I'm supposed to ask you two things. Where do you get your ideas from? And what do you do in Octagon, Alabama?
I get my ideas from the source.
What is the source?
It's difficult to say. Sometimes it’s my beautiful bass player, Nathan McMurray. I would say he's sometimes the source. Other times he's the Oracle… But in Octagon, Alabama, what you do is…the first time I was in Octagon, Alabama, I was out there with my mom and her fiancé. I got faded with my mom. We were just sitting there talking about stuff. She has a really funny tendency to novelize moments that aren't really big. So she was like, ‘Henry, Henry, you've just gotta breathe this in. You just gotta look out. Look out at the world right now.’ I was like, ‘Okay, mom.’ But, all of a sudden, you could hear very loudly and very clearly these coyotes echoing out. Then she started trying to call the coyotes. I would say that's the kind of thing that happens in Octagon, Alabama. It's very quiet and there's no lights and there's no one there except for this guy named Cousin Billy and you just sit. I stayed there for probably a month after recording with Oldstar in New York. I got back to Alabama and I was immediately deathly ill and that was what I did. I just sat in rooms.
And you grew up in Alabama, right?
Yes, I grew up between Demopolis and Livingston in Alabama and Meridian, Mississippi.
Did growing up in the south, growing up in Alabama, affect the music that you make?
I don't think it did. Well, I think a lot of it was just alienation. I felt like I didn't really know what my outlet was. I liked drawing. I really liked comics and Batman and the TV. Then I started getting into music–my dad is a guitar player and a failed country musician. He had this musical revue that was like the Rolling Thunder revue if it happened the first Friday of every month and every time it happened there was a really bad cover of “House of the Rising Sun.” So my introduction to music was torture. ‘Cause I was five years old and I would be in a practice room with a bunch of bluegrass players who were all playing different things. So initially music was a big headache and I didn't want to play guitar or anything. Then I heard the My Chemical Romance song, “I'm Not Okay (I Promise),” which had a really cool guitar solo and I thought ‘I'm going to learn that!’ and I didn't ever learn it, but I learned guitar. I think a lot of early musical influences were just, ‘How far can I get from where I am?’ A lot of stuff was like Broadcast. There was a guy who painted my mom's sets, he showed me Broadcast and the Velvet Underground. He was really interesting because he was from New York, but he moved to Alabama to become a folk artist. Then I started kind of getting more into The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers became important to me. I would say then the country-kind of stylings became more of an influence…But I don't know because none of that stuff was really around me outside of my dad who would just take me around. The only other local music scenes I saw were the blues bars in Meridian and church. I think church was kind of interesting.
What was interesting about it?
People are being forced to sing together. People who don't really like talking to each other, have to sing and eat with each other. A lot of times they're bad, but there's a threshold that happens when enough people are in a room where they don't normally sound bad, like they kind of all sync up and make these weird harmonies and things... We had a big ass organ in my mom's church. I remember being a kid and all throughout my childhood my ears would just ring after church. There was this giant sub-bass organ that sounded like an 808 and a bunch of old people trying to do Greensleeves hymns that have no rhythm. My dad's church had no organ. It was all just singing and that was even weirder. There was a deaf guy who had a really cool voice.
All of these things are very different from what you were doing when you first started making music, though. So how did you get to that point?
Well the first few things I made were just… I was really into a lot of bedroom pop music. I had been producing stuff since I was twelve on iPhones and school computers. So it's kind of a culmination of that. I just wanted to replicate the sound. There was also a lot of Microphones influence, but really the only Microphones influence is that I would layer a bunch of guitars on one song… Eventually around my second album, my music tastes changed. I wanted to make different kinds of sounds. So that one, Living Document, is I think seen as a slowcore album, and it is slow and unintelligible, but there are parts like ‘Dishes’ where it’s just a Rolling Stones riff. It's really stupid and it has a TR-606 on it because I was really into Big Black and you would never know that from listening to that song at all. There's that and there's weird ones on that album that I still kind of am into. There's one song that's called ‘Angjul’ and it's misspelled. I always thought that one was kind of neat because it's like a mumble rap song and I had no business putting that out. It's really funny, I tried listening to it in my car or the other like when I was first moving to Chicago and I almost hit someone because it was so distractingly bad.
What prompted you to move to Chicago?
My friends who make music live there and I needed a centralized band. I should have moved like a year ago, but I only realized after my stint in Octagon and a few other things... I first took a trip there to try to finish this album that I'm working on and it didn't really work. But it made me realize, oh, this place makes sense for me. I just felt like being around Nathan and Evren and a lot of the other people who I kind of know like Braeden [Long]. Braeden made shirts for me and we had a kind of weird Internet rapport. But you know, when I actually met him I was like, oh, this person's awesome, I might depend on him in like six months, which yeah, now he's my rock.
[Braeden: You’re my stone!]
But yeah, I just needed to be in a place with resources and people and I needed to be socialized, which I wasn't really being socialized pretty much since I dropped out of high school.
I feel like in the past year– and I don't know if the move to Chicago affected this at all– your music has been changing a lot. There’s been a transformation away from slowcore into something more akin to country rock. This is something I’ve talked about with Zane (Oldstar) too, but what prompted that change for you?
I just really like riffs like that. We played with a band in Cleveland that were just straight up a slowcore band and they were great. There's something about a band really sitting on a kind of repetitive idea that I still really like. But I think I just… With every album I try to do something differently. I made an album in between Living Document and As the Deer that I didn't fully put out called File Sharing. That was supposed to be more of a folky kind of thing with more of a Bonnie “Prince” Billy or Talons kind of influence. It was supposed to be more ambitious, but I was recording it with a Samson USB mic. There are some songs that are just entirely static and you can hear a bit of banjo under it. So that kind of stayed as this informal project. I didn't really like it because I just wanted to have a complete jarring shift after Living Document. Then I did As the Deer… also Zane and I, we both have a very similar set of influences. I think we were both kind of feeding off of each other during that period. When Zane kind of started doing the country thing more, that was kind of a group transformation. Zane is a person who has a very strong aesthetic aura and sense of what it is they want to do. Like, ‘These are all of the reference points for this and this is how we're going to do it. This is how we're going to tweak it.’ I also kind of have that, but I'm just less developed. So I think those two changes kind of happened at the same time where it's just like we were listening to a lot of different music and kind of frustrated that we weren't making it. We’d just been doing the slowcore thing which is kind of easy and it doesn't always translate super well live.
Can you tell me about the two new songs that you just put out? How did those come together?
Well, I recorded “Hurricane” when I was living with my dad in his parsonage by the Church of Christ where he lives. That was around the Octagon thing. I was basically bouncing between there and the hunting camp and I had just lost my voice, I guess from being sick in Octagon or being sick from New York…I had those lyrics for a while and I was just very frustrated because I realized at that time that I really liked singing and I had never thought about that really. I never thought of myself as someone who really likes to sing. I just thought I was someone who liked to play guitar. So that's why that song is borderline spoken word and kind of like a history lesson or something… But I got this new mixer because I was trying to produce stuff for my friend Olivia who had come down to Octagon in a very spur of the moment, insane sort of thing. So I impulsively bought a bunch of gear because Olivia makes pop music. So I had to have a rat compressor and I had to have some sort of gadget. So my gadget was this Yamaha mixer that had a spring in it and I was like, I'm going to sound exactly like Trish Keenan now. So that's why that song has a ton of reverb and there's like a Michael Jackson bass line in there somewhere. The other one is not new at all and I put it out because I kept on ideating about releasing music for the past year and “Hurricane” had been done since November, like completely done. I finished it in a day and then I maybe compressed it and fake mastered it a week later. Then it was just sitting there with a bunch of other ideas that I've been trying to carve out. Then the song that's the B-side was the second song I wrote for As the Deer and it was somewhat finished around 2023 and Zane plays drums on that. It was sort of a jam that we did right before they had to go back to Florida one day. Hurricane and that one are kind of lyrically similar because I was trying to write a Bill Callahan-style thing that was super flowery but still had some sort of directness. Then “Seeing Ghosts” or “Consuming Spirits” or whatever it's called [editor’s note: Henry was originally going to call the song “Seeing Ghosts” but decided not to because of the potential Kanye connotations.] For that one… that song was really going to set the tone for As the Deer to be a completely different album where it would have been way longer and it wouldn't have had a gay electronic freak out that happens in the middle of it. It would have just kind of been this digital nasty folk record where I talk all about the guts and bones of my life. So that one is super paranoid and has all these images of like… I was reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy, so there's a God burning on the horizon line and 50s Western trope stuff.
You haven't really mentioned it, but I've been listening to a lot of Summer Fun Music 2024, where does that fit in to all of this?
Summer Fun Music was right before my mom moved out of our old house…It was also right before I went on tour with Oldstar, and right before I was homeless. I'd been having trouble making my own music and I was having the most success with like just four-tracking because it sounds like what it is and I can't change it as much. I'm also not a very good drummer and tape can hide that sometimes. Not impeccably, but it can just kind of make it, you know, like, ‘Oh yeah, the bad drumming on a four track album, that makes sense.’ But yeah a lot of the ideas on that are jokes. Like “No. 6” is just me getting hammered alone and then being like, ‘Yeah, I'm just going to sing like Greg Freeman now.’ That one is really lyrically grotesque too. It's just a freestyle. That's maybe Zane's favorite song of mine. They’re just like ‘You do everything I'm scared of.’ I'm like, ‘What? What does that even mean? Those words don't mean anything. They're bad jokes.’ But then there's like one on there called ‘Your Hair pts. 4&5,’ that was an idea from around the File Sharing period that I was trying to write for a long time. I just really wanted to sound like The Glands or something and I failed. It went somewhere else.
You mention Bill Callahan– Where do you draw inspiration from for lyric writing, what do you need to do to write your lyrics?
I mostly just write compulsively, but that's really slowed down. I was really afraid of writing the same thing over and over again and I was trying to read a lot to get different references. So I read a lot of authors like Thomas Pynchon or Denise Levertov. I really like her. She's a poet from the Black Mountain School. She's cool because I didn't know who Rainer Maria Rilke was and she's just like Rilke, but more modern and more sensitive and cool. I liked a lot of their stuff because it's very spiritual, but grounded in a human element that was flawed and sometimes weird and repressed. There's a Rilke thing where he's like “Cut off my hands…” it's like really bad to quote… but it's “Cut off my hands and I'll hold you still” or something like that… and blah, blah, blah, and all this crazy Joan of Arc, ‘I'm going to mutilate myself,’ talk. Then Denise Levertov had a kind of similar poem that was like “After I plucked my eyes out, I'd grown in new ones.” I don't know. I can't remember these things well. But I liked how intense they were and I felt like that was something... I try to write as honestly as I can and then sometimes I try to write like I don't know who I am, like somebody else. Or other times I just write a lot without music at all. That's like the practice for when I'm actually recording something because I don't ever write songs sitting down and then record them ever. I never do that. I try and sometimes they'll make it live. But I mostly just sit in front of a recording device and just hammer at something. So a lot of what I do is just practice for when I have to essentially freestyle. A lot of the time that's where the regret plays in, because some vocal takes are just really good and you’re like ‘I don't know what other word would work for that’ and the word is just something really direct and stupid.
What's your approach to playing live? Because whenever I've seen you the songs sound a lot different than the recordings. Is that more in line with the ethos of improvising as you go?
Honestly, I never really tried to do it sincerely. The Pop Show set was the closest it ever got because I had Desi doing keyboards and had that electronic element. I actually had a second guitarist who could, you know… Awsef and I are kind of similar so I felt like they played like me and that was good… and Evren is just like GarageBand, Evren’s awesome. I don't have to tell Evren to do anything really. Then Nathan knows me way too well and is in the pocket. So that version I thought was the closest to live but it still didn't have… I mean I don't sing the same because I can't hear myself. I've been really trying to work on that. I've been trying to make it more similar to the recordings. But on this tour we kind of went back to being a rock band. Like last night at Pete's Candy Store, I kind of just freaked out and started hitting my guitar and kicking my guitar and our set was over. Then today on the radio [WNYU!] I got frustrated with my capo. So we were a three-piece and we haven't been three-piece in a long time. Will's never played in the three piece but Will is a machine! The most consistent version of memory card for a long time was just me on guitar and singing and then Zane on drums. Zane plays like fucking Ginger Baker. Zane's incredible and a prodigy drummer. Well I guess not now because they're like 22. But they were a child prodigy before then.But that was pretty wild. That was just straight up Southern Rock and weirdly emo. But yeah… I didn't play a lot for a long time. So my approach to live music is… I'm still figuring it out.
Have there been any shows you’ve played where the experience really stuck with you?
The Big Pop Show was interesting because it was utopian and just crazy. I felt like– I saw good flying birds and I was like whoa I'm not that good at guitar. Then we played right before Horsegirl and I was really into that album. I was just kind of like, ‘What am I doing?’ But I think the most interesting show we played would probably be one that was insanely chaotic. We did a tour, me and Nathan and Evren did a tour where we just made up power pop songs that we never recorded. And right after As The Deer right after that album had come out. And I didn't want to play any of the songs. I just wanted to play rock music that I felt like a crowd would respond to because I didn't have enough people to play all those parts and I was really sad and I didn't really want that album to come out initially. It was just kind of just the bane of my existence. So we did that as an escapist kind of thing. I want to say one of those shows had some sort of moment… There was one in Nashville that was in a very small art gallery and I didn't have a tuner pedal, I just had a clip on, and it broke halfway through. Then this guy just gave me his tuner pedal. He wasn't even a band member. He was an audience member. He was just this old head who somehow had a tuner pedal on him. We played with Melaina Kol and that was the interesting part, we weren’t the interesting part. He was on crutches and he carried his own amp which was huge and he played for 20 minutes and it was beautiful. It was beautiful insect music. It was like Panda Bear. It was just him and a drummer and then his amp died, but I thought it was part of the set, and then he just walked away and he was not to be found for the entire show. Then he came up as we were about to leave and gave us his entire cut from the door and he was just like ‘You guys are great. You sound a lot like Dinosaur Jr.’ I was like ‘Ah, cool man.’ And he was like ‘Where are you from?’ I was like ‘I'm from Alabama.’ He's like ‘Oh yeah I used to have a brother who lived in Huntsville.’ I was like ‘You used to have a brother?’ and he was like ‘Yeah.’ And that was…I don't know. I feel like every time we play something crazy happens. I think I'm cursed. I don't think I should be doing live music. I think I should be in a room that's mine with a lot of gadgets and I should never be allowed to get out of it. They should give me english muffins every morning. I hear you can do that in Switzerland or something… or no it's Berlin. You can go up and go ‘I'm an artist!’ So maybe I'll do that and they’ll feed me english muffins and cheese danishes.
Why didn't you want As the Deer to come out?
I was trying to make that album really impersonal and about the world or something. I wanted it to cover a lot of ground. I wanted to do everything that my brain likes about recorded music. Then it just ended up being about my relationship at the time which was super confusing and impossible to describe. It was weird because the person I was seeing lived in Brownsville, Texas. I didn't know if I would ever hear from them again and I still haven't heard from them again. It was just like this weird thing where it was like they know that I make music. So they're conscious of the fact that, you know, if they ever hear this they'll just know because it's like what else would I have been doing at that time? I wasn't really up to much. So it was just this really scary kind of feeling of vulnerability that... I feel like every album I was doing something that was embarrassing and that's always the goal. The goal is to embarrass myself hugely and then to try to become invincible. I think that was just the highest level of doing something that I knew people in my life would ask me about. Literally I had nothing going on. I was living in Demopolis. I was eighteen. I was out of school. I saw no one. My entire social life was playing one show every four months and then the rest of it was just me calling my friends and being like ‘I don't like that new Waxahatchee single. She sounds like a squirrel,’ and having this huge chip on my shoulder about Alabama music. So it was just weird. There's lines on there that just make me shudder. I mean there's lines on everything like that, but that one's like an exorcism.
What do you hope to do with the next record?
I want to make pop music. I just really want to make an album that has a six song minimum for each part. There are three parts. I want the first six songs to be fully, well-produced, danceable pop music where I'm singing well. Then I want the next half to be more of a Thanksgiving record [Note: He means the Portland band, not the U.S. holiday I think], and I wanted the last half to sound like death. I just want to make an album that could at least have one song that could maybe be played once at a party. Then the rest of it has you just sobbing and beside yourself and you're really confused. Also I wanted part of it to be just straight up field noise. There was a good part of the past year where I was just recording everything in my life and then layering it over and over again. I was just making these impossible to listen to songs. I think I wanted to capture this paranoid thing. I also wanted it to be super accessible but I also didn't want it to be accessible. I'm still stuck with it and it was named after a wah pedal and it's still named after a wah pedal. It's all supposed to be about Florida kind-of. I don't know, it's confusing.
When was the last time you wore a costume and why?
Oh this is good. I dressed up like Harry Dean Stanton from Paris, Texas but everybody thought that I was either Slenderman or… I'm trying to remember… Well this is funny because Nathan has a friend who also did this and his name is Henry and they all thought he was Donald Trump. So now there's a composite part of my brain saying that people thought I was Donald Trump. But they just thought I was a guy. They didn't think I was wearing anything. That was the last costume I wore. Then before that I was maybe three years old and I was dressed like Robin. That's actually probably the best thing to understand me is that my hero was Robin. I thought he was awesome. I thought Batman was cool but I didn't want to be Batman because it was unattainable. So I really liked Robin.
