Phosphorescent Sittin’ Down In Heaven

By: Dennis Cook

Matthew Houck by Sebastian Mynarski

Hard to place but unmistakable, there’s a profound resonance to the music of Phosphorescent, the recording moniker of Matthew Houck. With tendrils reaching back to the golden West Coast ’70s rock explosion, the grounded feel of classic Nashville, and further afield into the timeless elsewhere of Megafaun, Hiss Golden Messenger and other slippery contemporaries, Phosphorescent is deep stuff yet hardly unapproachable. One of the first descriptions I hit on for Houck’s work was that it had “a stratospheric reach that suggests a new fangled kind of country-gospel that just might reach all the black clad sad sacks who obsessively listen to Elliott Smith and Iron & Wine” (see rest of review here).

In the years since that impression his music has grown simultaneously denser and more accessible – a mighty rare dichotomy that creates an appealing push-pull for the listener, who’s made comfortable and oddly uncomfortable by turns. One floats along his stream only to bump into truthful logs and other psyche poking flotsam. Put another way, Houck makes you hum AND think, two things he excels at on Here’s To Taking It Easy (released May 11 on Dead Oceans). Abetted by his touring band – Scott Stapleton (piano), Jeffrey Bailey (bass), Christopher Marine (drums), Jesse Anderson Ainslie (guitar) and Ricky Ray Jackson (pedal steel) – the new album possesses an ease and gently tugging forward motion befitting the title, but also dustier, less polite elements than the indie rock ghetto Houck and his crew are often lumped into. Your average skinny jean wearing mope isn’t capable of pulling off lines like, “If I’m talking to you, mister, then you best be writing down what I say/ If you’re talking to me like that then you best be quickly walking away/ I can’t stand for none of this bullshit/ I came here to play.”

A few more clues to the band’s ethos and wit come from their MySpace page, which contains the slogan “Turn it On. Turn It Up. Turn Me Loose” and the description “Experimental / 2-step / Gospel.” These are the same guys who cut one of the finest tribute albums of the past decade last year, To Willie (JamBase review), a confident saunter through the Willie Nelson catalog that never genuflects too deeply and was good enough to attract the attention of the Redheaded Stranger himself, who invited them to play last year’s Farm Aid. Seeing Houck on the same stage as Willie, Neil Young, Jeff Tweedy and the other big guns behind Farm Aid just made perfect sense. That’s the strata this guy operates in, steadily turning out one quality album after another and earning his stripes in barrooms and concert halls worldwide.

JamBase had the good fortune to snag a few minutes of Matthew Houck’s time while he and his band were waiting on a flat tire. The show must go on but sometimes one does need a fresh wheel to make it happen.

JamBase: The new album has such a great title. It’s one of those cool phrases that one wonders how nobody else got to it before you.

Matthew Houck: You’re right [laughs]. I like it, too.

JamBase: It immediately, before you’ve heard a note, settles your brain into a place, and titles don’t always do that. Often they’re puzzles to be unlocked and this is a handshake that puts you at ease before you put the needle down.

Matthew Houck: I’m really glad it comes across like that because that was the title from the beginning. It was the very first thing I wrote down even before we started recording these songs. But you know how these things go, when it came to actually title this record after it was all done I, of course, spent a couple of days knocking around different themes present on the album thinking the very first thing I wrote down couldn’t possibly be the title of the album. But as it turns out, there was no question, that’s the title.

Phosphorescent Band by Miss Martha Jewelle

It situates you right away in a mindset that says this is not to be rushed; it’s to be eased into. In ways you’ve modernized the vibe of early Crosby, Stills & Nash or solo Paul Simon. You’ve found that groove but in a contemporary, non-derivative way.

There’s nothing I dislike more than throwback, regurgitated, genre-specific exercises, where people write songs like they were written in the 1920s or something. There was a specific effort – I produced it and did a lot of the engineering – to study all those records from the late 70s/early 80s. Those records have a sonic quality that’s absent from most records today, and I thought it’d be a good thing to aim for that sound, though obviously without access to all that gear.

One of the things you nail is you can actually hear the instrumentation on this album, which is something that’s been lost in much modern production, which tends to blur sounds into one mass. It’s pleasing to hear the crack of a snare drum or someone shaking bells or string strikes. It often gets shorthanded as ‘warmth’ but I don’t think that’s all that it is.

Exactly. It’s not actually warmth. I’ve gotten really enamored with engineering and the way you capture sounds. It does get shorthanded a lot as warmth but it’s not. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a separation of things and an expansion of each one of those things so they fill up the space.

I think it’s a word people are wary to use, but there’s a grandeur to those records that’s largely missing from rock ‘n’ roll these days.

I totally agree, and there’s something special about those records. There was one album I referenced a lot when thinking of the sonic universe of [Here’s To Taking It Easy], and that’s Ron Wood’s [I’ve Got My Own Album To Do]. It is a monster of a record. There’s parts of it where the only that’s happening is an acoustic guitar, a bass and maybe a drummer pattering away, but that’s it, just three instruments, yet somehow it sounds massive. How they were able to do that is a super fascinating trick to me right now.

It’s a room filling sound, and there’s a sense of place. The music doesn’t seem disengaged from the world, it’s made somewhere tangible, which is strikingly different to modern production which makes music sound like it was done in a cleanroom. Where did you record Here’s To Taking It Easy?

We recorded the whole record with the exception of “Hej, Me I’m Light” as a band in three days at Headgear Studios in Brooklyn with this guy Alex Lipson (The Jealous Girlfriends) engineering. So, we tracked everything live and I took those tracks to my studio and used those sessions as sort of blank tape to build the actual record. So, they got manipulated and recorded over and worked on for about six months.

One thing you’ve always done well, and again on this record, is your use of the human voice. You seem to be interested in the potential of what you and others can do with vocals. You play with your voice in interesting ways and I don’t think you have a sound, per se.

Phosphorescent live

You don’t think so? I disagree. I think the human voice thing has been the common thread – to me, anyway – that makes a Phosphorescent record a Phosphorescent record.

Maybe what I mean is say as much as I love Bon Iver, a lot of the time he’s hitting one groove, whereas I think you have a lot more variety even as distinctive as your vocals are.

Sure, I can agree with that, and I think it’s only gonna get a little more diverse given the new songs that have been popping out. But I do think the vocals are the common thread to all Phosphorescent songs. They do a lot of different things to songs. They may not exactly go together from record to record but the singing is a link.

With so many artists it’s really easy to trace their lineage – this band plus this songwriter plus this band equals the sum total. I dig that I can’t do that with you.

For me, it’s really hard to trace things backwards like that. I’m not aware of any specific influences from inside [myself]. I’m drawn to music that has that one little extra thing inside it. Unique isn’t the word because uniqueness isn’t that important, but heart or something. You can just kinda tell when something’s doing that one extra thing.

You frequently capture emotion and heartfelt intent on tape. It’s clear through your singing and the general atmosphere of your music that “one extra thing” is present. It’s ineffable but it’s certainly tangible and often most apparently in your vocals.

I think I’ve learned a lot about singing over the years. At some point, even as much as you’ve stubbornly ignored it, you learn ways to control your voice and little techniques from playing and touring so much.

However, your vocal style and production in general presents challenges to adapting the songs to the live setting.

There’s no challenge because by and large we let go of the recorded versions and the live versions are what they are. Very rarely do we even try to reproduce something from a record. When I’d tour solo there’s only so much you can do by yourself, so I’d fall back to the core and play with various effects pedals and the like. But now with this band – who are seriously some of the best musicians alive, in my opinion – we generally toss the recorded versions aside and just see what we can do live. It’s a moment and we’re in it.

Phosphorescent performs tonight at the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco with J Tillman and Little Wings. Find full Phosphorescent tour dates here.

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