Stripmall Ballads: Soul-Deep Modern Folk

☆The first artist on the Hub City Vinyl label!☆

Stripmall Ballads is the haunted, dust-blown project of Phillips Saylor Wisor, a songwriter wandering the backroads between myth and memory. Drawing comparisons to Neil Young, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and Maybelle Carter, his work lives in the tension between Appalachian tradition and modern disillusionment—aching with spectral beauty, dry wit, and a bone-deep sense of longing. From early lo-fi masterworks like Since Jimmy Died to the sparse, cinematic ache of Distant, his songs are slow-burning dispatches from the heart of a fractured America—where ghosts speak in minor chords and resistance sounds like a hymn. Stripmall Ballads doesn’t just sing about forgotten places—Phillips sings from them.

PHILLIPS SAYLOR WISOR UNVEILS EVERYBODY WINS — A STRIPMALL BALLAD FOR THE LOST AND LEFT BEHIND

With Everybody Wins, Phillips Saylor Wisor (aka Stripmall Ballads) emerges from the shadowed corners of America’s backroads and dollar stores to deliver a searing, soul-deep collection of modern folk songs for a country in quiet collapse. These are hymns for the overlooked and the overworked, the addicts and the angels, the night-shift romantics and the half-lost children of the Rust Belt. Across eight raw, radiant tracks, Wisor channels the poetry of gravel lots, blue tarps, wild grapes, and roadside motels—crafting a narrative that is at once achingly personal and profoundly collective. Whether he’s recounting the haunting stillness of a floodplain in Rabbits, the roadside resilience of Two for One, or the digital-age despair of Like and Share, Wisor writes with the clarity of someone who’s lived it all and still believes in the power of a well-worn chord and a hard truth.

Critics and cult followers alike are calling Wisor “the next voice of the lost generation of Americana folk singer-songwriters”—a modern-day Woody Guthrie with the unflinching pen of Lucinda Williams and the mythic weight of Townes Van Zandt. Everybody Wins isn’t just an album; it’s a weathered, wandering map of American fallout, stitched together with steel strings and survivor’s humor. These songs don’t romanticize poverty or pain—they document it with eerie beauty and brutal grace. In a world obsessed with polish, Wisor offers dirt under the nails and pop tarts in the snow. Listen from beginning to end, and you’ll hear a rare thing: an artist not trying to fix America, but simply refusing to look away.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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