The Fortuna Inn is the last sun-battered motel at the end of Drachman Street, a few doors down from the Meat Rack Bar & Grill, on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona. Through the cracked windows at the back of a second-floor room, four-foot palm shrubs are scattered around an arid, empty swimming pool. In the alleyway out back, Biro-scrawled graffiti depicts a cartoon Satan hovering above a swastika. Planes pass overhead twice an hour, interrupting the persistent jingle of an ice cream truck a half-mile away.

At Amie's, with taco meat cooling in the pan behind him, he slipped into a sermon. He pointed into the future with a plastic spatula and talked about the interconnectivity of all things: his new album, his presence in Arizona, the weed he was about to smoke, Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan. "All connected," he said. He served two tacos up into a clear tupperware, ate one, and handed me the second. Then he sat with his legs crossed on the dusty brown carpet, smoking weed out of a blue ceramic pipe. He lit the bowl with a red Bic, sucked in the smoke, and exhaled slowly, leaving a thick cloud around his perfectly picked two-inch afro, before cutting through the haze with a slow-motion karate chop.

He drove me to Amie's studio apartment—she was at work—talking about worst-case scenarios along the way. He was worried, he said, about hitting someone with his car; the thought of that happening gripped him from time to time, and he found it hard to shake. But for now, he wanted to make some food.

That Friday, Willis picked picked me up in front of the Fortuna in his grey 1992 Buick Century. He was dressed in the same uniform he'd worn onstage in his pomp: a black fedora, black T-shirt emblazoned with his Nobody insignia, black button-down with the same logo stitched onto the pocket, black jeans, and black cowboy boots. A black highwayman's mask lay, eyes-down, in the back seat.

I flew from New York to Phoenix one Friday that December, took a shuttle to Tucson, and walked two miles the Fortuna, where I'd booked a three-night stay in the room beneath Willis's. I'd spoken to him on the phone a dozen or so times already, but he'd been reticent to talk about a few things, and I figured it would be better to speak with him in person. I wanted to find out how he'd been living in the two years since he'd changed his performing name to Nobody, walked away from his lucrative contract with XL Records, and faded into semi-obscurity.

In December 2016, one of the king-sized rooms on the second floor belonged to Willis Earl Beal, a 32-year-old musician with a reputation for self-sabotage living in what seemed to be a self-imposed exile. Every morning and evening, he'd stand for two hours outside the Goodwill downtown, busking; most nights, he'd stay with his girlfriend, Amie, in her studio apartment nearby. But since quitting his job hauling boxes around a Target warehouse in November, he'd spent most of his afternoons in his room recording his new album, Turn, the latest in a long line of ambient, synth-inflected LPs.

He grew up in a lower-middle class household on Chicago's South Side in the 1980s. He was a precocious kid who sat inside and wrote screenplays rather than getting into dust-ups or worse. As a teenager he wanted to become Batman and, just about as soon as he was old enough, he joined the army to train up for vigilantism. His intestines started to tie themselves into knots while he was there, however, and he was discharged from the military before returning to Chicago and bouncing around hospital beds. In 2007, he moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he spent some time sleeping rough. He was so lonely there that he started sticking hand-drawn flyers up around town. At first, he was hoping to find a girlfriend. "I like oatmeal, train stations, night-time and chamomile tea," one poster read. Soon after, he wanted people to hear the music that he'd started to toy with, so he left demo CD-Rs in coffee shops around town. Above all, he just wanted to be invited to parties.

Myths are just stories that we load up with symbolism and meaning. They don't have to be made-up; they just have to carry the burden of our interpretations. At his critical and commercial peak, brief though it was, Willis's backstory was rehashed so many times in interviews and reviews that it became a myth, then a cloying parable, then a cliché, then a millstone.

He paused for a moment and let his smile hang. "I am such a fucking idiot," he said, staring at the greying wallpaper to my right. "Sometimes I think I’m like Forrest Gump, a real fucking idiot, you know? I thought it was that long ago."

I pointed out that it had been just three years since he'd gone on tour in support of his second album, Nobody Knows.

And, for the first time, he talked to me a little about his now-faded fame. He told me that he regretted what he referred to as "the sickness," his all-encompassing term for materialism and greed. "I had 18 grand in my account and I was complaining," he said before pausing, staring towards me, and disrupting the marijuana smoke with a hyena-cackle laugh. "Man, that was, like, five, six years ago."

On that second night in Tucson in 2016, Willis and I drove into downtown Tucson, where he was going to busk. He'd only made $20 in the morning, and he didn't want to stop until he'd doubled that. He stood outside the Goodwill beneath a sign that read "THIS WAY TO YOUR FUTURE" with an arrow pointing towards his head.

But above all, Willis hates the backstory because it typecasts him: the homelessness, the South Side childhood, the lingering presence of the terms like "lo-fi" and "soul." It turns him into a minstrel, a black man performing a white man's idea of blackness for a white audience that wants a frisson of danger and an air of authenticity.

Willis hates this story for a number of reasons. He thinks it's boring, for a start. He can't stand the fact that people used to rehash it whenever they wrote about his music; he hates that it's probably the first thing that comes to a person's mind when (or if) they think about him now.

All this caught the attention of Found Magazine, a cult print publication, who decided to put Willis and his work on the cover of their December 2009 issue. A few people started paying attention. He kept producing flyers after moving back home to Chicago in 2010 and, the next July, they caught the eye of Leor Galil at the Chicago Reader . He wrote a mini-profile on Willis which, in turn, created a small buzz around The Willis Earl Beal Special Collection, a 17-track CD and accompanying set of poems that Found were putting out that summer. He ended up on the X Factor, where he made it to the "bootcamp" round where Simon Cowell told him to "shut up." But that was never going to be his path. Willis was well on his way to cult fame; cult fame would have suited him.

After its release in 2011, The Willis Earl Beal Special Collection ended up in the hands of Jamie-James Medina, a British photographer living in the Bronx with an unparalleled reputation in the independent music scene. Medina immediately sought Willis out. With little negotiation on either part, he signed to Medina’s newly-created Hot Charity/XL imprint on a five-album deal.

"The industry is this thing that propagates itself to work," Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power, told me over the phone in the spring of 2017. "If you have someone who is a true, real artist who's got it, they're the most vulnerable in the industry." Willis, she said, "has been let down repeatedly."

As his friend walked away, Willis pressed play on the iPod Nano above the battery-powered amplifier to his right. The thin-stringed introduction to "Flying So Low," from 2015's Noctunes, trickled out. On record, it sounded like something that Angelo Badalamenti would have dreamt up. On an all-but-empty street in a desert city on a Saturday night, it was uncannier still. Willis closed his eyes behind the mask and sang in an agony-filled falsetto. "The mountains rise and I fall / Into the ocean / The monsters know / That I don’t got my potion."

Willis replied with an ecstatic and absurd southern affectation: "Trying to spread the word of Jesus! Trying to put some Jesus in these people!" He gestured towards the empty street.

Things were good for a while. Willis had some money and the faith of his label. He was on a subsidiary, but he was essentially sharing roster space with Adele and James Blake. In 2012 he released his first album for Hot Charity, Acousmatic Sorcery. Culled from Special Collection, barely cleaned up at all, it introduced a wider audience to Willis's work, scratchy and imperfect though the songs may have been. Hot Charity sent Willis out on tour first with the then-vital indie group STRFKR, then with Cat Power, one of his idols. He was starting to outgrow the "cult" tag that the reviews were playing up.

"If you have someone who is a true, real artist who's got it, they're the most vulnerable in the industry." — Cat Power

For his second full-length, Willis went into the studio with Matt DeWine (who'd worked live sound for Willis already) and Rodaidh McDonald (who's produced everyone from Adele to Bobby Womack to King Krule). On its face, the collaboration looked perfect. But, as Willis told me in his tatty room in Tucson, he wished it "hadn’t had any outside people," that it had just been his work on the record, no producers, no second opinions. In the end, Nobody Knows was an over-polished affair. At times, Willis possessed a unique power through the clarity, but it erred too often into parody or, worse, indifference. On the mostly a cappella round of "Wavering Lines," his voice was engrossing, but on the bright "Coming Through," featuring Cat Power, Willis was too clean and carefree—not himself.

The album's hit, worst of all, was "Too Dry to Cry," all bluster and sexual innuendo. He wrote it while "horny and sad," and that comes through clearly: "I got nine hard inches like a pitchfork prong / So honey lift up your dress and help me sing this song." Willis had started to worry about his status within indie music, the way that he was playing to regressive expectations of blackness; "Too Dry to Cry" was him howling himself further into that narrative.

Medina, according to Willis, wasn't helping. Willis told me that he was expected to be "the next fucking Aloe Blacc," a soul singer who could appeal equally to Pitchfork readers and their Motown-loving mothers. He started to feel the pressure of the industry around him. He starred as the lead in Memphis, a quiet and existentially troubled film about a soul musician struggling to find his voice. Willis sat with director Tim Sutton in interviews at Sundance 2014, where the movie premiered, candidly discussing a number of incidents that nearly got him fired from the set. "[Sutton] wanted me to go to Beale Street [Memphis' main thoroughfare] and act like a damn fool, and I’ve been kicked out of clubs and been drunk in the street, and I’ve done a lot of things to humiliate myself in my real life, and I didn’t really feel like it," he told Rolling Stone at the time. When the Beale Street shoot was cancelled, Willis "trashed the place," knowing all the while that his reputation would take an impossible hit as a result. "In a way, it was going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy because I’ve ruined everything in my life always," he said then.

Photoshoots and interviews started to pile up: "Every fucking five minutes, [Medina] would be sending some photographer to take my picture." Finally, Willis decided that, if he couldn’t just turn down the press, he’d rebel in his own small way. In his next photoshoot, he decided to wear a black phantom mask, covering his entire face.

"I was like, 'This is how we're going to take photographs today,'" he told me in Tucson. "'And I won't take the mask off because I'm afraid that I'm being projected in a certain way, and I think that you're coupling my race with my music. My race and my music have nothing to do with each other.'"

"I thought I could choose. I thought I could change whenever I wanted to, and you can't." — Willis Earl Beal

Medina, Willis said, was particularly unhappy about that. He accused Willis of sabotaging his career, of being a "difficult artist." Really, Willis was at breaking point. "I'd started to feel the wheels of exploitation," he told me. "I started to understand the process. I started to understand what was going on. I thought I had a choice. I thought I could choose. I thought I could change whenever I wanted to, and you can't."

A lukewarm commercial response wasn't helping. His European tour was cancelled in early 2014 due to a lack of ticket sales. By way of an apology to fans, he released A Place That Doesn't Exist, a surprise EP, without XL's permission. It was a gentle-sounding album: roughly produced, occasionally atonal, almost drone-like. Another EP, Curious Cool, followed a couple months later.

Willis says that Medina grew distant, pressing him to work alongside indie artists like Nicolas Jaar rather than allowing him autonomy. Medina was, Willis told me, non-committal about releasing Experiments in Time—the soft, synthetic album that he saw as his rebirth. So he put that out for free too. In a lengthy interview with Matt Fink at UndertheRadar soon after that, he laid his frustration out clearly. "I realized that I was more of a novelty than the second coming of Robert Johnson[...] I'm not anything like that," he said. "I'm a modern artist anyway. I'm a modern musician. I'm not trying to be a throwback. I have influences but a lot of stuff got attached to me that was unfair, and I just felt like I was misrepresented."