For more than three decades, Grant-Lee Phillips has carved out a singular path as a songwriter who balances honesty with optimism. From his years fronting Grant Lee Buffalo to a celebrated solo career, Phillips has continued to confront the darkness (in all its forms) while making sure the light gets through.
His latest album, In the Hour of Dust(out September 5 on Yep Roc Records), deepens that legacy with songs that draw on his heritage as an enrolled citizen of the Muskogee (Creek) Nation. It's an important and inspired release that honors the beautiful complexities of life as only a mature artist can.
Analogue: There's a real sense of addressing, describing, or even lamenting the world as it is on this record. Yet there's also always a light that shines through. That's been a staple of your catalog, which made me wonder if that stems from a sense of responsibility in some way.
Grant-Lee Phillips: Yeah. I think the sense of duty comes down to being truthful to myself, owning up to that turbulence and those mixed feelings, holding on to optimism. But it's also wrestling with all of those anxieties at the same time.
You're quite correct. I think it probably is a thread that you can find through a number of songs, going back all the way to Grant Lee Buffalo material. I guess I just try to find new ways to approach these things, just as I do with my life. I try to find new ways of surmounting the uncertain and moving forward.
Analogue: Is songwriting cathartic for you in that way? Is that how you find the light?
Grant-Lee Phillips: I suppose it is, maybe more than I might realize. I rarely go too long without writing. There are periods where I feel I have to take a break from writing when I'm in the throes of promoting a new one and presenting new songs.
It's all that I can do to remember the old classics and the yet-to-be classics, but usually when I'm out on the road, it's that solitude that is just the perfect condition for me to sit down and put my thoughts to the page or coax a melody. It's a pretty solitary act, though.
"You could easily carbon date these albums just by listening to them and getting a sense of whatever my preoccupations were at the moment."
Analogue: I'm projecting here, but some of us would say the days are darker than they've been. Does that affect what we're talking about here?
Grant-Lee Phillips: I think if one takes a close look and takes the work in, you see there are different colorations for each record. I can look back to 2008 or 2010, to the album Little Moon, and my daughter was just born at that time. That record is a playful record. There's a newness to it
The one prior to this was largely written and recorded at home and in more of an isolated fashion during the pandemic. So there's always a reflection. There's always residue. You could easily carbon date these albums just by listening to them and getting a sense of whatever my preoccupations were at the moment.
I don't spend a great deal of time listening to them once they've been recorded. So you might have to remind me what's on this new album. Which one are we talking about? [Laughs]
Analogue: You sort of just answered my next question, which was to ask how much you actually go back and listen.
Grant-Lee Phillips: I go back on the seldom occasion when I feel I need to revisit a song and relearn it. I'll get a wild hair to perform it live, and it's been 15 years—that kind of thing. Over the summer, I did several StageIt shows on the computer from home, and that was a good process. However, it did involve going back and listening to some of those things. I
I like the idea that the songs themselves are living creatures that are going to grow and evolve over time. I think that always happens with the work. I find that from the moment of conception, of sitting down and recording a lyric or a melody, to that point in time where it becomes a record, a lot can change in that space. By the time the record comes out, a lot can change.
Analogue: Are any of these songs going to be difficult to perform live?
Grant-Lee Phillips: No, I think all of these are great candidates for being performed live. For one, there are moments where the band is quite grand and dynamic, but all of these songs have their roots in me sitting down at the guitar or the piano. So they're easily translated in that same fashion.
I tend to tour in that way these days, solo acoustically, and I have for some time. I had to get through that hurdle of feeling like I had to present that same energy that I would have, in terms of the early records, the Grant Lee Buffalo records, but all of that has really evolved.
I've found there are different notes, different chords you can lay on and experience something different, and it can be quite powerful when a song is stripped down to those bare components of words and melody.
Analogue: The new album leads out with "Little Men". Was that pretty obvious to open things up?
Grant-Lee Phillips: I usually have a dozen demos, and some of them are just me and the guitar. Some of them might have me playing to something that I've programmed. Then I listen to those things and change the sequence.
I start to get a sense of how these songs bounce off each other. I recognize that one song ends on this particular chord, and another will begin on that one. I'm thinking of it almost in the way that you would arrange a song, that tension and release that you have in a song's arrangement.
You can do that with the way a record is sequenced. So I'm starting to think of it as a record, little by little, but I'm also remaining wide open to being surprised. I think there's a balance with that thing. You don't want to work it all out. You want to be surprised, but I have to feel a little prepared as well.
Analogue: How much of the craft is still surprising to you?
Grant-Lee Phillips: I think, if anything, I've gotten more involved with my own engineering. I'm not an overly technical person, not in terms of my engineering. I know what sounds good to me, and I know how to achieve that. There's a certain level of discovery that's really important, and it could be something very simple, just throwing up a microphone and asking, 'What does it sound like today?'
So I think of that as discovery. There were things that with this record that were surprising. I'm not a drummer, so anytime Jay Bellarose sits down and begins to play, I hear the song in a whole new light. And that's truthful of everyone who played on it.
VISIT: Grant-Lee Phillips
Photo: Denise Siegel-Phillips
