Eric Williger is a soft-spoken, long haired Webster Groves native who has taught himself to play, write and record his own music. He sings and plays the drums, piano and acoustic guitar, and records it all at home on an 8-track cassette recorder. The result is a scratchy, homemade sound that is fairly popular with indie singer-songwriters today.

Williger currently records and performs solo, under the name Sleep In Sundays. The solo project has been a constant for him since he was 15, a sophomore at Webster Groves High School. Until recently, he also played drums with a local indie rock band, Fairgrounds. The band broke up shortly after he quit last summer, but Sleep In Sundays continues to be Williger's creative outlet. All of his songs are original and based on his experiences.

"When I create something, it's an effort to make a memory more permanent," he said. "So (my music is) a lot of good memories or really bad ones."

At live performances, most recently a basement show in Webster Groves on Dec. 23, Sleep In Sundays is Williger as a singer-songwriter, armed with only his voice and acoustic guitar.

"I like to play basements a lot, or living rooms, or houses in general," he said. About half of the time, he plays at more official venues and businesses. His next show will be on January 13, at Cranky Yellow on Cherokee Street.

Williger does all of his own recording, on secondhand equipment he found on Craigslist or ebay. Some of it is digital and some analog, but lately, his favorite  is an 8-track cassette recorder.

"I have 10 or so recorders, more than I can justify, really," he said.

The cassette recorder gives his music a vintage sound, the musical equivalent of a Polaroid photo. His style, which he described as "pop music with folk structures," involves a lot of doubled vocals—he sings the same part twice, sometimes harmonizing, then plays them back together to create the illusion of more than one singer. The same technique allows him to accompany himself on guitar and piano simultaneously.

Williger says his musical style is a shifting one, influenced by whomever he is listening to and playing with at the time. For example, when he plays power pop with Jim Fitzpatrick, another Webster Groves musician, he hears that style reflected in his own compositions.

"I learned the guitar by playing other people's songs. So, as the music that I listen to has changed, my music has changed too," he said. "To anyone else it would probably sound pretty consistent, but to me it's different."

Sleep In Sunday's first official CD release was a split album, shared with Fitzpatrick's solo project Falsetto Boy. Williger is currently finishing up his first full-length album, and is planning to release it in February.

For the past few months, Williger has been living in Olympia, WA and attends school at Evergreen State College. It is a liberal arts school with no majors, required classes or grades, which was named by the Princeton Review as one of the nation's most sustainable campuses. Williger said it attracted him because the city is small, with lots of good music and art coming out of it. One of his favorite record companies, K Records, is based there as well.

Williger is back in Webster Groves now, and will be for the next several weeks. His next move will be to New York in March, where he will live with his brother, who owns a record label  in Brooklyn called Blackburn Recordings. His plan is to try to find an internship writing creative nonfiction, while he continues to make music.

He said he doesn't intend to seek a career in music, and even though it would be nice to make money from it somehow, that's not the goal.

"The whole reason (to make music) is in the hope that you can say something that someone will respond to," he said. "And as long as that happens once, with one person, it's worth it."