Phosphorescent

Beginnings

Phosphorescent is the stage name of Matthew Houck, who is originally from Huntsville, Alabama, and is now based in Nashville, Tennessee. Before he took the name he toured as Fillup Shack and self-released a limited pressing of Hipolit in 2000. In 2001 he began recording as Phosphorescent in Athens, Georgia. The project is his alone: he sings and plays guitar, piano, bass, drums and ukulele, and the line-up around him changes from record to record.

The early albums came out on small labels: A Hundred Times or More on Warm in 2003, then The Weight of Flight EP in 2004 and Aw Come Aw Wry on Misra in 2005, his first and only record for that label. Pride followed on 23 October 2007 as his first album for Dead Oceans, the label that has released most of his work since. Pitchfork gave it 8.0, and Stylus Magazine named it the 12th best album of 2007. In 2009 he made To Willie, a tribute to Willie Nelson, and in 2010 Here's to Taking It Easy.

Losing the studio

After the tour for Here's to Taking It Easy, Houck lost his studio, his relationship and his stability. He put Phosphorescent on hold, outside of touring, for about a year. In 2012 New York City rezoning forced him to take apart his studio in the Navy Yards area of Brooklyn, and he rebuilt it in Greenpoint. That winter, in the middle of what he called a freak-out, he impulsively booked a trip to Mexico and rented a little hut on the beach in Tulum.

The first song he worked on for the next record was Muchacho's Tune, which he said was influenced by Brian Eno's Apollo. He built the album slowly, in the Greenpoint studio, and produced it himself. He told SPIN that he made it piece by piece, bringing in each player for a single day. For the first time he could afford older analog gear, which he felt made the sound richer.

Muchacho

Muchacho came out on Dead Oceans in March 2013. The title is Spanish for boy, and Houck said he remembered a line from Neruda while alone in Mexico. The album opens and closes with brief pieces that he said were meant to ascend toward light, though he also called the record pretty dark. A large cast played on it, from pedal steel and fiddle to trumpet, trombone and bass saxophone.

Song for Zula was the first single, premiered in December 2012, and a swarm of strings and an electronic pulse marked a shift from the full-band sound of his two previous albums. A video co-directed by Houck and Djuna Wahlrab followed in March 2013. A Charm / A Blade is the album's rowdier moment, with horns that recall Aw Come Aw Wry. Reviews were warm: Metacritic gives the album 85 out of 100, Pitchfork gave it 8.8, and it reached 59 on the US Billboard 200.

Zula went on to turn up in films and television, among them The Spectacular Now, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and the series finale of Superstore. In 2018 American Songwriter called it the song that drove his indie breakthrough, and Houck said the attention was still totally surreal.

Since

In December 2013 Houck played four nights at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and the recordings became Live at the Music Hall, released in February 2015 with 19 tracks. C'est La Vie arrived on 5 October 2018, his first studio album in five years and the first since he left Brooklyn for fatherhood in Nashville. In 2021 Dead Oceans issued The BBC Sessions, five tracks from two BBC Radio sessions in 2011 and 2013, opening with a 2013 performance of Song for Zula. The Full Moon Project followed in 2022.

Revelator, released on 5 April 2024, is his most recent album and his first for Verve. He recorded it over six months at his Nashville studio, with Jack Lawrence of the Raconteurs and Jim White of Dirty Three among the players. His partner and collaborator Jo Schornikow, who played piano on Muchacho, wrote The World Is Ending, the first Phosphorescent song not written by Houck.