19-year-old Willy Mason sits in the corner of the Rough Trade record shop in Covent Garden, besieged by adoring teenagers. He’s just played half an hour of tender, heartfelt folk, blues and country, accompanied by nimble guitar picking: eloquent, simple songs about the world, injustice, happiness, basic human feelings.

From where I’m standing, this doesn’t look like the standard post-gig ego-nurturing ritual. The kids want a genuine conversation with Willy, to tell him how his lyrics touched them, how they feel the same way, how together they can try and make a little difference to the world. Mason, meanwhile, is eager to converse with them, thrilled to have touched these people’s lives, thoughtful and respectful.

“I find my songs a really easy way to communicate with people,” Mason tells me, “and to communicate ideas on an emotional level rather than an intellectual level, which is the way that I respond to communication best. In the beginning I did it mostly for myself, but the coolest thing of going on tour and stuff is realising that other people have been having the same thoughts – I can tell it just by the way they respond to the music – and so that’s inspiring to me as well.”

Me, I had my reservations. When I first heard ‘Oxygen’, his anthem for young people willing to stand up against the wrongs of the world, I admired his optimism, but even as I fell for the song part of me started imagining an older and more fucked-up and bitter Mason mocking the younger version of himself who wrote such a hopeful, idealistic lyric. But now, after meeting the guy and hearing him play, seeing the genuine passion and openness involved both on Mason and his audience’s part, I feel bad for sneering. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of hope.

“Those thoughts were kind of getting me through high school at the time,” he says of the sentiment behind ‘Oxygen’, “although a lot has changed since I wrote that song. I left the island [Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts where Mason grew up], which is an easy place to be so idealist, and started being more in touch with the harsh reality – and it also seems to be getting harsher and harsher in some ways. But at the same time, through my dad, I’ve also taken up an interest in anthropology, and any time I start being overcome by doubt, that’s how I get a sort of perspective, by looking at things in terms of a grander scale, and seeing that things have been way worse than this before.’

Willy’s father charts history like a sine wave, with societal movements swinging from one extreme to another and back again over time – but with the hope that, with each swing, the waves becoming smaller and smaller, as society learns from what has come before, until eventually an equilibrium is reached, an ideal way of living. Willy’s working on an equilibrium of his own, trying to be as self-sufficient as possible, to the extent that he even runs his car off leftover grease from fast food restaurants.

Perhaps this ’sine wave’ idea of progression also accounts for Mason’s choice of musical style (besides his passion for his parents’ old blues record collections). Over the years Willy and his 16-year-old brother (and musical partner) Sam have played in a wide variety of groups, from reggae through hard rock to electronica and disco-punk; roots music is for Mason not a means of regression, but a conduit for the most direct communication possible with his audience.

There is a strong musical and creative tradition in the Mason family. Willy’s father, Michael Mason, is a gifted performer of Indian music who signed to Columbia in the 1960s and left before releasing a record, over arguments about compromising his creativity. He later got involved with the Fluxus and Nexus performance art movements; made a very trippy-sounding installation with Yoko Ono; created a sort of eye-mask that produced lights and sounds that could make you hallucinate (”he fell asleep with it on, and woke up a day later, and took them off, and the entire world strobed in green for about a day. he thought he was gonna go insane”); and has been working away at an innovative musical for the past 16 years. Willy’s mum, meanwhile, is the powerful folk-blues-country singer Jemima James, who has been playing for many years and is currently signed to the US label Labor Records.

Both his parents have a cynical view of the music business, based on their own experiences, and this is an attitude Willy has in part inherited, saying he’d sooner stop performing than sacrifice the direct connection with his audience that small gigs can afford him. But he does love playing live. ‘I feel 10 times more comfortable onstage than I do just hanging out with people – it feels like home. I know that sounds cheesy as hell and it’s been said a thousand times, but I’ve come to the point where I can speak honestly and connect with people, without worrying about the subtle social rules that tend to cloud my thoughts when I’m hanging out with people.’

That connection, in essence, is what makes Mason such an inspiring presence. Other musicians will continue to strive for new levels of sonic experimentation, and their work will often be life-affirming. But there’ll always be a place, too, for Willy’s kind of emotional directness, which in its own way breaks down boundaries, creates exciting new possibilities and connects minds. It’s all about communication.