William Hale announces upcoming new album, ‘The Wait’

“It’s honestly disgusting. I don’t live well, I’m one of the most disorganized people you would ever meet,” the creative songwriter behind the Glens Falls band, William Hale, Lucas William Hale Van Scoy told me. He is first and foremost a writer.

“A lot of it is time and place. I write constantly and sometimes the words I write have a melody. I try and keep every song a little different but it’s all based on time and place. There’s no real influence other than ‘do I need to write a song right now? Is that important?’. Lucas writes out of necessity, “an innate necessity.” 

As a simple duo, the romantic and poetic partnership of Lucas and Alicia Van Scoy is comedy and tragedy entwined, and they typically go by the name of Goat Sausage when they are not performing in the full band. As in life as well as creative endeavors, they are a powerhouse team.

While Lucas inhabits a scream of consciousness place, Alicia Van Scoy plays a multitude of instruments and is the only person in the band who can sight read music. 

“I can vouch for that too, living with him there’s like scraps of paper and napkins and anything else you can write on, there are lyrics,” Alicia commented on Lucas’ fanatical sense of urgency.

The Glens Falls folk-rock group, William Hale, who’ve been around for close to 20 years now and demand a close cult following have finally alluded to a new album ready to be released.

 It is aptly named ‘The Wait’. When it will be released, remains as mysterious as the band itself. William Hale have always remained in the shadows of the Capital Region music scene, always staying creative, enigmatic and unapologetic. 

For those of you who are familiar with the group and follow them, you’ll be just as excited as I am. Hidden within their archives, lie about 400 demos, but out of these recordings, only two albums have officially emerged. 

That’s not to say that they are completely inactive. On the contrary, before the pandemic, they played out a lot, most notably for Super Dark Collective shows.

The band often transforms into its sinister counterpart, usually around Holloween, called Willian Hate. Under this nomenclature, the mirrored evil twin of William Hale gets to express the uglier and darker sides of human nature, in particular through the art of music videos. Check their most recent one out, here:

In the heart of cold downtown Glens Falls, there’s 42 Degrees, a head shop that recently added a live venue upstairs. This may be the reprieve that the city has been looking for ever since Gug’s shut down. William Hale was the last group to play at the infamous local bar that resembles more of a wild western saloon than anything else, and they happen to be one of the most fiercely original bands to now play 42 Degrees from time to time, ever since the place opened its doors to original music.

They have always remained steadfast in the isolation of the Glens Falls scene with only the comfort of their menagerie of artists who are associated, one way or another, with the Ravacon collective – but that’s a whole other story. 

What does the city of Glens Falls mean to them? 

Lucas: “I would say I would not have any type of musical career, if you can call it that, without the people I’ve met in Glens Falls. Even when I was a very young teenager, I lived in South Glens Falls, I would come over the bridge and meet the artists, meet the people I like. It offered me so much inspiration. I had a friend who a studio on Park Street. Most of my musical influence came from just playing with people I met in this area and meeting the artists in this area.”

Stay tuned for ‘The Wait’.