Kalispell musician makes shoestring world tour

Josiah Willows, 20, never expected to make a living as a musician and he would have laughed at the idea that he would do it playing pop music on a violin.

“I was a guitarist growing up —  I never wanted to be a violinist,” he said. “I was going to be an English professor.”

He also never imagined performing in the aisle of a Virgin Atlantic jet bound for Hong Kong — much less in his underwear on a street in London.

Willows, who graduated early from Flathead High School in 2009, had these adventures and more as a member of a three-man Australian band on a shoestring world tour that launched May 6.

Aptly named Set Sail, their group so far has sung and played on the streets of Australia, Hong Kong, England, Germany, France, Dubai, Spain, Sweden and Iceland. Along the way, he, Brandon Hoogenboom, 21, and Josh May, 22, ate piles of rice and pasta and slept in some leaky dives but had the time of their lives.

Willows sees his group as riding a wave of change creating new paths through the once label-dominated music industry. They market themselves through social media such as Facebook and YouTube and make direct sales to fans.

 “I hope to inspire more musicians to go out and present their music to the world,” he said. “Good music is good music. If it’s not good music, they won’t buy your CD.”

With street playing, he said a group breaks out of reaching one demographic into all ages and subcultures of the population. Willows said their performances draw in old people, young hipsters, businessmen and Goths.

“We don’t pretend to be rock stars or music gods,” he said. “Pop is entertainment. It makes people happy. A lot of people tell us we made their day better.”

Since going full-tilt and full time, the group has sold 6,000 copies of their first Set Sail EP CD and 1,000 of their latest Riley Moore EP CD, convincing Willows he made the right decision foregoing a scholarship and academia to follow the beat of his drummer, guitarist and own violin around the world.

On a break from the tour, he recently visited his hometown with Set Sail’s drummer May. Willows sat down for an interview about his post-graduation gamble on a music career.

The son of missionaries, he was born in Jamaica but came to the Flathead Valley as an infant when his parents James and Jaekyung Willows moved to Hungry Horse, where they operate Huckleberry Land. He attended Stillwater Christian School for three years but spent his senior year at Flathead High School.

A high achiever in academics, he was offered a college scholarship to Williams College, a top liberal arts school in Massachusetts. Instead, Willows spent a year at a music school called Hillsong in Australia, then transferred to the University of Sydney where he first started singing in the streets with friends Hoogenboom and May.

“The reason we did it was poverty — Sydney and Melbourne are the most expensive cities,” he said. “We started going out and playing in the streets for rent. As the months went by, we got better.”

Hoogenboom, a native Californian, serves as lead vocalist and plays guitar. Willows and May also sing while playing violin and drums, respectively.

For street playing, May pared down his drum kit to a floor drum on its side, a cymbal placed on the ground, a kitchen pot as a cowbell, a bucket as a kick drum and a snare drum in front of the bucket.

“He’s a very creative guy,” Willows said. “Actually, he’s a lazy guy. This weighs about 10 pounds while the drum set was 50 to 60 pounds.”

When Set Sail first took to the streets in Sydney, the band members earned about $10 to $15 an hour each. As they learned the ropes, they increased their earning power and desire to take their music on the road.

Finances presented a major stumbling block.

“Many bands get hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to tour,” Willows said.

From Sydney, Set Sail moved into the Melbourne music market via the streets where they drew good crowds of people who urged them to have a concert. After putting out a challenge over social media, they got 1,100 people to confirm for a potential show at Billboard, a popular Melbourne nightclub.

“We took those to ‘the venue’ and they were shocked,” Willows said. “We had 500 people come — that was great.”

With a cameraman in tow, Set Sail launched their world tour from that concert with the intention of posting videos from each stop starting in Hong Kong. They toured for 2 1/2 months before taking a break.

“We only stayed eight days in hostels,” Willows said. “The rest was with fans and friends.”

All was not smooth sailing in Europe, which the group thought would top Australia as a venue for street musicians. Paris marked the low point from every perspective.

“Our French friend has this really tiny room,” Willows recalled. “She told us French people were stingy.”

It proved prophetic.

The band played and sang every day for three weeks to make enough money to get to Berlin, where they found a different culture and generous people.

Iceland also was a good experience as was Stockholm, with a population that often travels to Australia.

“In London, that’s where things got interesting,” Willows said with a laugh. “We stayed in an absolute dive with a leaking roof. It rained the entire time.”

As a lark, the group decided to get up early to get free clothes offered by the designer label Desigual to the first 100 people who showed up at their London store in their underwear. The plan went bad when they overslept but they decided to go over anyway with their instruments.

“When do you ever get to walk around London in your underwear?” he asked with a laugh. “We played in our underwear and the crowd started cheering.”

Taking notice of the band’s warm reception, Desigual officials offered to fly them to Madrid for the same promotion. Then that afternoon, Willows discovered his violin had been stolen, but the company rented one for him, so they flew to Spain.

Singing amidst civil unrest in Madrid, the three musicians caught the attention of the police. Set Sail went aground at the police station where they learned through broken English that it’s illegal to sell CDs, play drums or use amplifiers in the street.

“It took half an hour and nine cops to tell us that,” he said.

 Good times on tour included playing on top of the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa, in Dubai as well as entertaining the crew with an a cappella song on a flight from Hong Kong.

Their globetrotting on a shoestring has paid off with increasing fame as fans follow them on www.facebook.com/setsailmusic and www.youtube.com/user/setsailtv.

“We’re very big underground,” he said. “We have 12,000 fans on Facebook.”

Within the next week or so, Willows and May will meet Hoogenboom in Los Angeles to buy a van to begin their U.S. tour, then maybe continue on through South America and beyond on future tours.

“I’d like to be the first band to play in Antarctica,” he said.

Willows travels light with just his instrument and a duffel bag packed with a few shirts, two pairs of pants, a jacket and his toothbrush. He wouldn’t trade his life for the security of a steady paycheck.

“I have so many friends who hate their jobs, make money and get drunk on weekends,” Willows said. 

On the road, he studies marketing online and works on a book about Set Sail’s excellent adventure. Willow urges other musicians not to give up on the idea of playing for a living.

He said they should do something new and do it well.

“If you have good music and you’re willing to put in the work to be a musician for a job, you can make decent money,” Willows said.

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at cchase@dailyinterlake.com.