Grant-Lee Phillips & Howe Gelb

Walking in the Green Corn, is the newest album by Grant-Lee Phillips. It’s ten songs are drawn from Phillips’ intensive investigations into his native lineage. Phillips, who is Muskogee (Creek), elliptically explores the intersection of past and present, personal and political. While the songs delve deeply into the subconscious mystery of his own back-story, they simultaneously reveal the resonance and insight of ancient myth in parallel to contemporary man’s emotions, actions, and errors.

 

Composed in a concentrated burst over the course of a few winter months, Walking in the Green Corn came about almost too quickly to censor—the unltered sum of years of rumination and discovery. As the days became shorter, the nocturnal Phillips became more productive. “I’m pretty good in the morning,” he says, a smile emerging, “which for me is about 2pm. I did that in a half-awake state, I can make a little bit of headway.

Then I become more conscious as the day goes on...I have to wait until the evening and the rest of the world has quieted down to resume.”

 

What initially began as o-the-cu home recordings, designed to capture the songs at the moment of conception, soon took on a life of its own. “Initially I gured that, somewhere down the road, I’d get some musicians together in a cathedral-like space and re-record these songs,” Phillips explains. But the disarmingly warm, bioluminescent quality of his simple home recordings had the certain weathered elegance that, in Phillips’ words, “would have driven me mad if I attempted to recreate them in a professional studio environment.” With the exception of violin and vocals by Sara Watkins (formerly of Nickel Creek) and an understated vibraphone part by Alexander Burke, everything on Walking in the Green Corn was performed, sung, and engineered by Phillips.

 

“I do my best work when nobody’s paying attention – including myself,” he recalls. “That’s what happened: it really snuck up on me. By the end of the year, I had most of the album written and recorded. Little by little I’d play the songs back for my wife, Denise (Siegel), on long drives up the San Joaquin Valley. She’s an artist and writer with uncanny ears and instincts. She kept me aimed in the right direction, brought a lot of objectivity to the project. Denise was my co-producer here.”

 

The mix of euphoria, wonder, and caution brought about by fatherhood—a heady emotional cocktail that fueled Phillips last album, the critically lauded Little Moon—also played a hand in this projects, as his thoughts turned to his own mixed heritage. He has always found his ancestry, which encompasses both Native American peoples European settlers to be a fertile source. “Connecting to my ancestry is like having this deep trunk that’s embedded in the earth, with deep roots. It was always something that was important to my grandmother, who was Creek, and to my mother.

 

So, after becoming a father, I wanted to be able to answer all those questions I know I’ll be asked one day, when my daughter takes an interest in where we come from.”

The opening “Vanishing Song” functions equally as an ode to rediscovering the ancient songs of his forefathers and as a longing for a purity and wisdom long corrupted by modern man’s material lust. A similar theme pervades “Fool’s Gold,” of which Phillips says, “Perhaps there is no other kind of gold. Look what it does to us, look how it drives people mad. Look how it drove a whole nation westward and all the suering that came with it.”

 

Exploring timeless myths and rituals also lead Phillips to discover a certain palpable awe and majesty in life around him that mirrors his ancient inspirations. The loping “Grey Horned Owl” celebrates a beast long associated with insight and wisdom, equating its constancy and calm strength with the unwavering dedication of a devoted partner. “Thunderbird,” perhaps the album’s most stark and intimate performance, nds Phillips overwhelmed by the mighty bird of myth—and equally enchanted with the mysteries and uncertainties of earthly attraction.

Since emerging in the early ‘90s as the front-man and songwriter of the internationally acclaimed trio Grant Lee Buffalo, Phillips has been drawn to the conicts at the heart of the American experience. The resulting body of work, which consists of four GLB albums and six uniquely divergent solo albums, has placed Phillips among the most revered and admired songwriters of his generation. His post-GLB career in particular has found him exploring a wide range of palettes and textures, from the roiling synthscapes of Mobilize to the rootsy clarity of the pedal steel-laced Virginia Creeper.

 

Walking in the Green Corn shares an elemental purity and richness with Virginia Creeper, but further pairs down both the performances and the compositions. “It comes down to the purest form of expression that I can hear,” Phillips explains. “I have to get o on my own, allow myself to disappear to do my best work.”

Walking in the Green Corn comes together as an evocative penetration into our own troubled era. And yet, the album’s optimistic title track completes the album on a meditative, redemptive note—implying that the potential for change and betterment is within reach, and that perhaps the best solutions can be found by looking backwards and forward simultaneously.

“The Coincidentalist is someone who can read the coincidences but who doesn’t try to figure out their meaning. For if one tries to figure out the meaning it will be lost. The coincidences aren’t there to figure out but to point the way.” – Howe Gelb

The Coincidentalist marks the New West Records debut of Howe Gelb, the freewheeling luminary whose three decades of voluminous recording with his category-busting band Giant Sand have forged a legend of Southwestern American roots punk and international prominence. The album culminates 30 years of restless creative work by Gelb, a Pennsylvania flood evacuee who relocated to Tucson in 1972. After meeting up in 1976, Giant Sandworms began in 1980 with his close friend Rainer Ptacek, the renowned slide guitarist. That group morphed into beloved genre benders Giant Sand in 1983. Giant Sand’s incarnation in the ‘90s included Joey Burns and John Convertino, who went on to form the acclaimed Latinesque unit Calexico.

Gelb says of the sources of his sunstruck music, “I always thought there was a similar attitude between Thelonious Monk, Neil Young, and Clint Eastwood, but I could never articulate why. I was drawn to those guys early -- there was something about the way they did things.” Whether as Giant Sand, Howe Gelb or any number of group rubrics (The Band of... Blacky Ranchette, Arizona Amp & Alternator, ‘Sno Angel, OP8) the shape-shifting, ever-evolving musician has issued a long run of indefinable and influential recordings ranging from punk and roots-rock to jazz, gospel and even traditional Spanish music. Aside from his own venerable catalogue of “erosion rock” as he likes to call it, Gelb discovered M. Ward and Grandaddy along the way, releasing the former’s debut album on his own little label. Gelb explains, “Giant Sand becomes this collection of dudes that I hang with for a season – a season can be a few years or a decade. When I go solo, it’s a different palette; it’s an open palette. I can be free enough to get anyone new.” Produced and recorded by Gelb largely in his home base of Tucson, at Wavelab studio and Harvey

Moltz’s studio, his latest solo album is somewhere between the musician’s 40th and 50th, but don’t ask him how many records he’s made, because he’s not sure. Gelb is the principal vocalist and plays guitar, piano, and chimes. His band on this record is made up of guitarist M. Ward, Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley and Giant Sand bassist and all-around co-conspirator Thøger Tetens Lund. Gelb’s friends, Scottish singer KT Tunstall (whose most recent album Invisible Empire/Crescent Moon was co-produced by Gelb), Bonnie Prince Billy (a/k/a off-center Americana songsmith Will Oldham), violinist Andrew Bird, and pedal steel guitarist John Rauhouse all make appearances on the album. One track’s intro/outro features Spanish flamenco musicians Juan Fernandez Panky, Lin Cortés, and Anil Fernandez, who collaborated with Gelb on his foray into gypsy folk on his 2010 album Alegrias. Since the turn of the millennium, Gelb had recorded and performed increasingly in Europe, and spent an increasing amount of time in Denmark, his wife’s home country. But he rediscovered his creative roots in his hometown last year.

“I fell back in love with the scene in Tucson,” Gelb says. “ The new crop of inspirational players and songwriters are in such abundance. They have a particular sizzle.” But he appears to be at a loss in explaining his own original connection there. “I tend to believe it’s the stuff that’s already inside you that makes living in a certain place comfortable. Something about the place agrees with your sensibilities. I think I just like how uncluttered it is there, because things always clutter up in my head. To be in a place that’s so empty and minimal – that’s what suits me.”

Although The Coincidentalist was recorded in the desert, a fortuitous circumstance brought Gelb together with New West A&R executive Gary Briggs far from home. “When I was returning home from my last European solo tour,” Gelb recalls. “As fate would have it, I got sick, so I had to push my flight back. I was getting on the plane, and I heard a voice behind me, and it was Gary Briggs. He introduced himself, just as we were going through security, connecting in London. And there were four security lines, so fate had put us together in the same line. And I just turned to him and said, ‘Well, you should be putting out my new record.’ We were on the same flight, and it was like a 10- hour meeting, with him all jet-lagged and me with the flu. By the time we landed, we knew we were right for each other.” Gelb’s collaborators on the album are a mix of old colleagues and comparatively recent creative allies. He first met Andrew Bird during a joint tour with Kristin Hersh a decade ago, while Jon Rauhouse has been a longtime accompanist of another Gelb mate, Neko Case. He vividly recalls his first encounter with Oldham, who shares the vocals on the album’s leadoff track

“Vortexas” (Gelb’s term for Tucson). “After 9/11 we did this huge Barbican show and then again something similar in New York,” Gelb says. “I met Will, and he kissed me on the lips. That made an impression! I had heard his records for years, and they’d always grabbed me. The idea with ‘Vortexas’ was for the song to be homage to the Merle

Haggard-George Jones album A Taste of Yesterday’s Wine. Billy Sherrill’s production on that always blew my mind. Will understood the idea.” Gelb has only recently begun working with Tunstall, with whom he was partnered on a singer-songwriter tour set up and hosted by Robyn Hitchcock, with Martin and Eliza Carthy, and Krystle Warren. “We just

hit it off,” he says. “I didn’t have any preconceived notions of her. I really liked the way she handled a song, and her voice! – I’m a sucker for a really soulful voice.” Two of the album’s most potent tracks – the piano instrumental “Instigated Chimes” and “Picacho Peak” – were cut solo by Gelb at home, where he records live to CD through an old four-channel mixing console formerly owned by Jonathan Richman. Gelb says of the latter number, “It’s a kind of lyric writing I’ve been enjoying more and more lately. You’re in a slipstream and you don’t know what you’re writing about, and then at some point it comes around to you, in the middle of recording or the middle of putting something down. It’s – what’s the word? – a rumination.”

 

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