, rubbing a lamp, or boarding a George Martin Time Machine, we arrive at the title track, transporting us back to September 1969 and the back end of The Beatles’ Abbey Road album. Those same wistful, elongated vocals and dreamlike guitar sequences found on “The Sun King” can be just as easily traced here. It’s a dewy-eyed experience.

It’s in this small portion of the album where Willie J Healey’s musical flexibility is on full display and where Twin Heavy is at its best. It’s almost acrobatic, the way he swings between genres and splits tempos, the way he seamlessly balances balladry with ballsiness, but remarkably he lands each jump and always feels in full control of what direction he wants to take the listener.

This ability of an artist being able to shift gears at any given moment during a record and for it to remain unspoiled is a rare gift. There’s an effortlessness to everything he touches on this record. There’s the cool indifference with which he delivers a piercing line on “Heavy Traffic”: “you know that when you sleep, you die a little bit?” which is followed by him selling us a mantra whilst peering over the top of his very own Phil Spector wall of sound on “Why You Gotta Do It?”. “Money doesn’t make you happy, but a little bit of cash might help.”

On the surface, these lines should be morbid but coming from his millennial mouth, they feel more like wisecracks or in-jokes.

They’re reminders of how he’s evaded the trap he could’ve fallen into, a man armed with all those old influences. Instead, he survives, not as another tribute act who’s produced a mixtape but as a young musician with his own thing to say.

A record that’s coated in summer, brushed with vintage tones and feels like the perfect antidote to testing times. The quieter moments of reflection are sincere and heart-felt but never get in the way of an album made by a man who feels like he’d prefer to have a good time.

And as Twin Heavy plays its closing chords and the piano locks into its final loop, it’s tough to shake the feeling that one of Willie J Healey’s earlier piss takes might actually have fallen flat. ”You’re gonna be a big star honey, a real household name.” If this record is anything to go by, you just never know…