“Sex And Lies And Petty Crimes” is Steven Ray Will’s second release as a solo artist, and his first for EarHertz/SoSouth Records.
Steven Ray Will has never stood on the outside of music looking in. By fourteen, he was already playing bass in the honky-tonks and roadhouses of Southeast Texas, learning the unspoken language of working musicians before most artists even pick up their first instrument. What followed was not a brief tour circuit but decades inside the machinery of American music — criss-crossing the U.S., Europe, and Japan — absorbing the rhythms of the road and the humanity that lives between soundchecks and sunrise drives.
Over the years, Will became more than a sideman. After relocating to Austin at thirty to pursue songwriting in earnest, he emerged as a bandleader, vocalist, and primary songwriter for the Americana outfit The Leavers, establishing himself as a commanding creative presence with a reputation for emotional authenticity and musical restraint. Those instincts continue to define his solo work.
Yet geography and mileage only tell part of the story.
Will’s latest release arrives with the weight of lived experience behind it — shaped by recovery, hard-won self-knowledge, and a late autism diagnosis that reframed a lifetime of feeling slightly out of step with the world he observed so closely. Rather than retreat, he leaned further into songwriting, crafting songs marked not by spectacle but by clarity, compassion, and emotional precision.
When he sings about endurance, listeners believe him.
When he writes about redemption, it feels earned.
Offstage, Will remains deeply embedded in the craft of music itself — serving as Tour Manager for the BoDeans while working as a producer, audio engineer, and guitar tech at Austin’s Six String Ranch. It’s a vantage point few artists possess: simultaneously inside the industry while maintaining the perspective of someone who never stopped being a musician first.
That duality may explain the quiet confidence running through his latest work. There is no rush to chase trends, no appetite for reinvention for its own sake — only the steady hand of an artist writing from depth rather than distance.
For fans of Jason Isbell, Ryan Bingham, Lucero, and Wilco, Steven Ray Will’s songs inhabit that rare space where craftsmanship meets emotional truth. They are songs built to last because they were written by someone who understands exactly what survives the passing years — and what doesn’t.
This is not the sound of an artist searching for a voice.
It is the sound of one who has found it.
Additional Information:
Produced by Matt Smith and Steven Ray Will at Six String Ranch, Austin, TX.
All words and music by Steven Ray Will
All vocals and instruments by Steven Ray Will, except drums by Brian Christopher Mendes and percussion by John Bush.
National distribution by EarHertz/SoSouth Records