Look Away, Dixieland
Phosphorescent's Matthew Houck Plays Two More Shows Before Leaving Athens, So Flagpole Interviews… His Dog?
originally published November 29, 2006
Patrick Dean
She came to him; he had no choice. Out of a mess of brambles and river and all covered in ticks, Gracie Lou made her way into Matthew Houck's life. And for a handful of months, they lived together in a small and yellowing house on Nowhere Road, just northeast of town.
Gracie Lou is a dog; Matthew Houck is a singer. Houck, an Alabama native, has for the past five years lived in Athens and created music under the name Phosphorescent. The debut album A Hundred Times or More introduced Phosphorescent to Athens in 2003, and it was followed by the 2004 EP The Weight of Flight and last year's moving full-length Aw Come Aw Wry. The songs move from raucous blasts of sound and emotion to delicate, folk-inflected songs - all connected by Houck's tenuous, keening vocals.
The dog left a while ago; the singer will soon. Gracie Lou, a young Husky with striking grey eyes, headed back into the woods a week before Houck was about to leave on tour. Houck plans to move to New York City in early 2007. "It's treated me really well the last few times I was up there," he says.
With Houck out of town for the past month on a tour of England and western and central Europe, Flagpole tracked down Gracie Lou on one of the last warm days of the season. After convincing her that we would reveal no details of her new life, we discussed Houck's new songs, these last several shows in Athens and that sequined denim jacket laced with Christmas lights that Houck is so fond of.
- Flagpole
- Can you talk a little about yourself? Your interests, that sort of thing?
- Gracie Lou
- Oh, you know, the regular stuff. Running into the street. Licking people's ears. Oh, and squirrels! Love squirrels. Looove 'em. Chasing them, biting them, barking at them. Lately, I've also found it very liberating to just run around in circles at very high speeds… it's a pretty good way of tackling the existential malaise that I assume all North American mammals in 2006 feel every now and then. A good way to break out of the everyday blah, kind of. You should try it some time!
- Flagpole
- I totally know what you're talking about. That is fun. How did you first meet Matthew?
- Gracie Lou
- He was working at some building by the water…
- Flagpole
- The Broad River Outpost?
- Gracie Lou
- I guess. I'm a dog, so I don't really pay attention to a lot of details. Anyway, I guess this was in July or so that I showed up there. He seemed nice enough, and he scratched me in the right places. By the way, this isn't weirding you out? A talking dog and all that? Most people get a little upset, so that's why I just keep quiet most of the time. But we can all do this, you know.
- Flagpole
- No, no, it's fine. Please, continue.
- Gracie Lou
- Right. So, I hung around there while he was working, and at the end of the day, he seemed nice enough, and so I decided to go home with him. I'm sure a lot of your readers know what that's like - the ladies, I mean, who've been in similar situations. And then, when it was time, I left.
- Flagpole
- Why?
- Gracie Lou
- Well… I could tell a change was coming. At the time, I wasn't really sure what was going on, but I didn't want to get hurt, so I left before anything happened. Since then, I've heard that Matthew's moving to something called New York in a couple of months. I guess it's time for him to go. Same with me, though, so I understand.
- Flagpole
- Heard from whom?
- Gracie Lou
- The Athens area has an extensive network of chatty and well-informed woodland creatures.
- Flagpole
- What do you know about the jacket that Matthew wears when he performs? The one that works best in pitch black?
- Gracie Lou
- You mean the one that looks like the sky? With all the twinkling lights? Not much, really… he already had it when I showed up. He'd put it on at home sometimes, but I think he mostly used it whenever he would leave the house with his guitars and not come home until late. Do you know where it came from?
- Flagpole
- He picked it up in Madison, GA, in March of this year. Actually, he emailed me about it from Switzerland on this current tour: "Walkin' around in those junk shops down there with a close friend. Saw that glittering cowboy jacket hanging all by itself and thought, whoa, now that's a jacket. And there was a big antique full-length mirror, so I put it on and was checkin' it out. And it was immediately clear that for this jacket to reach its full potential - I mean, it was already pretty special - but for it to really shine, so to speak, it was gonna need some alterations...
"Phosphorescent was leaving the next day for a short tour - just a couple shows that would take us to Austin, TX, for the South by Southwest festival. And those are some pretty long drives. A lot of hours in the van. So! Packed a string of electric lights and some tape and thread and scissors and spent those hours patching in the lights. And by the time we got to Austin, it was ready to go."
- He said the Swiss Internet café he was in smelled of dog food. Maybe he was thinking of you.
- Gracie Lou
- Aww, that's sweet.
- Flagpole
- Can you tell me anything about Matthew's songwriting process?
- Gracie Lou
- You should probably ask him about that.
- Flagpole
- I did, a little bit, before he left for this tour, but he's clearly uncomfortable talking about his own work. He'd avoid eye contact, and use his fingernails to trace designs in the circles of water left on the table from water glasses, and he'd squirm a little in his seat.
- Gracie Lou
- Oh! Speaking of fingernails, it's been a while since I've had a good scratching behind the ear. That's one of the several things I miss about living with Matthew: guitarist fingernails. Would you mind?
- Flagpole
- Not a problem. So you don't know anything about specifics for an upcoming album? He mentioned to me, "The songs are taking new shapes of their own, and I'm trying to honor that with the recordings and not push it."
- Gracie Lou
- No, not really. Well, a little. Remember, I left Matthew a while back, and so when I took off, he was planning on having everything done before he went out on this tour. In fact, there were a lot of nights when we'd be in the room with pianos, guitars and wires on all sides, and I'd really just want to go follow some smell from outside. But from what I can gather, I think he's going to have another full-length, with maybe nine or 10 songs. They seem like they're longer than they have been in the past.
- Flagpole
- New songs like "My Dove, My Dove, My Lamb" and "Cocaine Lights" have poked their heads up in recent live shows, and before he left for tour, Matthew played almost-finished versions of the recordings. They do sound a lot… I dunno, fuller? With more atmospherics and vocal layers. But surely you must know more details like release dates or labels or something. You spent almost every day with the guy for months straight. Can't you throw my readers a bone?
- Gracie Lou
- Ha ha, very funny.
- Flagpole
- So the details of these last two Phosphorescent shows before Matthew takes off: it'll be a full-band show at the 40 Watt on Thursday, and he'll be backed by Ray Raposa of Castanets, former Athenian piano player Scott Stapleton and a handful of other local and non-locals. And then this thing at Flicker on Monday… do you know anything about that?
- Gracie Lou
- He spent some time talking into that little plastic thing he held to his ear about that one with some other people, and it sounds like he's going to do something with that Ray guy and two people called Liz Durrett and Jason Molina. Like maybe they'll all be playing solo or together or something. But I'm not even really sure what "playing solo" means. Is it like playing fetch?
- Flagpole
- You seem to have inconsistently varying degrees of knowledge about human things. You know what a piano and guitar are, but not a cell phone?
- Gracie Lou
- Eh, what can I say? I'm a dog.
- Flagpole
- Gracie Lou, thanks for taking the time to chat. Should we, um, shake hands?
- Gracie Lou
- Sorry, I don't do that one. Sometimes I'll do "sit," or "lay down," but that's about it. I find the more anthropomorphic tricks a little demeaning.
WHO: Phosphorescent, Titans of Filth, The Good Ship, Jeff Fallis
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Thursday, November 30
HOW MUCH: $5
WHO: Matthew Houck, Jason Molina, Liz Durrett & Ray Raposa
WHERE: Flicker Theatre & Bar
WHEN: Monday, December 4, 8:30 p.m.
HOW MUCH: Call
Dreaming A Highway
Thoughts On The Career Of Songwriter Gillian Welch
originally published November 29, 2006
Gillian Welch
The cat is hardly out of the bag regarding the steady arc of Gillian Welch’s unique status in the American songbook. Since 1996, she has released somebody’s bona fide favorite record every two and a half years. With a wheelbarrow full of Grammy nominations, all-star collaborations and soundtrack contributions, she still enjoys a quiet celebrity unshared by most colleagues of her stature. Perhaps a result of her obliquely demure demeanor, it only fuels the mystique compelled by the calm intensity of her presence onstage and on tape.
The catch with Welch falls where her historical context meets the breadth of her palette. In the decade since her first album, 1996’s Revival, was released, an ongoing proliferation of acoustic sensibility has blossomed throughout popular music. Call it the unplugged effect, and witness it everywhere from Uncle Tupelo to Outkast’s “Hey Ya,” from the resurgence of Neil Young to the moment Beck dropped that deliciously hokey slide loop that names “Loser.” Attribute it to a generation of musicians and music fans born in the late '60s and early '70s coming to roost in the fold of the radio of that era. They are the folks that brought you alt-country in its here-to-stay form. They are now the torchbearers of their own influences; in the South, this was often country music, with roots winding back to the Appalachian hills, before electricity, when there were only strings.
The smash success of the Coen Brothers' 2002 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and its accompanying soundtrack came as little surprise to diehard fans of old-timey and bluegrass music. Tucked into the folds of the soundtrack was a voice already known throughout the songwriter world, one that embodied the soul of longing, regret, sorrow and, ultimately, hope. By then, Welch was barely more than Nashville-famous, even with countless high-profile contributions on tributes to the likes of Gram Parsons, Kate Wolf and Pete Seeger; she had collaborations in the bag with Ani DiFranco, Allison Krauss and Ralph Stanley. Additionally, she and partner David Rawlings found time to act as Whiskeytown frontman Ryan Adams' backing band on his solo debut Heartbreaker. In the six years prior to O Brother, Welch had also churned out three discs of her own compositions - Revival, 1998’s Hell Among the Yearlings and 2001’s Time (The Revelator) - each too mystifyingly succinct with tradition to seem contemporary. 2003's Soul Journey continued the trend of creating albums that seemed unearthed, plow-hewn, found accidentally in a tree stump along some windy gap. When the world finally came around to Gillian Welch, her work stood openly prepared.
Adopted the day after her birth in 1967 by two Manhattan musicians who made their living writing for television and Broadway, Welch moved with her parents to Los Angeles after they secured a gig writing for "The Carol Burnett Show." She grew up around instruments and songbooks, and ostensibly started playing in bands as soon as she started college at U.C. Santa Cruz. After a cloistered musical childhood, the excess and freedom of college led to a spin out. Art and ceramic classes followed, and she moved into a house where a few folks played bluegrass, and the effect was electric. Pizza parlor gigs followed, but nothing about her said “pay any attention to me” at the time.
After the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, a shaken and restless Welch took a hiatus house-sitting in Wales before returning to the states for music instruction at The Berklee College of Music in Boston. There, in the hall waiting for an audition, she met David Rawlings, who would become her collaborator and partner. She stayed at Berklee for two years and majored in the just blossoming songwriting program. After realizing every album she’d ever loved came out of Nashville, she decided to hit the road and try her luck there before completing the degree. Rawlings joined her there some months later and the two began making the singer-songwriter rounds as a duo.
It wasn’t long before luck and persistence payed off. At the Bluebird Café in November 1993, she signed her first writing contract. Her first master session came in 1994 with Robert Earl Keen's “Gringo Honeymoon,” and a 1996 Starbucks compilation featured her song “Paper Wings.” Jerry Moss signed the two to Almo Records the same year and released Revival. By the time Hell Among the Yearlings was released in 1998, it was clear that Welch had spent a great deal of her years absorbing the traditions of musical Appalachia, and her songs have been performed and recorded by artists like Solomon Burke, Chris Thile and Jimmy Buffett.
Filtering those traditions through a narrative lens that focuses on a protagonist singing in first or second person, Welch’s songs convey the restlessness of the poor, the weary, the unlucky. David Rawlings’ delicate and nimble melodic accompaniment underscores her relentlessly accurate rhythmic strumming, and the effect is captivating. When the two share harmonies, it's a powerful and tonic blend of rustic noir.
WHO: Gillian Welch
WHERE: Melting Point
WHEN: Thursday, November 30
HOW MUCH: $28
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