PHOSPHORESCENT

Despite finding peace and stability with his young family, Matthew Houck –the creative force behind PHOSPHORESCENT – still agonises over his intensely melancholic music. As his first album in six years surveys both his hellraising past and becalmed present, Houck guides Uncut round his Nashville haunts in search of answers. “The sign of agood record is that weird panic attack you have once it’s done,” he confesses to Stephen Deusner

Photo by CURTIS WAYNE MILLARD

Matthew Houck in 2023: “It’s very rivery, this record”

MATTHEW Houck is lost in the Christmas lights. “Where the fuck am I?” he mutters to himself as he squints at the map on his phone. He’s standing on abridge over a fake river, next to abusy ice-cream parlour. Every surface in every direction is covered with lights, blinking and fading in different rhythms. The effect is disorienting, almost psychedelic. Houck has been here many times since moving to Nashville adecade ago, but he still doesn’t know his way around the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. “I love this place, how fake everything is,” says Houck. “It’s weirdly beautiful.”

Rather than some of the old Nashville haunts – like Robert’s Western World or Brown’s Diner – Houck appreciates the inauthenticity of this weird, sprawling theme park, which houses multiple hotels, aconvention centre and awater park, as well as the Grand Ole Opry itself. Slick pop-country is piped in from hidden speakers, while the scent of chlorine from the ersatz rivers wafts through the air. This is Houck’s “happy place”, according to his wife, the singer-songwriter-keyboardist Jo Schornikow, and tonight he’s stopped by for a much-needed distraction.

Looking completely out of place with his scruffy beard, tattered Indy 500 cap (once pink, now brown-ish), and scuffed motorcycle boots, he is jittery with nerves and excitement. In just afew months he’s releasing Revelator –his first collection of new Phosphorescent songs in six long years. It’s asharp, sad, surprisingly humorous album, full of slow-burning grandeur and lustrous arrangements. It stands among his finest work, yet the logistics of making such acomeback have been weighing heavily on him.

“There’s areason you do all this,” he says, referring not to the spectacle of the Gaylord Opry but to all the work that goes into maintaining a band. “I try to find ways to just take abreak from all the other stuff. It’s easy to let it subsume the things you wanted to do in the first place, the things you’re actually good at. That’s what I’m fixated on lately. I made arecord and then I immediately just wanted to make another record. But I can’t, because Ihave all this other stuff to do. I’ve got to figure out touring and photos and videos and all that stuff.”