"His songwriting is just incredible and it’s had a real impact on me.” - Eddie Vedder

Will Dailey’s seventh album BOYS TALKING is the one he’s not releasing.

Oh, you’ll get to hear it, if you buy a vinyl copy, CD, or download it directly from him. But it won’t be a matter of opening up a streaming platform and pressing play on a chosen date with thousands of other releases. With a record he considers his best work, Will wanted to find another way to celebrate and enjoy the process of sharing the album for more than a day or week. “Music is supposed to be a joyful expression of self that connects us to other people,” Will says. “I want to instill a more personal, joyful process of sharing my work.”

Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, Dailey has spent the last decade-and-a-half mastering a twisted, Americana psychedelia that evokes underground legends like Cass McCombs, Kevin Morby, and Jeff Tweedy. Like these beloved, offbeat icons, there’s no bending to the music industry machine in his catalog. Rather than try to slot himself into a single genre, era, or sound, Will has always let the songs do what they want—marketing plans and genre programming be damned. Independent but not really indie, the strains of the blues, rock, funk and folk continue to permeate his sound across the years. Rather than a brand of sound, Dailey is a student of the American roots songbook, and a champion of masterful pop hooks.

In fact, the most consistent through line of his career is recognition from artists of a certain caliber. He’s repeatedly performed with Eddie Vedder, played alongside Peter Buck of R.E.M., spent 2023 opening for Jakob Dylan and The Wallflowers, and was tapped to pay tribute to Richie Havens at the 2024 Folk, Americana, Roots Hall of Fame induction. In that sense, BOYS TALKING is a culmination of sorts. Not just concerning the idiosyncratic methods of an artist who’s routinely gone the long way around, but as a mountaintop release from a musician, writer, and performer who is a visionary artist in every sense of the word.

On this album, which was funded in part by a local arts grant, Will insisted on getting a murderer’s row of studio musicians in one room, together, to record live: Dave Brophy, Fabiola Mendéz, Cody Nilsen, Juliana Hatfield, Jeremy Moses Curtis, Andrew Stern, Abie Barrett, Kevin Barry, Alisa Amador and James Rohr. That sense of camaraderie and fellowship, across ten days of playing music together, you might say it was... boys talking (even though the presence of women on this record is essential to the DNA).

The album’s title was directly drawn from the subject matter found in these ten songs, a selection that was culled down from close to 80 tracks in various states of completion. “These songs turned out to be about men trying to communicate. The good and the bad.” Dailey says. Many of the songs that made the cut quickly veer between two planes of sound, like how the bodacious funk of “One At A Time” transitions to thick, golden folksy harmonies that evoke Fleet Foxes, a whiplash technique Will uses to pay subtle tribute to one of his idols, Fiona Apple. “My Old Ride” is stippled with steel guitar in the vein of an old midnight troubadour road song, and early album favorite, “Send Some Energy,” deals with the repercussion of grief and loss.

Later, “After Your Love” is half homage to an Astral Weeks-era Van Morrison, a gentle, swirling ballad that echoes deep calling unto deep—but with pop hooks intact on the wordless refrain. Then, there’s the Bruce Springsteen-esque closer, “Sometimes The Night” where harmonies from Alisa Amador flickering like glints of light on the eerie chorus. But all of those songs won’t exist in the streaming world—just for fans who own the record.

The lead single, “Make Another Me,” will come out on its own to mark the official release and features Juliana Hatfield. Like a sister song to the gripping, existential loneliness of Jason Isbell’s “Last Of My Kind,” it’s a paean to the isolation that so many men experience without ever expressing it to another person. “I’m occasionally haunted by all the information we give away—we now give away our biological information, too,” Will says of the track. “Sometimes I think they just need to get on with it and make us duplicates of ourselves to help cope.” After “Make Another Me” came out in September, listeners who own the record will help decide which other songs get shared publicly over the course of the next few months. That lead to “Send Some Energy” in February and “Hell of a Drug” in March.

If you’ve been paying attention to Will’s career as an independent, cult-favorite songwriter, his freewheeling release tactics won’t come as much of a surprise. You could say there’s been a pattern of behavior. Following up a 2023 tour where he offered fans an unreleased song that they could pay $10 to listen to once, his unconventional methods are putting the listener in a better position to engage with the work. The $10 song was the catalyst for his decision to not release BOYS TALKING, and that ethos will continue to inform his decisions moving forward.

Comfortable fingerpicking through simple, sweet chords and hushed lyrics or ripping a guitar solo and embracing straight-ahead rock urgency, on BOYS TALKING Dailey has synthesized the American songbook through his own lens and presented a thesis of what it means to be a artist—and a human—in 2025. The key to all? Just keep the conversation going. Everything else sweet and cosmic and right flows from that, the sound of boys talking.