Photos by Dusdin Condren
It's a rainy afternoon in December, and I'm supposed to meet Phosphorescent's Matthew Houck at a rundown Greenpoint watering hole called Palace Cafe. One problem, though: It's closed, ostensibly because most drinking establishments don't expect weekday patrons before 4 p.m. I text him to see if he'd rather just talk at his apartment-cum-recording-studio nearby, but that suggestion is shut down. Instead, we walk in the rain, searching for a bar that's willing to serve us.
Ten minutes later, we enter local beer garden the Keg & Lantern, and Houck addresses the bartender in a manner that suggests he's been here a few times before. We grab a beer and start to head out to the heated patio in the back, but he stops suddenly. "Can I get a shot of tequila, too?" He offers me one. (I decline.) At the end of our interview, he decides to hang around, since he'd made plans for a friend to meet up and knock back a few more.
There's little doubt that Houck, a professed road warrior, lives hard; a particularly despondent cut from 2007's cracked-blues opus Pride goes by "Cocaine Lights", and much of his new album Muchacho addresses how hard living-- illicit substances, infidelity, and the like-- can affect personal relationships in nearly irreparable ways.
Born and raised in Alabama, Houck has lived in Brooklyn for about six years now. He lived in relative isolation in the borough's Navy Yards area ("If my environment encourages me to become a hermit, I'll do it") until he was evicted in 2011, decamping to Greenpoint, studio gear in tow. Shortly after that, Muchacho was recorded over the course of a year, with production handled by Houck himself, mostly in his own home. "It's not so much a 'studio' as it is a junky practice space-- no professionals would ever walk in there and be like, 'Whoa.'"
Far from the sullen type, Houck is warm and gregarious in person, but when it comes to talking about the contents of his music, he can be reticent-- which is ironic, considering that Muchacho is the most straightforward record of his decade-plus career, from the ragged Neil Young burn of "The Quotidian Beasts" to "A Charm/A Blade"'s Soft Bulletin-esque sway, to the meditative elegance of first single "Song for Zula". The record's welcome warmth may suggest an artist preparing for his close-up, but in conversation, Houck's still more willing to recede into the shadows.
Pitchfork: You're on the road a lot. Do you like touring?
MH: It sounds really bratty to bitch about being able to travel and play music for a living, but touring is a damaging and destructive way of life. There’s a kind of mental blankness that being on the road encourages. You have to shut down a few things in your mind, or you’ll go crazy. If you’re touring at my level, you’re not touring in a comfortable bus. You’ve got to get up at a certain time of the day and then shut yourself down for six hours while you’re driving. It does something to your mind and your spirit. It’s not like you can do much that's productive when you’re crammed in a van, except read a book or listen to some tunes. It makes your mind lazy.
The last time I was on the road, I thought, "Just a few more months, and then I’ll go home and tend to everything." But when I got back, everything was too far gone to fix, so there was fallout. Losing my place [in the Navy Yards] was a big deal. It’s a big space, and over the years I acquired a decent amount of gear. New York is a beast, man, it’s hard to find a place to do music unless you’re going to soundproof it. Relationships are tough when you're on the road, too-- my girlfriend would come on some of the tours, but it wasn't easy. Drugs and booze were involved. So I lost the place, lost the girl, and lost my mind.
Pitchfork: Some artists write songs that sound incredibly personal, but then it turns out that they're more fiction than representative of personal experience.
MH: It's impossible not to draw from your life-- that’s all you’ve got. Even your imagination is instructed by what you know. It’s very interesting to hear what people come up with when interpreting my lyrics. There are lines that are so personal that I'm mortified that I’m even singing them.
Pitchfork: This record sounds more well-produced and labored over than your previous albums.
MH: At this point, I’m just better at making records. In the past, I was just stabbing in the dark. I needed to make those records, but I didn't care about how perfect the sound was. For Muchacho, I had the luxury of building a studio and playing around with sounds for an entire year. I’m really into that. The act of producing records is really interesting to me right now. I'd love to produce for other artists, but I'm always so busy. It'd be nice to not have to worry about the songs themselves, though.
Pitchfork: Muchacho is also more sonically varied than any of your other albums. Did you draw from any specific influences in the studio?
MH: "Muchacho's Tune" was the first song I worked on, and the production was inspired by Brian Eno's Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. That record sounds very moon-bouncy to me, and I figured that sound would couple well with some Mexican cantina-type stuff, to my ears at least. I got the underwater floatiness that I wanted there. I'm really proud of that song.
Pitchfork: Besides recording in your own home, you did some sessions in Manhattan's Electric Lady studio, too.
MH: I made friends with their studio manager, so I spent a day in there with Father John Misty's Josh Tillman. We were just goofing around, and I thought, "This is great, I want to record here." But after three days, I realized that I just wasn't organized enough to make the record there. I can't be like, "These are the hours we have, let's go in and cut a song." I don't work that way, so it would've been a waste of time. I’m bad about being productive-- it takes me 15 hours of lolling around until my chemicals get right and I can get to work.
Pitchfork: Why is the record called Muchacho?
MH: If you see someone who is getting uppity, you might just say to them, "Hey, muchacho, settle down." I was in Mexico, by myself, feeling pretty raw, and I remembered a line in a Neruda poem somewhere. I can’t even remember what it was, but it was something like, "This is how it is, muchacho." That kept resonating to me-- like, "You better handle it. This is how it is, muchacho."
Pitchfork: Your music is often sad-sounding, but there you are on the cover of this album, smiling. You look happy.
MH: I am happy, but I write terribly sad songs. It’s hard to reconcile those things for me; I don’t feel like a sad wreck of a person, but I write from the perspective of a wreck of a person. Also, I wouldn't call that album cover "happy." There’s a messy desperation going on there. It shows that you can be happy when you’re a wreck.