Down to Go: An Interview With Phosphorescent
By Don Harrison
Talking about sadness, life and Willie Nelson with Phosphorescent.
By Don Harrison (host of WTJU Rock’s Radio Wowsville, Sundays, 11 p.m. – 1 a.m.)
Something recently dawned on Matthew Houck, the Nashville-based singer-songwriter who has been making exquisitely sad indie rock music for 25 years under the name Phosphorescent.
“It’s not really enjoyable to make a Phosphorescent record,” he reveals. “I don’t know if I put too much pressure on myself or what it is, but I feel there’s an expectation for what a Phosphorescent record is supposed to sound like at this point. And I do very much feel a little hemmed in by that.”
Houck yearns to break out of his carefully constructed persona as a ruminative, sardonic indie-rock shaman. Thank goodness for live performances, where the contemplative songsmith and multi-instrumentalist can stretch out, increase the tempos, and get “pretty unhinged” with his crack touring band. He’s slated to appear at the Broadberry on Wednesday, July 9, with fellow Nashvillian Rich Ruth opening the show as well as playing bass. “The live thing is where a lot of the concerns I have go away. It’s much, much freer.”
The Huntsville, Alabama native, 45, has also been trying some different things of late, like writing the score for “Oh, Canada,” the most recent film directed by Paul Schrader (“American Gigolo,” “Light Sleeper,” “First Reformed”). “I loved it,” he says of movie scoring. “It was free and fun, and I could step out of the Phosphorescent thing and just be a musician.”
The soundtrack features atmospheric instrumentals mixed with re-recordings of early Houck songs, and follows closely on the heels of his most recent album, “Revelator,” the first Phosphorescent studio release in eight years, and the first for a major record label, Verve. He thinks it’s his best batch yet, but recording it was a hard slog. “They’re all hard,” he says. “It takes a lot of work to make it all sound like it just happened.”
Style Weekly recently talked about “the Phosphorescent thing” with Matthew Houck, on the phone from Nashville, Tennessee where he lives with longtime partner and collaborator Jo Schornikow and their three kids. Schornikow, a distinguished singer-songwriter in her own right, contributed one of “Revelator”‘s highlights, “The World is Ending,” the first time a non-Houck original has made one of his albums. She’ll be performing in the band at the Broadberry too. “She’s always there as long as we have someone who can help out with the kids,” he laughs.
Style Weekly: How did you get connected with Paul Schrader and end up scoring “Oh, Canada”?
Matthew Houck: Paul is an avid music guy and had discovered Phosphorescent a few years ago and reached out to just say hi. He came to a show and we met and said hello and it was kind of one of those things that’ll happen, you’ll have conversations like this where someone says, like, ‘We should do something together someday.’ More often than not, it doesn’t happen. But he followed up and said he had a film, and we talked about the concept of it and very quickly, we decided to just do it. It worked out well.
Did he leave you alone to do it or was he involved in the process?
Both things are true. He had a mostly finished cut of the film and he came down to Nashville and showed it to me. The film is about this guy [Richard Gere] who’s at the end of his life and he’s sort of looking back and, you know, reassessing. He’s revisiting the past in a way. So I got this meta idea and thought I could revisit some really early Phosphorescent songs that no one knows, songs from my first two records. And that’s what I did. I recorded a few of those and it was kind of eerie how well they lined up with the film.
What about the instrumental sections?
The score part was just me and my partner Jo, who is a wonderful musician. We projected the film on the wall at my studio and kind of live scored the parts that [Shrader] wanted music for. And then Paul came down and was, like, ‘do this more,’ ‘do this less.’ You know, kind of in his gruff way that he has.
Schrader has been quoted as saying that he chose your music because it’s “anti-anthemic.” Do you understand what he means?
I don’t think I agree with it, but I understand what he’s talking about. I guess I’m fairly flattered about this, but he had originally talked to Bruce Springsteen about doing it. In that sense, I understand. He was saying that Springsteen was going to make everything too anthemic and too big and he needed it to be a bit more downcast. I think I understand what he means about that. for sure. [Laughs]
Click here to read the remainder of this interview
Thank you to Don Harrison and Richmond’s Style Weekly magazine for the permission to re-post.
