Villiers is a New York-based writer of mysterious origins. Once a little queer kid in a house full of classical music, who loved Lee Hazlewood and Bobbie Gentry, Tori Amos and Bernard Hermann, he taught himself guitar in his teens instead of going to therapy. In his early twenties, in a basement studio apartment in Washington DC, he started writing music. He made his way into the pedal-steel-guitar music scene across the river in Virginia, and he quietly sold a few country songs. Despite his obvious lifelong desire to avoid the spotlight, Villiers kept getting roped by music executives into songwriting sessions throughout the next decade; no stranger to shaping a powerful narrative, he was drawn over and over again to the way music excavated the deepest longing, love, turmoil, and loss. More recently, influenced by modern queer indie artists like Perfume Genius and Anohni and the Johnsons, and processing a period in his life of crashing and burning and finding reinvention, he realized he had more stories to tell, and that it was too late to confine them to where they probably belonged (again, therapy). He makes his debut as a pop experimentalist, raw and offbeat and honest, ready to surprise anyone who thinks they might already know all that he’s about.
