An Evening with Phosphorescent
Sublime bummer songs brought to joyful life in Utrecht
On Sunday evening in Utrecht, Phosphorescent did something I’ve not experienced in decades of watching live music: he was both the support act (solo) and the main event (with his band) of the night’s show, billed as An Evening with Phosphorescent.
In the slot usually filled by an upcoming or allied artist, Matthew Houck - who first began performing under the name Phosphorescent some 20 years ago - played a selection of songs solo for the sold-out crowd. When planning the current tour in support of new album, Revelator, the notion had arisen for him to play “some older stuff, some different stuff that wouldn’t fit into the time allotted for a rock show”, he said, by way of explanation. “It’s going to be a lot of Phosphorescent tonight,” added Houck with a smile, before moving into the opening chords of “C’est La Vie No.2” off his gorgeous 2018 album, C’est La Vie. Immediately, Tivoli’s perfectly intimate Pandora venue fell silent, the audience spellbound as we heard, this time unadorned, the song’s lyrics - “I wrote all night/Like the fire of my words/Could burn a hole up to heaven/I don't write all night burning holes/Up to heaven no more” - that describe the before and after of a life forever altered by love and children and new geography. It was followed by a version of “Terror In The Canyons (The Wounded Master)” that emphasised the unnerving starkness - “And I'm not so sorry for the heart-wreck” - of the original through Houck’s singular voice, at once cracked and yielding and commanding.
The next song is special and warranted a more detailed explanation from Houck. Acknowledging that the evening would include a lot of “bummer songs”, the artist told us that there are “maybe none more so than this one, which I didn’t write”. The song is “The World is Ending” which was written by Houck’s partner Jo Schornikow and which includes two lines that I find impossible to get out of my head whenever I listen to it - “Cause I belong to an older song/It's a feeling unrelenting”. In what he calls a stroke of luck, because it is the “most beautiful song I’ve ever heard and also the saddest”, the artist and songwriter left it off the album she was working on and it now appears on Revelator, cosmically destined to find a home on a Phosphorescent record. Schornikow’s own album is called Altar and, her partner tells the audience, it’s a great record (I have written about Schornikow and Altar here, and Houck is absolutely right about her criminally overlooked work).
There were a few guitar mishaps early on, tuning issues and whatnot - the stuff of bad dreams, confided Houck - but the audience could not have cared less: we were right there with him as he moved into a tender take on Vern Gosdin’s “Any Old Miracle” (but perhaps not as tender as this one, filmed a decade ago with Schornikow, the couple’s newborn baby lovingly cradled throughout). “Wolves” and “Cocaine Nights” (two great tracks off 2007’s Pride) also feature in this solo set, as does “Endless” which Houck told us has found a new home in the scoring work he has done on the new Paul Schrader film, Oh, Canada (which reunites Schrader and Richard Gere, 44 years after American Gigolo).
If the opening set felt akin to sitting with Houck on his porch, the main event was like being at the Nashville bar that regulars never want to tell anyone about because it has the best working band for miles around. For this part of the evening, Phosphorescent - the band - was encircled by vertical lights, pedal steel, drums, bass and keyboards coming together with Houck’s guitar and voice in a way that moved between rip-roaring raucous to raw, contemplative and bruised.
First up was a trio of songs off Revelator - “Impossible House,” the album’s title track and “Wide As Heaven”, all richer and even more captivating than on the record. It’s increasingly rare these days to hear recorded songs being brought to life so joyfully in a live performance as we experienced on Sunday night. The waltzing “There From Here” and the rambling “New Birth in New England” off C’est La Vie, the plaintive, unsettling "Tell Me Baby (Have You Had Enough)" off 2010’s Here’s To Taking It Easy and the Willie Nelson classic“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” drew us further in before the final songs of the evening unfurled on stage.
No artist is a single song, far less one who has been releasing music as long as Houck has. But when the opening notes of “Song for Zula” sounded, the air in Pandora was incandescent and we were heady with the emotion of the composed masterpiece of a tune unfolding before us. Thirteen years after it was released, Muchacho’s centrepiece - a beguiling tale of disfiguring love (the meaning of which Houck has only recently spoken about in this illuminating feature in The Line of Best Fit) - remains a pinnacle of songwriting, and also a pinnacle personal moment because I have long wished to see a song I have listened to many, many hundreds of times played live. Phosphorescent has recorded several versions of “Song for Zula” and, undoubtedly, performed it live too many times to count. But there was not a moment in the performance in Utrecht - Houck leaving his guitar to the side and just singing - that didn’t feel like a gift, that felt like an obligation to the those of us in the audience.
It was all brought to a close with Muchacho’s aching “Down to Go” and “Ride On/Right On” which offered up a jangling, communal and uplifting end to a night of “bummer” music that was celebratory and remarkable in a way I know I’ll be remembering for a long time to come.
I leave you with this, dear reader.
I would take a guess that “Cocaine Lights” was probably the first Phosphorescent song I heard when it arrived in our then-Johannesburg home as part of the compilations that accompanied Uncut magazine. In this instance, it was featured on a 2008 CD titled Long Time Gone that also included a handful of other songs that I can never get enough of, including The Felice Brothers’ “Frankie's Gun” and Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love” (though, truthfully, neither of these as beloved as “Song for Zula”). I have included the list of songs on that compilation at the end of this piece - a reminder of a time when music magazines and journalists were genuinely, even lovingly, taste-making, long before the algorithms took over.
One last thing. As might be expected for someone going through chemotherapy (shout out to the staff at TivoliVredenburg for bringing me a stool to sit on), I have been thinking a little more than usual about mortality and, sometimes, about a song that might be played when one day I leave for the place of the souls. It may change still but, for several years now, I have thought it should be Phosphorescent’s “At Death, a Proclamation”, in particular the version recorded in 2021 for The BBC Sessions which you can listen to here. To me, it’s a hymn for the ages.
O in life
Through many dark rooms
We must go
O in life
Through many dark rooms
We must go
And all right
Though many's the hour
Will come to you sour and slow
And all night
Though flames in the forest ring halos
To glory us both
All I
Can bring to that of smoke
Is the hope that you knowed:
O love
Though one day I tarried too far
And I never came home
O love
Always I carried your heart
Married deep in my own
1. Fleet Foxes - Mykonos
2. Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Who Built The Road
3. The Felice Brothers - Frankie's Gun
4. Bon Iver - Skinny Love
5. Howlin Rain - Dancers At The End Of Time
6. American Music Club - The Decibels And The Little Pills
7. Joan As Police Woman - To Be Lonely
8. Silver Jews - Suffering Jukebox
9. Willard Grant Conspiracy - Lost Hours
10. Thalia Zedek - Body Memory
11. Ravens & Chimes - Eleventh Street
12. Dawn Landes - Bodyguard
13. Phosphorescent - Cocaine Lights
14. The Black Keys - Things Ain't Like They Used To Be
15. Dirtmusic - Morning Dew
Sounds like the only song you didn’t get was ‘The Quotidian Beasts’, but wow, what a concert and what a set list. Great to read a excellent and thoughtful review from such a fan. Thanks Di.