Phosphorescent: 'It's hard to know how far you've slipped, if you're slipping'

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/28/phosphorescent-matthew-houck-interview-muchacho

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Late Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn, the street full of long shadows and day drinkers, I watch Matthew Houck pull up outside the bar on his motorcycle, low sun catching its chrome trim and the top of his pale blonde hair.

It is the day after Houck, who performs as Phosphorescent, has played the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Crossing Brooklyn Ferry festival, and he carries an air of post-show contentment about him. He orders a beer, a pickle-juice shot; we head to a quiet corner of the bar.

Phosphorescent had recorded five albums before the release of last spring's Muchacho. They had been quietly-feted records that had earned Houck a steady following and critical support, but sold only moderately. Muchacho, then, was something of a revelation: where its predecessor, 2010's Here's to Taking It Easy, had sold a total of 15,000 copies, Muchacho notched up 20,000 in its first month alone.

The success of Muchacho is difficult to pin to one reason: a shift in sound, possibly, from the easy country drift of earlier records to something more urgent, more compelling; the propulsion, perhaps, of a startling first single, Song for Zula. But what is certain is that it is a radiant collection of songs: a breakup record, certainly, but equally the sound of a man apparently waking from a stupor and coming to his senses.

Houck's life before these songs were written was a somewhat ramshackle existence: recording, touring, drinking, taking drugs; late nights, hard mornings. He had begun his musical career in the early noughties, an Alabama native relocated to Athens, Georgia, performing first as Fillup Shack, later as Phosphorescent, and touring widely.

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But by the time Here's to Taking It Easy was winding up its tour cycle, he was several steps into his 30s, and felt the need for some kind of reckoning. "I guess with the benefit of some distance that was a pretty messy time," he says now. "Things got messy and it's hard to be aware of how far you've slipped if you're there, slipping."

Houck returned from that tour with the intention of reassembling his life. "I just really needed to sit still," he says. "I cumulatively had been touring for 10 years. And I decided to just stop and I thought that stopping would give me the opportunity to put together all of these things that had been falling apart. And that wasn't the case. There was just too much to fix."

In the wake of his return, Houck learned he would have to move from the home and studio where he had lived for six years. Simultaneously, his relationship began to fall apart. "I think that was the first time I ever slowed down enough to have a moment like that, where everything musically and personally just seemed at a questioning point," he says softly. "Whatever the problem was, I couldn't blame it on being on the road all the time, which is the easiest excuse. And I wouldn't call it disillusionment, though it had moments of that, but I took a less starry-eyed look at things. Because you can get so lost that you just wonder, what the fuck am I doing?"

For six or seven months, Houck spent his time reconstructing his studio and recording various sound pieces: lyricless, ambient sketches of music. "Writing lyrics just didn't seem like anything I wanted to do," he explains. "Maybe after I'd heard myself singing song after song I just got tired of my own words and thoughts."

The return of lyric-writing came suddenly. "Actually," he says, "five or six of them appeared out of the blue. Writing kind of forced its way in, and all of a sudden all this stuff just came out." Was there a spur? He thinks for a moment. "I don't know what the actual catalyst was," he says. "Except maybe the lowest point of all this stuff. Things just came to a head."

When the lowest point came, Houck booked a flight to Mexico. "At four o'clock in the morning, for a 6am flight, and just left town," he recalls. He spent a week in Tulum, on the beach, with a guitar. "And I just made an effort to see if I should be writing," he says. "I finished five or six songs down there."

He returned rejuvenated. "I came right back feeling really excited," he recalls. "Feeling I was going to make this record work and focused and feeling really good about it." He found a new apartment and set about reconstructing his studio as a home for these new songs.

It is his nature, Houck says, to think of recording in terms of albums rather than individual songs. "I'm conscious that an hour is long for a record," he says. "And so right when it was around 45 minutes things just kind of clicked. One song got cut. I'd battled with it so long and it just didn't fit. And as soon as I pulled it out, the record was done. It was like a puzzle."

Muchacho is bookended by two echoing, chanted tracks: Sun, Arise! (An Invocation, An Introduction) and Sun's Arising (A Koan, An Exit). They sound something like prayer or hymn, and together they help to bring a reverential quality to the album, as if heralding the start and close of a song cycle or a book of hours.

It is surprising, then, to learn that at first Houck had planned to conclude the record with Song for Zula – a defiant farewell of a song, a portrait of love as an imprisoning, ferocious creature to be defeated. "See, honey, I am not some broken thing / I do not lay here in the dark waiting for thee," he sings. "No, my heart is gold, my feet are light / And I am racing out on the desert plains all night." It is the type of song that makes you sit upright and press repeat.

Reading on mobile? Click here to hear Phosphorescent's Muchacho on Spotify

"I wouldn't have expected people to like that song the way they have," Houck says. "The things that people have brought to me and said to me about what it means to them … I think it just doesn't matter now what I was doing when I wrote it."

So he will not unravel its meaning, or the circumstances of its writing. "No," he says, looking sheepish. "I kinda can, but I know it's silly to be abstruse, but that one is …" Special? "It does still feel special to me, it does," he nods. "Yeah, more than the others, to be honest. I think I've been lucky enough a handful of times to have done something which I feel is above what I think I can do, where I don't know where that little thing has come from." It is a strange feeling, he says. "It's an emotional and physical feeling, and there's an element of doubt in it when you're doing it, because you know you're doing something above your ability."

These songs do not hurt to play. "Every once in a while you'll feel it," he says. "But by and large there's a separation as a performer. It's craft. I've almost got nothing to do with these songs when we play them; by the time they're out they have almost nothing to do with my personal life at all."

"There is," he continues, "a pretty big difference between the making these records and the touring of them. On the road absolutely you're a team. I have a fantastic band – you share, and it's gorgeous."

But the songs always begin alone. "This thing is just a solitary pursuit," he says of songwriting. "It's something I don't know how to do any other way. I don't let anybody hear it until I know that it's done, because I think the kind of stuff I'm dealing with requires a certain vulnerability, or an open state that precludes others being present."

He has to seek out solitude to find that open state. "It takes a while, it takes a minute. It's not a matter of a few hours, it's a matter of a few days until you can access those kinds of feelings," he says. "So I think it's getting out of your setting, out of your social obligations, out of your personal connections." He considers this a moment. "Which is weird because I guess in the end what is music doing if not connecting with others?"

• Phosphorescent play a free in-store show at Rough Trade NYC on 30 November, followed by four shows at Music Hall of Williamsburg from 18-21 December. The Guardian hosts the #GuardianGreenRoom interactive digital lounge in Rough Trade NYC.

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