Muchacho is bookended by two echoing, chanted tracks: Sun, Arise! (An Invocation, An Introduction) and Sun's Arising (A Koan, An Exit). And as soon as I pulled it out, the record was done. I'd battled with it so long and it just didn't fit. "And so right when it was around 45 minutes things just kind of clicked. "I'm conscious that an hour is long for a record," he says. It is his nature, Houck says, to think of recording in terms of albums rather than individual songs. "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. "I came right back feeling really excited," he recalls. "I finished five or six songs down there." "And I just made an effort to see if I should be writing," he says. He spent a week in Tulum, on the beach, with a guitar. "At four o'clock in the morning, for a 6am flight, and just left town," he recalls. When the lowest point came, Houck booked a flight to Mexico. "Except maybe the lowest point of all this stuff. "I don't know what the actual catalyst was," he says. 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. "Actually," he says, "five or six of them appeared out of the blue. The return of lyric-writing came suddenly. "Maybe after I'd heard myself singing song after song I just got tired of my own words and thoughts." "Writing lyrics just didn't seem like anything I wanted to do," he explains. Because you can get so lost that you just wonder, what the fuck am I doing?"įor six or seven months, Houck spent his time reconstructing his studio and recording various sound pieces: lyricless, ambient sketches of music. And I wouldn't call it disillusionment, though it had moments of that, but I took a less starry-eyed look at things. "Whatever the problem was, I couldn't blame it on being on the road all the time, which is the easiest excuse. "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. Simultaneously, his relationship began to fall apart. 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. 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. "I cumulatively had been touring for 10 years. "I just really needed to sit still," he says. Houck returned from that tour with the intention of reassembling his life. "Things got messy and it's hard to be aware of how far you've slipped if you're there, slipping." "I guess with the benefit of some distance that was a pretty messy time," he says now. Reading on mobile? Click here to see Phosphorescent playing liveīut 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. 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. Houck's life before these songs were written was a somewhat ramshackle existence: recording, touring, drinking, taking drugs late nights, hard mornings. 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. 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. 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. They had been quietly-feted records that had earned Houck a steady following and critical support, but sold only moderately. Phosphorescent had recorded five albums before the release of last spring's Muchacho. He orders a beer, a pickle-juice shot we head to a quiet corner of the bar. 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. L ate 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.
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