Radical Inclusivity: Billy Mays III

Billy Mays III at Clearwater Beach, where he's staying until he goes on tour.

If you want to hear the third Billy Mays’ music, it’s not hard to do. He never stops making it. He’s beatboxing when he walks up to my car on a long, hot afternoon in Clearwater. His YouTube channel has over eighty videos, and he offers most of his albums for free on the Infinite Third website.

“The music comes so easy,” he says. “It feels almost silly to charge for it. The big stuff, the stuff that you’d pay for, that’s in the works.”

The ease is evident in the prolific nature of his work. There are eighteen albums available for download online, not counting the song-a-day project he did last year. His latest Infinite Third album, Ear Drops, is billed on the website as “80 Minutes of Soothing Music to Massage Your Brain While Bringing You to the Next Level.”

Infinite Third goes on tour this October, starting in Asheville, North Carolina at the 3 Days of Light Festival, and then?

“Who knows?” says Billy, who will be touring with his collaborator and girlfriend, Gen, across the country. “Asheville will open up a lot of possibilities. The tour is going to be kind of like the process of making music itself. I find it hard to force it.”

The tour will be ongoing, and Billy mentions Pennsylvania and Canada in the same breath, making it clear that the structure is currently undefined.

“There’s no finite goal to any of this. I find the music has to be channeled, not forced. If I trust that it’s going to come, then it’s infinite.”

There are times when talking to Billy seems like the conversation equivalent of a road trip. Part of that, I imagine, comes from the fact that he's currently unanchored. He'll be in Florida a little while longer, then he and Gen hit the road in their Nissan Pathfinder for points unknown.

"City, country, the beach, the mountains, it doesn't really matter much to me. Creativity can happen anywhere. I can be happy anywhere, and I hate feeling stuck. Gen and I are totally on the same page there. I don't think this would be nearly as much fun to do by myself."

Billy runs the website Where's Billy Mays? where he posts tributes and references to his father, the late pitchman Billy Mays II. He's giving thought to writing and directing a documentary about his father, although it's a long way off.

Just like I remembered, Billy is still all about team work. His solo music project, Infinite Third, provided the music for a documentary by Skull Babylon. His group, Bandpractice, has become a sort of open jam session that tours at festivals around the Southeast. His writing, Impersonal Verses, is actually deeply personal and about connecting to others. But Billy really gets excited when he talks about his improvisational music group Mouth Council, run with his girlfriend and fellow musician, Gen.

“It’s all about the breath and the voice,” he says. “Gen sings or raps, and I beatbox and have a looper. We have a microphone we pass around and try to get everyone in the room or in the audience involved in making the sound.”

Beatboxes? Sure enough, Billy was happy to show me his skills after we got some beer on the beach, and he got me to participate. Don’t worry, I've got video evidence.

When we finished, Billy says, "That's the basic idea of Mouth Council. Anyone can make music, make the rythym. We try to make it a truly collaborative experience for both ourselves and the audience. Nothing is forced, everything is improvisational. It's radical inclusivity."

When I ask what role fear plays in his improvisation, Billy gets a shifty little smile. "It's not so much fear, but an energy. You've got to have that performance energy to make it quality."

And so finally I have to ask, what next hot stuff?  The tour of course, and his YouTube channels. The videos Billy makes- with nothing fancier than some mics and a Cannon Rebel- often get over 10,000 hits. With Mouth Council, Band Practice, and Infinite Third all contained inside his creative sphere, Billy has no shortage of projects to keep the creativity flowing... infinitely? Infinitely. That sounds about right.