Willis Earl Beal: 'It's hard dealing with an artist – particularly me'

Willis Earl Beal was due to be playing in Europe next week. Now he won't be – the gigs have been cancelled. There's nothing unusual about that – gigs get cancelled all the time, by all sorts of artists, for all sorts of reasons. What's odd here, though, is that no one seems to want to say why: you could guess that touring with a full band, as he intended to do, might make a short seven-date tour in six different countries financially impossible, but costs would certainly have been worked out before tickets went on sale.

"We didn't receive any official reason for the cancellation of his tour," said the promoter of a Belgian show. "We have been asked to announce it as 'unforeseeable circumstances'. The venue was not sold out but, yes, it was going to be a good audience, and of course it's always a pity to have to cancel the show of an artist that we support."

And the artist himself seems puzzled. "This is Willis Earl Beal with a most unfortunate update," he wrote on his Tumblr late in January. "My European tour has been cancelled. I want to thank the folks who bought tickets and assure them that this was NOT my decision. At this point, the reason I'm not touring is as mysterious to me as it is to you … What can I do? Situations arise … before my eyes … stealing my body … 'neath ravenous tides."

In compensation for the cancelled shows, he released a collection of eight new songs, titled A Place That Doesn't Exist, free online, despite the fact that his second album, Nobody Knows, had only come out last September. It seemed he had gone rogue, or perhaps been fired. "Enjoy the tunes, enjoy your lives and don't touch that dial," his statement ended. "You ain't seen or heard the last of Willis Earl Beal."

Both his parent record label, XL, and the imprint to which he is signed, Hot Charity, refused to comment when asked about their relationship with Beal and the reasons for the cancellation. An email to his manager to try to establish what was going on returned an automated message: "I no longer manage Willis Earl Beal." No one, it seems, wants to talk about him.

Speaking from his new home in Lake St Clair, in the Pacific north-western state of Washington, Beal offers the germ of a possible explanation: "It's hard dealing with an artist, particularly me."

Difficulty has been a key part of the Beal story. He became perhaps the most unlikely addition to powerhouse British independent label XL – home to Adele and The xx – when he signed a reported five-album deal, via its New York-based imprint, Hot Charity, in 2012. A musician in the American folk tradition, who sings with a golden, soulful croon, there's no questioning his talent. But there was plenty of evidence in his extraordinary backstory – which XL used to market him to the public – that he might become a tricky character.

Single-minded and claiming to always have felt detached from others, 29-year-old Beal had a tough upbringing in Chicago's southside, then joined the army. After being discharged on medical grounds in 2005, he scratched around Chicago and Albuquerque, walking out of as many menial jobs as he was fired from. Even when people have helped him, there's been trouble. In Albuquerque, a man called Jesse Del Rio offered him work and a place to stay, but they fell out, and it's not particularly surprising that he has always had a fraught relationship with those who have released his music.

Soon after he signed, Hot Charity/XL put out a set of 11 ultra-lo-fi home recordings, Acousmatic Sorcery, which he had collected together over a number of years when, at times, he had been homeless. Intriguing and highly original, they resonated with a large number of music fans, who saw him as an outsider artist in the vein of Daniel Johnston, or even his hero, Tom Waits. Beal, however, was embarrassed by how amateur the recordings were and later said that he had asked Hot Charity/XL not to make them his first official release.

Yet speaking from Lake St Clair, which he moved to from New York after getting married, he seems content. "As I talk to you now, I'm looking at evergreen trees, fir trees and an icy wonderland paradise," he says. "It just snowed yesterday and I don't think they get much snow up here. Me and my wife are pretty much snowed in, and that's absolutely all right." Nevertheless, he says, his relationship with the recording industry is strained, at best. "Things are always hard; in fact, much harder than I ever anticipated. They want me to do things their way, which is understandable, but I'm a former street musician and I'm used to doing things differently."

There's no suggestion that Hot Charity and XL won't honour the albums left in his agreement, and summer festival dates, including Latitude, are set to go ahead. He's annoyed that the decision to pull his seven-date European tour, which was due to start at Village Underground in London on 18 February, was made without his blessing, but he understands that for an XL artist, he's small fry. "I've got an audience in France, I've got an audience in Belgium, I've got an audience in Britain, but at the same time, it's concentrated in the larger areas – the capital cities," he says. "I'm still basically obscure."

In Principles of a Protagonist, an animated film Beal made last year, he narrates: "A protagonist needs to rely on his principles. Principle 1: Sincerity. Never do or say anything contrary to your overall intentions." In practice, that means Beal can come across as self-centred, bitter, narcissistic, iconoclastic and selfish – all words he has previously used to describe himself. He also once said: "Sometimes I'm walking down the street and feel like a potential sociopath." In the most shameful episode of his career, he was arrested while on tour in Holland in May 2012 for allegedly assaulting a man (he also has a scar on his face which he has said is the result of getting into a fight in Nottingham when he played there).

If the PR backstory played up the romantic notion of the tortured outsider, accessing his muse through madness, Beal refused to play up to it: "I'm not trying to glorify mental instability – that used to be a very romantic notion for me, the mentally fractured artist," he told the Observer last year. "I'm not insane. I just had a few hard times in my life and a bit too much solitude, and it pushed me to the edge."

He couples ferocity with intense sensitivity and he's drawn to wounded bird-type characters such as Cat Power, with whom he has become close friends, and Lana Del Rey, whose song Black Beauty he wrote a response to. Tracks on his new record, such as The Axeman and Babble On, are among the most tender and beautiful he has written, and in January he was at the Sundance film festival promoting a Tim Sutton-directed movie called Memphis, in which he stars as himself – an experience he says he found profoundly difficult, but rewarding.

It certainly isn't "the last of Willis Earl Beal", although he accepts that Hot Charity/XL might currently be sick of him and in need of time out. Neither label would go on the record to publicly offer Beal their support, but that won't stop him from making music. He's got a surprise for them – his third album is very nearly finished – although he doesn't expect them to release it any time soon, nor does he believe he will ever be the kind of artist they imagined he could be.

"I made a good living for a while, but that was almost three years ago," he says. "I was constantly on the road and I developed a very strong liking for exotic foods. I felt like Rick James, without the coke habit. I bought many pairs of new boots and it was more money than I'd ever seen before. I didn't really know how to deal with that. But I want to emphasise that fame and fortune, that's not where it's at. It can give you a lot of things; it's given me a way to express myself, but at the same time what I'm doing now – riding my bike, making music alone – that's the way I started out. That's what I know."