MATTHEW Houck is lost in the Christmas lights. “Where the fuck am I?” he mutters to himself as he squints at the map on his phone. He’s standing on a bridge over a fake river, next to a busy ice-cream parlour. Every surface in every direction is covered with lights, blinking and fading in different rhythms. The effect is disorienting, almost psychedelic. Houck has been here many times since moving to Nashville a decade ago, but he still doesn’t know his way around the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. “I love this place, how fake everything is,” says Houck. “It’s weirdly beautiful.”
Rather than some of the old Nashville haunts – like Robert’s Western World or Brown’s Diner – Houck appreciates the inauthenticity of this weird, sprawling theme park, which houses multiple hotels, a convention centre and a water park, as well as the Grand Ole Opry itself. Slick pop-country is piped in from hidden speakers, while the scent of chlorine from the ersatz rivers wafts through the air. This is Houck’s “happy place”, according to his wife, the singer-songwriter-keyboardist Jo Schornikow, and tonight he’s stopped by for a much-needed distraction.
Looking completely out of place with his scruffy beard, tattered Indy 500 cap (once pink, now brownish), and scuffed motorcycle boots, he is jittery with nerves and excitement. In just a few months he’s releasing Revelator – his first collection of new Phosphorescent songs in six long years. It’s a sharp, sad, surprisingly humorous album, full of slow-burning grandeur and lustrous arrangements. It stands among his finest work, yet the logistics of making such a comeback have been weighing heavily on him.
“There’s a reason you do all this,” he says, referring not to the spectacle of the Gaylord Opry but to all the work that goes into maintaining a band. “I try to find ways to just take a break from all the
