Will Moseley

Will Moseley is a country singer from Hazlehurst, Georgia, who got his first guitar off a late night television commercial at sixteen.

He came into the McBastard studio for Salty's Live Music with Benji, who plays guitar, and Paul, who runs their production and is not in the band, a correction Moseley made about four seconds into the introduction. They played a set first. Brad spent most of the episode watching the three of them insult each other, which he took as the whole point of having them in.

The guitar came from a Keith Urban commercial. Thirty songs in thirty days, pay the money and they ship a guitar and the discs. Moseley was sixteen, had never touched an instrument and had never sung in front of anybody. His mother said he could have it if he did not stick it in a closet. It was in the closet inside a week. He got it back out at nineteen or twenty in college and started writing. He met Paul at an acoustic opening slot in the town next to his hometown, and Paul did not remember it. He met Benji through church and then through working a summer for Benji's dad, who was refinishing Moseley's father's house and building cabinets. Their first show together was in Statesboro, and Benji put together the first band Moseley ever played with.

He lost the job that was paying his way through school during COVID, and music went into that slot. He played two to four or five nights a week in any bar or restaurant that would have him, which is how the rest of his tuition got paid. A year and a half before this taping, Paul says, they were still playing flatbed trailers in the middle of a chicken farm. The part Moseley has thought hardest about is what he owes the people who buy the tickets. He has finished a show at one in the morning and still been outside at four thirty because a drunk man wanted to talk. A restaurant owner once photographed him halfway through the first bite of a cheeseburger. He has never worked out what he could sell inside a meet and greet that he is not going to do for free at the merch table anyway.

Driving down the interstate one day he told Benji there had never been an instrument in his house until he was sixteen, and wondered aloud whether it would have gone differently if there had been one earlier. Benji asked why they did not give somebody else that. Paul knew a small guitar company in Washington State called Walden, which cut them a price on a volume order, and tariffs have since made it harder. At every show now, during the acoustic break, Barnett goes into the crowd and comes back holding a kid by the hand. Everybody calls him Uncle B. The kid leaves with a guitar and it costs the family nothing.