Phosphorescent releases dreamy new album 'Revelator,' reflects on making Nashville home

Phosphorescent—the stage name for Nashville-based singer-songwriter Matthew Houck—spent six months crafting his newest album, but it was recorded over the course of only five days in his East Nashville studio.

On April 5, he released his new album "Revelator," a spacey, lonely nine-track album about drift and exploring one's own psyche.

The album comes alongside a spring tour that will take Houck to Mississippi, Texas, Georgia and more before heading out in August on his first European run of shows in six years.

Houck spent an afternoon with The Tennessean in the music studio that he built from the ground-up in Nashville to discuss his life in Music City and the arrival of "Revelator."

Houck's life changes with fatherhood and Nashville move

The Alabama-born alternative-indie artist moved to Nashville about seven years ago, but much of the city still feels unexplored to him.

"It still feels kind of like a newish town to me," he explained, "I felt like I didn't really get ingrained in the town for the first couple of years."

Houck was zoned in, working to finish his 2018 album "C'est La Vie" when he first moved to Nashville. He's also a dad to three young kids, and then he found himself in the pandemic. Time flew by before Houck realized he hadn't soaked in the city.

As it turns out, Phosphorescent has only played a handful of times in Nashville due to touring schedules and the pandemic.

"Revelator," however, isn't necessarily centered around Nashville. "I think this one just felt free from time and place," he said.

"It really did feel like there was magic in the air. It was easy to just get lost in making the record and staying in the world of these other sounds. I do think it probably could have been made anywhere," he said.

'Revelator' arrives: A hazy, lonely, pensive album

"Revelator" was recorded in Houck's Nashville studio following his 2022 collection, "The Full Moon Project," through which he released a cover each month on the full moon. Some of his covers included Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Corpus Christi Bay" by Robert Earl Keen.

In 2018, Houck released his most recent studio album "C’est La Vie," an acclaimed alternative album with hit "C'est La Vie No.2." And now, six years later, Phosphorescent's eighth studio album is here.

"It's an inward looking record, for better or worse," Houck said about "Revelator." "It's a sad record."

"Revelator" was created alongside collaborators Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs, Jim White of Dirty Three and Houck’s partner, singer-songwriter and pianist Jo Schornikow.

Houck said the album was recorded over five live sessions in February of last year. "Nobody knew the songs yet," he said. "We didn't know each other yet.

"And so it was a thing of like, really wanting to trust everyone's initial instinct... then did a lot of overdubbing." From there, he worked on the record for another six months, tweaking and perfecting the original frames of the songs.

His process starts with a creative burst of lyricism, he said, followed by months of fine-tuning, and even now, Houck says he's still processing what this album really means for him and about him.

"It's still actually it's kind of revealing itself to me now, what it is about," Houck said of the album.

"If you're lucky, you get into a state when you're writing stuff that just turns off your front brain -- and just kind of go with the back brain," he said. "Kind of like automatic writing, but it's something close to that. You just trust the process of it and you kind of look at what's there."

The nine-track album is an ethereal, dreamy and reflective collection of indie-Americana tracks.

Phosphorescent's record starts with the title track, "Revelator," a flowing, hazy track that showcases Houck's vulnerable lyrics and emotive voice. Houck says the track was the album's North Star, that is only made sense to name the album after the track.

"I got tired of bein a badass all the time," he sings. "I don't need anybody better / I don't need anybody ever, I never have."

Houck notes that the album was "a lot more affected by the pandemic than I would have thought it was." Appropriately, the songs capture feelings of finding oneself in solitude and turning inwards, instead of to others.

Houck draws inspiration from family on new album

Despite capturing these feelings of isolation, Houck's album was deeply inspired by his loved ones.

Houck's parter Jo Schornikow wrote one song on the album, “The World Is Ending." It became the first Phosphorescent track on an original album to be penned by anyone other than Houck.

"I just adored that song, I thought it was one of the most saddest and most beautiful things I've ever heard," he said. So I was like, 'Can I record that?' It's like that song just dovetailed so perfectly with all these other terrifically sad songs that I was making."

The track has a warm flow to it despite its morose lyrics. The song goes: "I might have apologized / But I have never been wrong / I know the world is ending."

"The World Is Ending" isn't the only song to have been created with the help of Houck's family. Song "It's All the Same" came to being with the help of Houck's daughter.

"I was just up in her room one afternoon and she just had this little piece of paper on her desk," Houck said.

"She had been looking out the window where there was these trees and (she) had written, 'Empty bare leaf trees and trees with leaves. They're all the same.' I was like, (that's) just so stunningly beautiful."

Houck took the phrase and used it as the beginning of the tune, singing "Leafy trees and empty trees / They're all the same / Blowing trees and frozen trees / They're all the same."

The song brings listeners into a world of positive nihilism. Though Houck—and his daughter—may be pointing out that everything is the same, Houck finds beauty in the "sameness" of nature. That appreciation is reflected in the track, which holds its own grateful radiance.

That juxtaposition isn't just the center of that one song, it's the crux of Phosphorescent's entire "Revelator," balancing feelings of loneliness and desolation with deep gratitude and self-exploration.

To listen to the new record and learn more about Houck, head to phosphorescentmusic.com.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Indie artist Phosphorescent releases 'Revelator,' talks Nashville