Feb. 10, 2026
Grant-Lee Phillips
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Grant-Lee Phillips first made his name in the ‘90s as the frontman of Grant Lee Buffalo, a critically acclaimed band that released four albums and toured with Pearl Jam, the Smashing Pumpkins, and R.E.M. Rolling Stone named Grant-Lee "Best Male Vocalist" in 1994, and his band became known for their folk-infused rock sound and their reflections on American history.
After Grant Lee Buffalo disbanded in 1999, Phillips launched a solo career, eventually becoming familiar to a wider audience through his recurring role as the town troubadour on Gilmore Girls. Last September, he released his 12th solo album, In the Hour of Dust. The album's title was inspired by an ancient Indian painting Grant-Lee saw at a museum in Pasadena that depicts the twilight moment when cows are led home and kick up dust as night falls.
On today's episode, Bruce Headlam talks to Grant-Lee Phillips about making In the Hour of Dust. He tells the story of how a trip to the La Brea Tar Pits with his old friend Michael Stipe inspired his song "American Lions." And he discusses his songwriting process and how he approaches writing lyrics that balance the personal with larger societal themes.
You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite songs from Grant-Lee Phillips HERE.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Grantly Phillips first made his name in the nineties as the frontman of Grant Lee Buffalo, a critically acclaimed band that released four albums and toured with Pearl Jam, The Smashing Pumpkins, and rim Rolling Stone named Grant Lee Best Male Vocalist in ninety four, and his band became known for their folk confused rock sound and their reflections on American history. After Grantly Buffalo disbanded in ninety nine, Phillips launched a solo career, eventually becoming familiar to a wider audience through his recurring role as the town troubadour on Gilmour Girls. Last September, he released his twelfth solo album, and The Hour of Dust. The album's title was inspired by an ancient Indian painting grantle Soada Museum in Pasadena that depicts the twilight moment when cows are led home and kick up dust as night false. On today's episode, Bruce Headlem talks to GRANTLYE. Phillips about making in The Hour of Dust. He tells the story of how he tripped to the Librea tar pits with his old friend Michael Stipe, inspired his song American Lions, and he discusses his songwriting process and how he approaches writing lyrics that balanced the personal with larger societal themes. This is broken record, real musicians, real conversations. Here's Bruce Headlam with Grant Welee Phillips.
00:01:38
Speaker 3: You have a new album called in the Hour of Dust, and I want to know the story behind the title.
00:01:45
Speaker 4: Man.
00:01:45
Speaker 5: I'll try to make this as concise as I can. But I was out in LA where I lived for some thirty years something like that. I'm a native Californian, but I moved from Stockton, California, to LA in about eighty three, I guess. But some years ago I was at the Norton Simon Museum of Art. It's a great museum in Pasadena, and they had an exhibit paintings from India from about the fifteenth century, I think, and one of them was called The Hour of cow Dust. This is just a really lovely little painting and I love that title. And I wrote it down and just kind of, you know, set it aside and forgot about it for about fifteen years something like that. But it came back to me when I was struting to do a lot of painting myself, you know, I've always been interested in visual art and involved with that, you know, as well as songwriting. But I had a particular piece that I had painted, and I was asking myself what I want to call this, and some part of me was reminded of that particular title, the Hour of cow Dust. I always wanted to do something with that. I thought it might be a song. Who knew. And at the same time, I had taken an interest in a Mayormerican Tonalism, the art movement that it was dubbed American Tonalism a little bit later, but it was roughly the late eighteen hundreds posts Civil War, and this is a period where landscape painters are preoccupied with the idea of twilight, that transition from day to night. And I believe it was sort of a metaphor and a way of encompassing some of the grief and the confusion in the wake of the American Civil War, and.
00:03:45
Speaker 4: All of these things kind of collided.
00:03:47
Speaker 5: And that title kind of leapt forward, you know, in the hour of Dust, a moment of confusion, working your way through the blinding sands of unreality.
00:04:00
Speaker 3: So why was the Indian painting called cow Dust? What does that mean.
00:04:05
Speaker 4: Well, that's a great question that.
00:04:07
Speaker 5: Has to do with this, this moment in the day when the cows are led back home and in doing so, their hoofs kick up the dust, right, and we're blinded by that dust. And it's that moment when we have to light the lanterns, we have to prepare for night.
00:04:25
Speaker 4: Night is about to fall.
00:04:27
Speaker 5: So I thought, well, there it is. You know, it's that theme again.
00:04:31
Speaker 3: You, as well as being interested in art, you are a very impressionistic lyric writer. For the most part, this album's a little different. The songwriting is more direct here.
00:04:43
Speaker 4: I think, Yeah, that's possible. I think.
00:04:46
Speaker 5: I think I've always been trying to be as direct as I could and not realizing that I have somehow veered into the metaphor that happens as well. Maybe with age, with doing it over and over, some clarity comes with that.
00:05:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, a song like you Know she Knows Me? Yeah, it's got a beautiful image of you a kite flying out a window, but it's it's it's a love song. Yeah, Bullies is a song about bullies, little men, No mistaking is it's a great love song. Yeah, in a much more direct in a much more direct way. Was that was that deliberate or is this.
00:05:28
Speaker 1: Is this is just what you're feeling.
00:05:30
Speaker 5: It's deliberate, It's what I'm feeling. I don't believe that it's altogether new, though, I'm I if you look through a certain degree of my work, my solo albums especially, I guess you know, Post Grantly Buffalo, there are songs like Heavenly, Heavenly and Truly Truly, I guess all the double the double titled songs, you know, trying to hammer the point home there. I guess I'll sing it again.
00:05:59
Speaker 1: You know, I can't think of another word that's right.
00:06:01
Speaker 5: I think I've always kind of walked that line, I guess, And for me, kind of citing citing those things that are meaningful to me is a way of kind of of honoring all that I do care about, you know, all of the tenderness of life that seems to get pushed to the side sometimes in this state of constant panic that we find ourselves in. You know, So I choose to sing about those things that keep me up at night. But I also I'm aware of what I'd rather be focused on, you know, and that's the stuff of life.
00:06:40
Speaker 4: As well.
00:06:41
Speaker 1: So I mentioned the song she Knows Me?
00:06:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it does have this wonderful image of you as a kite being swept out the window and the person in your life knows how to get you down from the telephone wires. Did you get stuck on? Yeah, a song like that? Did it start with a simple thought she knows Me? Or did that image begin? How did How did a song like that come together?
00:07:09
Speaker 5: My experience is that the best songs they leave me a little bit confused, and I can't remember writing them, you know, I can't remember how they were written. I can remember being It's like it's like recalling being abducted or something, isn't it. I was on I was on a country road and there was a light and I was backstage in Dublin and I was, you know, kind of plunking on the guitar and I landed on these chords and I began to kind of sing, and in that state of nerves that you get before you go on, I realized, Hey, there's a song here, there's something, something's happening here. I'll sing it into my phone and I did, and then I kind of just kept singing. It never really never you know, really putting too much thought into it at soundcheck, and gosh, maybe a month or so later, turned on the tape, the digital tape, and it all just kind of fell out, you know. But I kind of I have found that that is a good way for me to work, you know, because this is such as a verbal medium, and the songs exist as we're talking now, you know, I as opposed to like the songs having this separate life on a sheet of paper, I would much rather use the microphone as my my quill. And often I'll do that when I feel like, you know, this is just not singing right, let me just turn And you know, I've heard that Bowie would do that as well, you know, trying to work his way through phrase after phrase until it felt natural and it felt right and you can.
00:08:44
Speaker 4: Just trust that process.
00:08:46
Speaker 3: Is that process for you, a short one, a long one?
00:08:49
Speaker 4: Both? It can is.
00:08:51
Speaker 5: It's usually the case of one wonderful spasm of a song, but if it isn't completed in that moment, I might have to wait until the next occasion for you know, to pick it up where I left off. And that too can be kind of spasmodic or just you know, the case of getting in the car and singing along and then it hits me.
00:09:13
Speaker 4: You know, I really have.
00:09:16
Speaker 5: I have learned to try to get out of my own way and that case, you know, let the song kind of write itself, and it does it most always done.
00:09:25
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
00:09:26
Speaker 5: If I use my voice as kind of the skeleton key that that usually seems to work out the best. You know, like automatic writing, but using your voice, you know, it doesn't all have to exist with your wrist.
00:09:39
Speaker 3: And then do you you filled in the chords around that doesn't have to exist with your wrists.
00:09:44
Speaker 4: See it happened right here in the room.
00:09:47
Speaker 3: I thank god we're surrounded by microphone.
00:09:49
Speaker 5: I think they've never written such a genius line like that.
00:09:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, you have very distinctive melodies. There's usually a few intervals that aren't usual. There's a lot of chromatic lines. And what you write. Is that something you work on with songs or is it something that's just where your voice goes.
00:10:08
Speaker 5: I think it's where my voice and where my my fingers go, where my ears go.
00:10:12
Speaker 4: I guess, you know.
00:10:13
Speaker 5: I like exploring with the guitar, like making discoveries, and you know, sometimes sometimes I do get under the hood of some some song that I've always been mesmerized by, you know, like, how do you play stardust? You know, everything that's you know, under the under the stars. You know, there's so much music you can explore and and sometimes when you get it wrong, you wind up discovering something else and that can be my song.
00:10:38
Speaker 3: Do you Is that something you'll do, like you'll you'll sing another song and you'll get a germ of an idea from that.
00:10:46
Speaker 4: I suppose that's. Yeah, that's possible.
00:10:48
Speaker 5: It's more indirect though, It's it's more like sort of like this, like like the album title, whatever time I spent a few years back trying to work out some strange chord and stardust, it might reappear and inspire me down the road, you know. Rodney Krause said something like that, like he played in bands where they had play helped me make it through the night, you know, And he said, if I hadn't done that, then I probably wouldn't have written Leaving the Louisiana and the Pale Moonlighter. You know, these kind of things they have a way of kind of creeping to the surface years later. You know, that's part of the magic of this whole thing is you know, kind of you know, kind of lighting the right incense and and just seeing seeing what happens, and and you know, I like that the spontaneity of it. And there's always a place to chip away. And there are great artists who who are who skillfully craft their work, you know, and and and continue to refine it. I'm not sure where I exist in that spectrum, you know. I mean I have a level of of you know, I have a critical ear as well, but uh, my ear becomes more critical when it feels as though it was forced or it wasn't natural, or you know, uh it wasn't accidental enough.
00:12:11
Speaker 3: Have you have you become more critical as you've gotten older? Less critical?
00:12:17
Speaker 5: I think, if anything, I've become a little more trusting in the process, less ruled by anxiety. I guess, you know, the idea that I don't know. Sometimes you can get yourself into kind of a loop where the idea of like that you won't finish the song creeps in or maybe this is the last record, that kind of thing. But even if that was the case, that's you know, that's probably acceptable. I would find something else to write about. You know what seems like my critical mind is often just anxiety.
00:12:48
Speaker 1: Anyhow, mm hm, anxiety over careers.
00:12:53
Speaker 4: Any number of things. Uh uh yeah, I think that's.
00:12:57
Speaker 5: That's that's the kind of the pleasure in music is setting setting those things aside. It's the thing that I've always you know, when everything was crazy kind of growing up in my house, I turned to the guitar and put on the headphones and kind of lose myself in music.
00:13:15
Speaker 4: It was that, you know, that sense of comfort.
00:13:18
Speaker 1: Did you grow up in a crazy house?
00:13:20
Speaker 5: A crazy house that was a you know, my parents are young, and it seems like there were you know, there were always voices being raised, but there were also you know, there were good songs playing in the house too. My dad loved country music. I have exposed to Merle Haggart and Charlie Pride and all that kind of stuff. My mother was more of a like a carpenter's fan, you know. But it was a golden era in terms of great melodic, depressing songs.
00:13:49
Speaker 1: What made you discover the guitar?
00:13:52
Speaker 5: Well, I can remember sitting back with the family and we would watch guys like Roy Clark, you know, just kind of just shred and everyone was so mesmerized, and I was as well, and I wanted to do that, you know, I wanted to learn how to make sounds like that, play Ghostwriters in the Sky, you know, really simple ambitions, you know, I mean to play it like Roy Clark is a whole other level of ambition. And what I found was that as soon as I picked up the guitar and learned a chord or to, I began to I began to write songs soon after.
00:14:24
Speaker 4: So I'm in high.
00:14:25
Speaker 5: School, I'm fourteen, fifteen something like that, and I've just got a song after song that I'm writing. And it was a good time to have your ears open and discover all kinds.
00:14:35
Speaker 4: Of music, you know.
00:14:36
Speaker 5: I mean things were kind of blasting off overseas, you know, Elvis Costello and great songwriters like that, bands like The Clash. But also discovering Neil Young around that time. That was a big one for me. Yeah, seeing him by himself at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Yeah, that made a real impact.
00:14:56
Speaker 3: You were in LA when you formed Grantly Buffalo. Yeah, so tell me were you playing around town?
00:15:01
Speaker 5: What was the Yeah, we played everywhere around town.
00:15:05
Speaker 4: You know, I.
00:15:07
Speaker 5: Moved to LA three, and there was all this stuff going on, you know, a lot of underground stuff, and we kind of grew up out of that, you know, playing these these little clubs and some of them you would get a gig at midnight downtown, you know, Al's, bar Raji's, all of these these clubs that a lot of well known bands, you know, kind of legendary bands now also kind of cut their teeth in Largo then called Cafe Largo on Fairfax was a it was more of a cabaret actually, and that's kind of what where we came out of mostly, you know, and kind of playing maybe too loud at times for that room and pushing the edge, but that's kind of the that's.
00:15:50
Speaker 4: The secret really, you know.
00:15:51
Speaker 5: It's that kind of steam kettle kind of concept where there's a little more force than you know, and that blows the lid off and.
00:15:58
Speaker 4: It's very exciting, you know.
00:16:00
Speaker 3: I tend to think of LA at that time being like the punk scene, maybe like hair metal bands. I don't think of it being.
00:16:08
Speaker 5: Well, you're right, and that was a strange thing. They're really you didn't really know where to find your own tribe because there was all of that going down on one part of you know, in one part of town, but deeper in the bowels of the city you would find bands like Savage Republic six or so guys, one of them beaten on a flaming oil drum and seems like every guitar was tuned to E and they were just going for it, you know. And in that environment the band Shiva Burlesque, which was the first band that I was involved with with putting together in La we came out of that and then we sort of morphed into Grantly Buffalo as I took my writing into a different place and began to kind of just step up to the microphone. Literally, even though I had written songs and performed, I kind of took a back seat for a period there until I couldn't know more. And yeah, so Grantly Buffer all of that that stuff was somewhere between ninety and ninety three, wrote a zillion songs, and then we signed with Slash Records, and they, as you pointed out, and everything they had, they had also kind of spawned or signed some of the you know, some of the punk bands like the Germs and those those more musical punk like bands like X and dream Syndicate and that type of.
00:17:35
Speaker 1: Thing, and you it was Bob Mold involved.
00:17:38
Speaker 5: Bob Mold and Nick Hill had a label and it was called Sol Singles Only label and they would just put out vinyl singles. And they put out this single of Fuzzy and that became a song that was played a good amount and it kind of became our you know, our calling card for for a while, and ultimately I think it kind of led to the Bambien signed.
00:18:04
Speaker 3: And then that album came out. You looking back now, you got a lot of attention pretty pretty quickly.
00:18:11
Speaker 5: Yeah, I feel like there was a greater wave of music. It was sort of like the people at the record companies they kind of just stepped out of the room for a moment and they let musicians be musicians.
00:18:24
Speaker 4: And you know, some of these.
00:18:25
Speaker 5: Bands had had experienced some sort of ground swell in a regional way, you know, everything that was going on in Seattle or wherever. And it was a healthy time to make music because we weren't so controlled and you know, we were producing ourselves and just leave us alone, you know, and.
00:18:45
Speaker 4: It produced good music.
00:18:47
Speaker 5: The band probably got a foothold in Europe much more so, especially in the UK, and we toured quite a bit in the UK and in other parts of Scandinavia, places where I still I still returned to and I'll be back in these parts in a few weeks from now, really really special places for me, and you know, a lot of history there.
00:19:10
Speaker 3: And then the band broke up, Yeah, for queens bad reasons.
00:19:15
Speaker 5: Well, I think, you know, I mean when you stop and consider that we have history that goes back before Grantly Buffalo and back into Shiva Blasque. So that mixed for a pretty long period where we just worked with one another, you know, and there's a frustration that sets in when in a situation where it doesn't change much, you know, and I'm speaking of touring, you know, by and large, I think that's a real hard one sometimes to deal with when you really, you know, when you get your joy from experimenting, from recording and I don't know, it's it's a hard.
00:19:53
Speaker 4: One for me.
00:19:55
Speaker 5: I can mix it up by myself, but it's a little harder to do that with the band.
00:19:58
Speaker 4: You know.
00:19:59
Speaker 5: We all have to kind of agree on, you know, where it's going to go tonight, you know, and where it's going to go in general, and in terms of our life, you know, you're a six legged beast if you're a trio. And for me as a songwriter, I mean we basically I was twenty nine, I think when we signed our deal at that point, you know, I mean, I've been writing songs for a good chunk of my life, you know, since I was a teenager, and it's the songs that really kind of lead me. I have to follow that, and that's sometimes a very solitary kind of thing, you know. I don't really write with other folks, you know, unless you know, every now and then somebody will ask you, don't write a song with me. But it's a solitary thing, and it's a very personal kind of kind of path as well.
00:20:48
Speaker 2: We'll be back with more from Grantly Phillips after the break.
00:20:55
Speaker 3: Now, when you began your solo career, it was also a really interesting time in the calambitus time in the music business, just when Napster has come in, right, nobody knows what's going to happen to the business. You were in this transition at the same time and may have had certain expectations going forward, you know, what is the album? You know, and all that was being up ended. What was it like from your point of view to watch all that?
00:21:21
Speaker 5: Yeah, I can remember that that moment, and there there was a sense that we were again approaching some big transitional point. You know, everyone was screaming about Y two K. Remember, you know, are we going to lose our computers? I woke up that morning. My garage door wasn't working.
00:21:42
Speaker 4: It's happening. I don't know why. It's starting with my garage door opener, but.
00:21:45
Speaker 5: And the machines are rebelling like that like that Beck video right where the refrigerator goes crazy. And I wasn't so certain where where it was all going. I felt like I wanted to embrace, you know, the future. And the first thing I did, one of the first things I put out was entirely self relis. It was an album called Ladies Love Oracle. And I went into my friend John Bryan in great musician composer, and he had a studio he'd built in his house, and he said, you know, I'm working on this soundtrack. The soundtrack was Magnolia, but here's you know, go ahead and go up to my studio and you know, have fun this week and whatever you want to do.
00:22:31
Speaker 6: You know.
00:22:31
Speaker 5: And I was there for about three days or so and walked out with a record, you know, you know, a record that was really stripped down to my voice and guitar, and you know, I play played everything on It's some piano and organ, but yeah, I was like, this feels right, and I didn't know where it was going to go. It wasn't built to be something that was going to stand alongside the most the slickest, most produced record that was on the radio. Wasn't really built for radio or anything like that. I was just meant to be something truthful and that felt really good.
00:23:10
Speaker 3: And then you immediately turned around and did a very different album, yes, Mobilized. You know a lot of people know you from, Yeah, Grantly Buffalo, a lot of people know you from Mobilized.
00:23:21
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:23:21
Speaker 5: I think I felt as though if I was going to make a solo record, it was the first one for a rounder at that time, then it truly had to be a solo record. I mean, talk about extremes, you know, it's just like I'm going to play everything on it, with the exception of the percussion, which I had a hand in, but we programmed that, you know, and I'm listening to a lot of things that are so different. I'm listening to Jork and Moby and all this stuff, and I love this air. Feeling very kind of inspired by things that feel so different than you know, the music that I would typically listen to. You know, it pushed me down a road that was, you know, a little more uncharted.
00:24:03
Speaker 4: You know.
00:24:03
Speaker 5: I hit upon hybrid songs that I had written on the guitar and the piano, but also songs that had their genesis in me trying my hand at programming a rhythm track and just working with sounds specifically, you know, like maybe it doesn't have to be a traditional drum sound, maybe it's something else, you know.
00:24:23
Speaker 3: At the same time, we have to mention you have fans because of television. Yeah, you know, I actually watched the show Gilmore. Oh really yes, yeah, you're not supposed to say that as a guy, but.
00:24:36
Speaker 1: I didn't recognize you at first. I was like, who's that guy? I thought he was You're an actor?
00:24:42
Speaker 5: How did I even plays an actor who plays a musician?
00:24:47
Speaker 1: How did that come about?
00:24:49
Speaker 5: Amy Sherman Palladino, who created Gilmore Girls. She and her husband Daniel Palladino. They were big music fans, and they were fans of Grantly Buffalo. They had came out and seen me play and had were familiar with my solo records, certainly with the first one I was working on, Mobilized, when I got the call from them inviting me to come down and be on this new show. You know, for all I knew it was kind of flax, a one off, and lo and behold, you know, several seasons and quite a few episodes that I have this sort of bit part in a special guest appearance, as they say, and you know, in some in some situations, some really insane scenes, you know, where I'm battling it out with another local troubadour played by Dave gruber Allen from Freaks and Geeks, and another one where word has gotten around the stars Hollow, the setting of the show is a hotbed where troubadours could be discovered. You know, it's the new it's the Seattle, it's the new Seattle for for buskers, and so among the hopeful sonic youth show up in town and they set up with their you know, their pig nose amps and just surreal and bizarre, and it always felt like a real coup to to be a part of it.
00:26:07
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:26:08
Speaker 3: And then as you mention, your next album was Virginia Creeper, which is another big album people people think of. It's got starts with Mona Lisa, Yeah, Dirty Secret, a lot of great, great.
00:26:20
Speaker 1: Songs on that.
00:26:21
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:26:22
Speaker 3: Are you thinking when you when you you'd finished Mobilized, what was what was the thinking going into that record?
00:26:27
Speaker 5: Well, you know, I create this record, Mobilize. It has, you know, an interesting palette of sounds, but I soon find myself on the road, just me and the twelve string guitar, and it was kind of like the songs were kind of they were being presented as though they you know, kind of where they started solo acoustically, and so again, the songs just they led me. And I never really went back to that because I suppose I kind of narrowed the gap between what I write and what I record. You know, even though I do bring a band in and I've had work with some great musicians over the years, and you know, there's a band on the on the the current album, Jay Bell Rose on druma Jeniver Condo's Patrick Warren keys, but it's all kind of built around the songs, and that's kind of how how I began to do it with Virginia Creeper and every album after that.
00:27:25
Speaker 4: I'm stuck a little.
00:27:26
Speaker 3: Bit about your your songwriting, your music writing harmonically, what you do. Did you have formal lessons? Did you learn theory? You didn't do any of that.
00:27:39
Speaker 4: I uh, no, I had.
00:27:40
Speaker 5: I had a couple of weeks of maybe a month or more.
00:27:44
Speaker 7: Uh uh.
00:27:46
Speaker 5: But you know, they how it is with music, with when learning the guitar, they want to, you know, they want you to learn some some old folk song to begin with, you know, and it's not the spooky great folks songs that are out there, you know. Uh So I I I just kind of went down the road of writing songs for myself. There have been times where I've been curious about theory, but no, I've I've always been, you know, more reliant on my ear.
00:28:11
Speaker 3: Even on the new album Closer Tonight, you do the switching between the major and minor chords, which is very.
00:28:19
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's just like walking down the hall though I don't even think about it. I really yeah, I'll take your word for it.
00:28:26
Speaker 3: That's got such a distinctive sound to me.
00:28:28
Speaker 5: Well, I've done I've probably done that trick on you know, thirteen other songs in the last week, so I probably you know, I think of it as building upon what I've already written, but yeah, I mean it probably can be traced too.
00:28:41
Speaker 3: It's a great trick.
00:28:43
Speaker 5: I love impressionistic music of all sorts, you know, and some I find that in some of the like the swing era.
00:28:50
Speaker 4: I find it in Debusy. You know.
00:28:54
Speaker 5: I love dissonance. I love the way that a lyric can seem to be diametrically opposed to a melody, you know, and there's a tension in that.
00:29:06
Speaker 3: And then tell me a little bit about that before we get to this, I do want to talk a little bit about The Narrows, which was an album I really oh yeah, I love that had a very different feel different.
00:29:16
Speaker 4: Look.
00:29:17
Speaker 5: There's a few on that record where I'm kind of working through those feelings of of leaving my home going someplace else. And my father passed away right as we basically began to unpack in Nashville, and Smoke and Sparks was a song that was you know, written with him in mine and uh as a person who's always been fascinated with history. I mean you could I think maybe that that happens when your your parents named you Grant Lee. You know, at some point in time, you know someone's gonna gonna whisper to you. You know, there were there were some generals, uh right, So I grew up kind of interested in history and and.
00:30:00
Speaker 1: Was that actually the reason for your name?
00:30:02
Speaker 5: No, I'm named after my My grandfather and great grandfather both named Grant, and Lee was from my dad. His father was Robert Lee Phillips, so they kind of, you know, a little tribute to the grandfather's there, right, Grant Lee.
00:30:18
Speaker 3: I mean, when you first see the name, you think, well, I mean I thought, well, that must be a play on the.
00:30:24
Speaker 4: I still have being and everything. So is that like a Civil War thing?
00:30:27
Speaker 5: I was like, No, not really, but I am fascinated with history and moving to place like Tennessee, you know, there's a lot of Civil War history, for sure. I'm fascinated with all the you know, the ghost of country music that seemed to still flutter about Nashville.
00:30:44
Speaker 3: You know, let's talk about some of the songs in the new album. Sure did you make it through the Night?
00:30:51
Speaker 4: Okay?
00:30:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is one of your longer titles.
00:30:55
Speaker 5: Yeah, I love a good long every now and then, you know, I think there's room for a long title. Sometimes you wake up in Charleston is one of them.
00:31:02
Speaker 4: I guess.
00:31:03
Speaker 5: I was taking a course in the language of the Muskogee Creek. Now I am Muscogee Creek. I'm what's called an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation.
00:31:15
Speaker 1: Now what does that mean?
00:31:16
Speaker 5: Native American tribe whose center is in Oklahoma. My mother is from Oklahoma and her side of the family, and it was something that as I was growing up, my grandmother, who was really important person in my life, you know, she would kind of instill in me this sense of wanting to know, wanting to appreciate and honor our heritage in that.
00:31:43
Speaker 4: Way, you know. Yeah. Yeah.
00:31:45
Speaker 5: She always kind of said to me, you know, like you make sure to really study, you know, and learn where we come from. And I would go to her house, you know, she wasn't real mobile there in her last days, but I would play guitar and she would sing gospel like Malia Jackson, you know, and had a big influence on me. You know, we'd watch Roy Clark and Johnny Cash and they seem to always have the Ten Commandments on as well at their at their house. The movie, you know, gives you a sense of what it was like then. And when I became a father, when our daughter was born, I really kind of started investing more time in trying to understand the history of the Greek people. And later on, during during the pandemic, I took this course and that's where I learned this phrase. There's no word for good morning in the language of the Muscogee Creek, but there is this phrase a stungun jug hyadiga that means did you make it through the night?
00:32:46
Speaker 4: Okay? And I just love that, you know.
00:32:48
Speaker 5: It's like kind of it sort of sums up the feeling of like, man, that was a that was a rough one last night, you know, and it seems like an appropriate way to kind of to talk about this time in history as well, you know. But that's the idea there behind did you make it through the night?
00:33:06
Speaker 4: Okay?
00:33:06
Speaker 3: It's it sounds like it said with a little little bit of humor.
00:33:10
Speaker 5: Yeah, Yeah, that's the idea. It's sort of it's humor in the face you know, of of challenge, you know, But yeah, tell me about closer tonight Closer Tonight. That is a song where I'm basically kind of I guess I'm kind of wrestling with these uneasy feelings, like, well, on one hand, we seem we're being told at least that we're living in this age where we might conquer, you know, certain.
00:33:38
Speaker 4: Ailments, diseases.
00:33:40
Speaker 5: I mean, we we somehow defeated pandemic for at least for a moment, and yet here we are at this moment that's extremely retrograde, and one could argue that we are closer to the possibility of an all out war, of of a of a of a great financial calamity. So it feels as though we are at this cusp where it could go either way.
00:34:09
Speaker 4: You know, we're closer to.
00:34:12
Speaker 5: Self harm or potentially closer to getting beyond it perhaps, you know. And we're also being made aware just how closely we are related and reliant and intertwined.
00:34:26
Speaker 2: Well, let's break and we'll come back with Grant Lee Phillips.
00:34:33
Speaker 3: A song I loved was American Lions. Oh yeah, and I thought you're speaking metaphorically. There were American lions.
00:34:41
Speaker 4: Apparently there were American lions.
00:34:43
Speaker 3: Did that discovery kick off the.
00:34:45
Speaker 5: Song or yeah, I wrote that down in a notebook years and years ago when I was still in La Okay on name Drop. My friend Michael Stipe came to town and he said, do you guys want to go with some friends? We want to go to the Labrett Tarpits. And you know with Violet like that, you know, this is our daughter who's like she was like four at.
00:35:07
Speaker 4: The time something like that.
00:35:09
Speaker 5: So we all went down to the Libria Tarpits and I saw this exhibit called the American Lion. There was you know, like like the MGM Lion, and I started thinking about apparently, yeah, massive, the idea of this thing, just kind of wandering down the Miracle Mile, past the Labriat Harpits, past the Beverly Center, and thinking about time as being kind of compacted everything that I have experienced, all the change and all the unpredictable things that I've witnessed in my life, to the degree that you know, some places, don't you know, they feel so different now. You know, La is a different place, and New York's a different place, but it's a different place for the American Lion too, you know. So I guess it's kind of a meditation on change and the more subtle things that we encounter. And you know, you've asked a lot of questions in these songs, keep saying, you know, what does it mean.
00:36:04
Speaker 3: We're going this way, you're going that way? Last Corner of the Earth sort of feels like it's a bit of an answer at the end of this album. Tell me about that song.
00:36:15
Speaker 5: I guess I have arrived at a sense of finality there. You know, it had to be the last song on the album. It with a title like that, I guess I wanted to to talk about those feelings, no matter how bleak. I think, you know, some part of me, as a songwriter would have felt compelled to to soften the blow or resist that that impulse. But I think despite that sense of bleakness, there's also kind of a there's another note that I hit at the end, you know where I'm saying, hold on to that that coal of hope, that little bit of fire. Sometimes that and sometimes that's all you have, is that little bit, that little spark, you know, because you'll need it.
00:37:00
Speaker 4: So I think there's hope in that.
00:37:01
Speaker 5: I think there's there's it's a weighty song, but there's there's optimism as well, you know, I think that's it does feel to me that we're going to have to walk through some difficulty. You know, we already are. You know, we're into it. We're halfway out on the coals, but it'd be a while before we get, you know, to we get beyond it, you know. And yet there is I have more than hope.
00:37:28
Speaker 1: You know you want to play something?
00:37:31
Speaker 6: Yeah, quiet for now, you're a second.
00:37:45
Speaker 8: All of this could change, like the world.
00:37:50
Speaker 4: Let's go.
00:37:52
Speaker 7: And say.
00:37:55
Speaker 6: So much or.
00:38:00
Speaker 4: Another kind of lone lean names.
00:38:03
Speaker 6: I don't know.
00:38:05
Speaker 4: Where I am to turn? Where turns you tore on the backwards?
00:38:22
Speaker 9: You just dry with your eyes clicked to the curveer to lift your footy you right.
00:38:40
Speaker 7: At the last.
00:38:46
Speaker 6: The corner round here.
00:38:55
Speaker 4: I'm going now.
00:38:59
Speaker 9: And drag it to the summer heats and all the GOLs have warm.
00:39:07
Speaker 6: Out, and you walk between.
00:39:14
Speaker 4: The shoulders of the.
00:39:15
Speaker 6: Night and me.
00:39:17
Speaker 9: We don't glass or dare to speak, dare to speak?
00:39:33
Speaker 6: You don't look backwards. You just try.
00:39:41
Speaker 7: With your eyes glued to.
00:39:43
Speaker 10: The curve.
00:39:48
Speaker 4: To lift your foot till your.
00:39:51
Speaker 8: Ry at the last.
00:40:00
Speaker 7: The corner up here.
00:40:09
Speaker 10: M hmm, hold on time.
00:40:40
Speaker 7: Blowing on a cold of home. Keep that part of you.
00:40:48
Speaker 6: Light.
00:40:51
Speaker 7: Keep it lit, you would need it when it turns off cold, and the sun that's gone inside, and the moon is his.
00:41:11
Speaker 8: M You don't look backwards. You just try, with your eyes clean to the cur to lift your foottowe you are.
00:41:31
Speaker 9: Right at last.
00:41:40
Speaker 6: The corner of here.
00:41:49
Speaker 8: You won't sleep till.
00:41:52
Speaker 9: You are right at last.
00:42:01
Speaker 4: The corner of here.
00:42:08
Speaker 1: M beautiful. All right, Thank you so much for coming in.
00:42:19
Speaker 4: Thank you, thank you, my pleasure all right.
00:42:26
Speaker 2: An episode description, you'll find a link to a playlist featuring our favorite songs from Grantley Phillips, as well as his new album and The Hour of Dust. Be sure to check out YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast to see all of our video interviews, and be sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record Pod. You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing health from Eric Sandler and Jordana McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Tolliday. Broken Record is production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Grantly Phillips first made his name in the nineties as the frontman of Grant Lee Buffalo, a critically acclaimed band that released four albums and toured with Pearl Jam, The Smashing Pumpkins, and rim Rolling Stone named Grant Lee Best Male Vocalist in ninety four, and his band became known for their folk confused rock sound and their reflections on American history. After Grantly Buffalo disbanded in ninety nine, Phillips launched a solo career, eventually becoming familiar to a wider audience through his recurring role as the town troubadour on Gilmour Girls. Last September, he released his twelfth solo album, and The Hour of Dust. The album's title was inspired by an ancient Indian painting grantle Soada Museum in Pasadena that depicts the twilight moment when cows are led home and kick up dust as night false. On today's episode, Bruce Headlem talks to GRANTLYE. Phillips about making in The Hour of Dust. He tells the story of how he tripped to the Librea tar pits with his old friend Michael Stipe, inspired his song American Lions, and he discusses his songwriting process and how he approaches writing lyrics that balanced the personal with larger societal themes. This is broken record, real musicians, real conversations. Here's Bruce Headlam with Grant Welee Phillips.
00:01:38
Speaker 3: You have a new album called in the Hour of Dust, and I want to know the story behind the title.
00:01:45
Speaker 4: Man.
00:01:45
Speaker 5: I'll try to make this as concise as I can. But I was out in LA where I lived for some thirty years something like that. I'm a native Californian, but I moved from Stockton, California, to LA in about eighty three, I guess. But some years ago I was at the Norton Simon Museum of Art. It's a great museum in Pasadena, and they had an exhibit paintings from India from about the fifteenth century, I think, and one of them was called The Hour of cow Dust. This is just a really lovely little painting and I love that title. And I wrote it down and just kind of, you know, set it aside and forgot about it for about fifteen years something like that. But it came back to me when I was struting to do a lot of painting myself, you know, I've always been interested in visual art and involved with that, you know, as well as songwriting. But I had a particular piece that I had painted, and I was asking myself what I want to call this, and some part of me was reminded of that particular title, the Hour of cow Dust. I always wanted to do something with that. I thought it might be a song. Who knew. And at the same time, I had taken an interest in a Mayormerican Tonalism, the art movement that it was dubbed American Tonalism a little bit later, but it was roughly the late eighteen hundreds posts Civil War, and this is a period where landscape painters are preoccupied with the idea of twilight, that transition from day to night. And I believe it was sort of a metaphor and a way of encompassing some of the grief and the confusion in the wake of the American Civil War, and.
00:03:45
Speaker 4: All of these things kind of collided.
00:03:47
Speaker 5: And that title kind of leapt forward, you know, in the hour of Dust, a moment of confusion, working your way through the blinding sands of unreality.
00:04:00
Speaker 3: So why was the Indian painting called cow Dust? What does that mean.
00:04:05
Speaker 4: Well, that's a great question that.
00:04:07
Speaker 5: Has to do with this, this moment in the day when the cows are led back home and in doing so, their hoofs kick up the dust, right, and we're blinded by that dust. And it's that moment when we have to light the lanterns, we have to prepare for night.
00:04:25
Speaker 4: Night is about to fall.
00:04:27
Speaker 5: So I thought, well, there it is. You know, it's that theme again.
00:04:31
Speaker 3: You, as well as being interested in art, you are a very impressionistic lyric writer. For the most part, this album's a little different. The songwriting is more direct here.
00:04:43
Speaker 4: I think, Yeah, that's possible. I think.
00:04:46
Speaker 5: I think I've always been trying to be as direct as I could and not realizing that I have somehow veered into the metaphor that happens as well. Maybe with age, with doing it over and over, some clarity comes with that.
00:05:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, a song like you Know she Knows Me? Yeah, it's got a beautiful image of you a kite flying out a window, but it's it's it's a love song. Yeah, Bullies is a song about bullies, little men, No mistaking is it's a great love song. Yeah, in a much more direct in a much more direct way. Was that was that deliberate or is this.
00:05:28
Speaker 1: Is this is just what you're feeling.
00:05:30
Speaker 5: It's deliberate, It's what I'm feeling. I don't believe that it's altogether new, though, I'm I if you look through a certain degree of my work, my solo albums especially, I guess you know, Post Grantly Buffalo, there are songs like Heavenly, Heavenly and Truly Truly, I guess all the double the double titled songs, you know, trying to hammer the point home there. I guess I'll sing it again.
00:05:59
Speaker 1: You know, I can't think of another word that's right.
00:06:01
Speaker 5: I think I've always kind of walked that line, I guess, And for me, kind of citing citing those things that are meaningful to me is a way of kind of of honoring all that I do care about, you know, all of the tenderness of life that seems to get pushed to the side sometimes in this state of constant panic that we find ourselves in. You know, So I choose to sing about those things that keep me up at night. But I also I'm aware of what I'd rather be focused on, you know, and that's the stuff of life.
00:06:40
Speaker 4: As well.
00:06:41
Speaker 1: So I mentioned the song she Knows Me?
00:06:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it does have this wonderful image of you as a kite being swept out the window and the person in your life knows how to get you down from the telephone wires. Did you get stuck on? Yeah, a song like that? Did it start with a simple thought she knows Me? Or did that image begin? How did How did a song like that come together?
00:07:09
Speaker 5: My experience is that the best songs they leave me a little bit confused, and I can't remember writing them, you know, I can't remember how they were written. I can remember being It's like it's like recalling being abducted or something, isn't it. I was on I was on a country road and there was a light and I was backstage in Dublin and I was, you know, kind of plunking on the guitar and I landed on these chords and I began to kind of sing, and in that state of nerves that you get before you go on, I realized, Hey, there's a song here, there's something, something's happening here. I'll sing it into my phone and I did, and then I kind of just kept singing. It never really never you know, really putting too much thought into it at soundcheck, and gosh, maybe a month or so later, turned on the tape, the digital tape, and it all just kind of fell out, you know. But I kind of I have found that that is a good way for me to work, you know, because this is such as a verbal medium, and the songs exist as we're talking now, you know, I as opposed to like the songs having this separate life on a sheet of paper, I would much rather use the microphone as my my quill. And often I'll do that when I feel like, you know, this is just not singing right, let me just turn And you know, I've heard that Bowie would do that as well, you know, trying to work his way through phrase after phrase until it felt natural and it felt right and you can.
00:08:44
Speaker 4: Just trust that process.
00:08:46
Speaker 3: Is that process for you, a short one, a long one?
00:08:49
Speaker 4: Both? It can is.
00:08:51
Speaker 5: It's usually the case of one wonderful spasm of a song, but if it isn't completed in that moment, I might have to wait until the next occasion for you know, to pick it up where I left off. And that too can be kind of spasmodic or just you know, the case of getting in the car and singing along and then it hits me.
00:09:13
Speaker 4: You know, I really have.
00:09:16
Speaker 5: I have learned to try to get out of my own way and that case, you know, let the song kind of write itself, and it does it most always done.
00:09:25
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
00:09:26
Speaker 5: If I use my voice as kind of the skeleton key that that usually seems to work out the best. You know, like automatic writing, but using your voice, you know, it doesn't all have to exist with your wrist.
00:09:39
Speaker 3: And then do you you filled in the chords around that doesn't have to exist with your wrists.
00:09:44
Speaker 4: See it happened right here in the room.
00:09:47
Speaker 3: I thank god we're surrounded by microphone.
00:09:49
Speaker 5: I think they've never written such a genius line like that.
00:09:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, you have very distinctive melodies. There's usually a few intervals that aren't usual. There's a lot of chromatic lines. And what you write. Is that something you work on with songs or is it something that's just where your voice goes.
00:10:08
Speaker 5: I think it's where my voice and where my my fingers go, where my ears go.
00:10:12
Speaker 4: I guess, you know.
00:10:13
Speaker 5: I like exploring with the guitar, like making discoveries, and you know, sometimes sometimes I do get under the hood of some some song that I've always been mesmerized by, you know, like, how do you play stardust? You know, everything that's you know, under the under the stars. You know, there's so much music you can explore and and sometimes when you get it wrong, you wind up discovering something else and that can be my song.
00:10:38
Speaker 3: Do you Is that something you'll do, like you'll you'll sing another song and you'll get a germ of an idea from that.
00:10:46
Speaker 4: I suppose that's. Yeah, that's possible.
00:10:48
Speaker 5: It's more indirect though, It's it's more like sort of like this, like like the album title, whatever time I spent a few years back trying to work out some strange chord and stardust, it might reappear and inspire me down the road, you know. Rodney Krause said something like that, like he played in bands where they had play helped me make it through the night, you know, And he said, if I hadn't done that, then I probably wouldn't have written Leaving the Louisiana and the Pale Moonlighter. You know, these kind of things they have a way of kind of creeping to the surface years later. You know, that's part of the magic of this whole thing is you know, kind of you know, kind of lighting the right incense and and just seeing seeing what happens, and and you know, I like that the spontaneity of it. And there's always a place to chip away. And there are great artists who who are who skillfully craft their work, you know, and and and continue to refine it. I'm not sure where I exist in that spectrum, you know. I mean I have a level of of you know, I have a critical ear as well, but uh, my ear becomes more critical when it feels as though it was forced or it wasn't natural, or you know, uh it wasn't accidental enough.
00:12:11
Speaker 3: Have you have you become more critical as you've gotten older? Less critical?
00:12:17
Speaker 5: I think, if anything, I've become a little more trusting in the process, less ruled by anxiety. I guess, you know, the idea that I don't know. Sometimes you can get yourself into kind of a loop where the idea of like that you won't finish the song creeps in or maybe this is the last record, that kind of thing. But even if that was the case, that's you know, that's probably acceptable. I would find something else to write about. You know what seems like my critical mind is often just anxiety.
00:12:48
Speaker 1: Anyhow, mm hm, anxiety over careers.
00:12:53
Speaker 4: Any number of things. Uh uh yeah, I think that's.
00:12:57
Speaker 5: That's that's the kind of the pleasure in music is setting setting those things aside. It's the thing that I've always you know, when everything was crazy kind of growing up in my house, I turned to the guitar and put on the headphones and kind of lose myself in music.
00:13:15
Speaker 4: It was that, you know, that sense of comfort.
00:13:18
Speaker 1: Did you grow up in a crazy house?
00:13:20
Speaker 5: A crazy house that was a you know, my parents are young, and it seems like there were you know, there were always voices being raised, but there were also you know, there were good songs playing in the house too. My dad loved country music. I have exposed to Merle Haggart and Charlie Pride and all that kind of stuff. My mother was more of a like a carpenter's fan, you know. But it was a golden era in terms of great melodic, depressing songs.
00:13:49
Speaker 1: What made you discover the guitar?
00:13:52
Speaker 5: Well, I can remember sitting back with the family and we would watch guys like Roy Clark, you know, just kind of just shred and everyone was so mesmerized, and I was as well, and I wanted to do that, you know, I wanted to learn how to make sounds like that, play Ghostwriters in the Sky, you know, really simple ambitions, you know, I mean to play it like Roy Clark is a whole other level of ambition. And what I found was that as soon as I picked up the guitar and learned a chord or to, I began to I began to write songs soon after.
00:14:24
Speaker 4: So I'm in high.
00:14:25
Speaker 5: School, I'm fourteen, fifteen something like that, and I've just got a song after song that I'm writing. And it was a good time to have your ears open and discover all kinds.
00:14:35
Speaker 4: Of music, you know.
00:14:36
Speaker 5: I mean things were kind of blasting off overseas, you know, Elvis Costello and great songwriters like that, bands like The Clash. But also discovering Neil Young around that time. That was a big one for me. Yeah, seeing him by himself at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Yeah, that made a real impact.
00:14:56
Speaker 3: You were in LA when you formed Grantly Buffalo. Yeah, so tell me were you playing around town?
00:15:01
Speaker 5: What was the Yeah, we played everywhere around town.
00:15:05
Speaker 4: You know, I.
00:15:07
Speaker 5: Moved to LA three, and there was all this stuff going on, you know, a lot of underground stuff, and we kind of grew up out of that, you know, playing these these little clubs and some of them you would get a gig at midnight downtown, you know, Al's, bar Raji's, all of these these clubs that a lot of well known bands, you know, kind of legendary bands now also kind of cut their teeth in Largo then called Cafe Largo on Fairfax was a it was more of a cabaret actually, and that's kind of what where we came out of mostly, you know, and kind of playing maybe too loud at times for that room and pushing the edge, but that's kind of the that's.
00:15:50
Speaker 4: The secret really, you know.
00:15:51
Speaker 5: It's that kind of steam kettle kind of concept where there's a little more force than you know, and that blows the lid off and.
00:15:58
Speaker 4: It's very exciting, you know.
00:16:00
Speaker 3: I tend to think of LA at that time being like the punk scene, maybe like hair metal bands. I don't think of it being.
00:16:08
Speaker 5: Well, you're right, and that was a strange thing. They're really you didn't really know where to find your own tribe because there was all of that going down on one part of you know, in one part of town, but deeper in the bowels of the city you would find bands like Savage Republic six or so guys, one of them beaten on a flaming oil drum and seems like every guitar was tuned to E and they were just going for it, you know. And in that environment the band Shiva Burlesque, which was the first band that I was involved with with putting together in La we came out of that and then we sort of morphed into Grantly Buffalo as I took my writing into a different place and began to kind of just step up to the microphone. Literally, even though I had written songs and performed, I kind of took a back seat for a period there until I couldn't know more. And yeah, so Grantly Buffer all of that that stuff was somewhere between ninety and ninety three, wrote a zillion songs, and then we signed with Slash Records, and they, as you pointed out, and everything they had, they had also kind of spawned or signed some of the you know, some of the punk bands like the Germs and those those more musical punk like bands like X and dream Syndicate and that type of.
00:17:35
Speaker 1: Thing, and you it was Bob Mold involved.
00:17:38
Speaker 5: Bob Mold and Nick Hill had a label and it was called Sol Singles Only label and they would just put out vinyl singles. And they put out this single of Fuzzy and that became a song that was played a good amount and it kind of became our you know, our calling card for for a while, and ultimately I think it kind of led to the Bambien signed.
00:18:04
Speaker 3: And then that album came out. You looking back now, you got a lot of attention pretty pretty quickly.
00:18:11
Speaker 5: Yeah, I feel like there was a greater wave of music. It was sort of like the people at the record companies they kind of just stepped out of the room for a moment and they let musicians be musicians.
00:18:24
Speaker 4: And you know, some of these.
00:18:25
Speaker 5: Bands had had experienced some sort of ground swell in a regional way, you know, everything that was going on in Seattle or wherever. And it was a healthy time to make music because we weren't so controlled and you know, we were producing ourselves and just leave us alone, you know, and.
00:18:45
Speaker 4: It produced good music.
00:18:47
Speaker 5: The band probably got a foothold in Europe much more so, especially in the UK, and we toured quite a bit in the UK and in other parts of Scandinavia, places where I still I still returned to and I'll be back in these parts in a few weeks from now, really really special places for me, and you know, a lot of history there.
00:19:10
Speaker 3: And then the band broke up, Yeah, for queens bad reasons.
00:19:15
Speaker 5: Well, I think, you know, I mean when you stop and consider that we have history that goes back before Grantly Buffalo and back into Shiva Blasque. So that mixed for a pretty long period where we just worked with one another, you know, and there's a frustration that sets in when in a situation where it doesn't change much, you know, and I'm speaking of touring, you know, by and large, I think that's a real hard one sometimes to deal with when you really, you know, when you get your joy from experimenting, from recording and I don't know, it's it's a hard.
00:19:53
Speaker 4: One for me.
00:19:55
Speaker 5: I can mix it up by myself, but it's a little harder to do that with the band.
00:19:58
Speaker 4: You know.
00:19:59
Speaker 5: We all have to kind of agree on, you know, where it's going to go tonight, you know, and where it's going to go in general, and in terms of our life, you know, you're a six legged beast if you're a trio. And for me as a songwriter, I mean we basically I was twenty nine, I think when we signed our deal at that point, you know, I mean, I've been writing songs for a good chunk of my life, you know, since I was a teenager, and it's the songs that really kind of lead me. I have to follow that, and that's sometimes a very solitary kind of thing, you know. I don't really write with other folks, you know, unless you know, every now and then somebody will ask you, don't write a song with me. But it's a solitary thing, and it's a very personal kind of kind of path as well.
00:20:48
Speaker 2: We'll be back with more from Grantly Phillips after the break.
00:20:55
Speaker 3: Now, when you began your solo career, it was also a really interesting time in the calambitus time in the music business, just when Napster has come in, right, nobody knows what's going to happen to the business. You were in this transition at the same time and may have had certain expectations going forward, you know, what is the album? You know, and all that was being up ended. What was it like from your point of view to watch all that?
00:21:21
Speaker 5: Yeah, I can remember that that moment, and there there was a sense that we were again approaching some big transitional point. You know, everyone was screaming about Y two K. Remember, you know, are we going to lose our computers? I woke up that morning. My garage door wasn't working.
00:21:42
Speaker 4: It's happening. I don't know why. It's starting with my garage door opener, but.
00:21:45
Speaker 5: And the machines are rebelling like that like that Beck video right where the refrigerator goes crazy. And I wasn't so certain where where it was all going. I felt like I wanted to embrace, you know, the future. And the first thing I did, one of the first things I put out was entirely self relis. It was an album called Ladies Love Oracle. And I went into my friend John Bryan in great musician composer, and he had a studio he'd built in his house, and he said, you know, I'm working on this soundtrack. The soundtrack was Magnolia, but here's you know, go ahead and go up to my studio and you know, have fun this week and whatever you want to do.
00:22:31
Speaker 6: You know.
00:22:31
Speaker 5: And I was there for about three days or so and walked out with a record, you know, you know, a record that was really stripped down to my voice and guitar, and you know, I play played everything on It's some piano and organ, but yeah, I was like, this feels right, and I didn't know where it was going to go. It wasn't built to be something that was going to stand alongside the most the slickest, most produced record that was on the radio. Wasn't really built for radio or anything like that. I was just meant to be something truthful and that felt really good.
00:23:10
Speaker 3: And then you immediately turned around and did a very different album, yes, Mobilized. You know a lot of people know you from, Yeah, Grantly Buffalo, a lot of people know you from Mobilized.
00:23:21
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:23:21
Speaker 5: I think I felt as though if I was going to make a solo record, it was the first one for a rounder at that time, then it truly had to be a solo record. I mean, talk about extremes, you know, it's just like I'm going to play everything on it, with the exception of the percussion, which I had a hand in, but we programmed that, you know, and I'm listening to a lot of things that are so different. I'm listening to Jork and Moby and all this stuff, and I love this air. Feeling very kind of inspired by things that feel so different than you know, the music that I would typically listen to. You know, it pushed me down a road that was, you know, a little more uncharted.
00:24:03
Speaker 4: You know.
00:24:03
Speaker 5: I hit upon hybrid songs that I had written on the guitar and the piano, but also songs that had their genesis in me trying my hand at programming a rhythm track and just working with sounds specifically, you know, like maybe it doesn't have to be a traditional drum sound, maybe it's something else, you know.
00:24:23
Speaker 3: At the same time, we have to mention you have fans because of television. Yeah, you know, I actually watched the show Gilmore. Oh really yes, yeah, you're not supposed to say that as a guy, but.
00:24:36
Speaker 1: I didn't recognize you at first. I was like, who's that guy? I thought he was You're an actor?
00:24:42
Speaker 5: How did I even plays an actor who plays a musician?
00:24:47
Speaker 1: How did that come about?
00:24:49
Speaker 5: Amy Sherman Palladino, who created Gilmore Girls. She and her husband Daniel Palladino. They were big music fans, and they were fans of Grantly Buffalo. They had came out and seen me play and had were familiar with my solo records, certainly with the first one I was working on, Mobilized, when I got the call from them inviting me to come down and be on this new show. You know, for all I knew it was kind of flax, a one off, and lo and behold, you know, several seasons and quite a few episodes that I have this sort of bit part in a special guest appearance, as they say, and you know, in some in some situations, some really insane scenes, you know, where I'm battling it out with another local troubadour played by Dave gruber Allen from Freaks and Geeks, and another one where word has gotten around the stars Hollow, the setting of the show is a hotbed where troubadours could be discovered. You know, it's the new it's the Seattle, it's the new Seattle for for buskers, and so among the hopeful sonic youth show up in town and they set up with their you know, their pig nose amps and just surreal and bizarre, and it always felt like a real coup to to be a part of it.
00:26:07
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:26:08
Speaker 3: And then as you mention, your next album was Virginia Creeper, which is another big album people people think of. It's got starts with Mona Lisa, Yeah, Dirty Secret, a lot of great, great.
00:26:20
Speaker 1: Songs on that.
00:26:21
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:26:22
Speaker 3: Are you thinking when you when you you'd finished Mobilized, what was what was the thinking going into that record?
00:26:27
Speaker 5: Well, you know, I create this record, Mobilize. It has, you know, an interesting palette of sounds, but I soon find myself on the road, just me and the twelve string guitar, and it was kind of like the songs were kind of they were being presented as though they you know, kind of where they started solo acoustically, and so again, the songs just they led me. And I never really went back to that because I suppose I kind of narrowed the gap between what I write and what I record. You know, even though I do bring a band in and I've had work with some great musicians over the years, and you know, there's a band on the on the the current album, Jay Bell Rose on druma Jeniver Condo's Patrick Warren keys, but it's all kind of built around the songs, and that's kind of how how I began to do it with Virginia Creeper and every album after that.
00:27:25
Speaker 4: I'm stuck a little.
00:27:26
Speaker 3: Bit about your your songwriting, your music writing harmonically, what you do. Did you have formal lessons? Did you learn theory? You didn't do any of that.
00:27:39
Speaker 4: I uh, no, I had.
00:27:40
Speaker 5: I had a couple of weeks of maybe a month or more.
00:27:44
Speaker 7: Uh uh.
00:27:46
Speaker 5: But you know, they how it is with music, with when learning the guitar, they want to, you know, they want you to learn some some old folk song to begin with, you know, and it's not the spooky great folks songs that are out there, you know. Uh So I I I just kind of went down the road of writing songs for myself. There have been times where I've been curious about theory, but no, I've I've always been, you know, more reliant on my ear.
00:28:11
Speaker 3: Even on the new album Closer Tonight, you do the switching between the major and minor chords, which is very.
00:28:19
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's just like walking down the hall though I don't even think about it. I really yeah, I'll take your word for it.
00:28:26
Speaker 3: That's got such a distinctive sound to me.
00:28:28
Speaker 5: Well, I've done I've probably done that trick on you know, thirteen other songs in the last week, so I probably you know, I think of it as building upon what I've already written, but yeah, I mean it probably can be traced too.
00:28:41
Speaker 3: It's a great trick.
00:28:43
Speaker 5: I love impressionistic music of all sorts, you know, and some I find that in some of the like the swing era.
00:28:50
Speaker 4: I find it in Debusy. You know.
00:28:54
Speaker 5: I love dissonance. I love the way that a lyric can seem to be diametrically opposed to a melody, you know, and there's a tension in that.
00:29:06
Speaker 3: And then tell me a little bit about that before we get to this, I do want to talk a little bit about The Narrows, which was an album I really oh yeah, I love that had a very different feel different.
00:29:16
Speaker 4: Look.
00:29:17
Speaker 5: There's a few on that record where I'm kind of working through those feelings of of leaving my home going someplace else. And my father passed away right as we basically began to unpack in Nashville, and Smoke and Sparks was a song that was you know, written with him in mine and uh as a person who's always been fascinated with history. I mean you could I think maybe that that happens when your your parents named you Grant Lee. You know, at some point in time, you know someone's gonna gonna whisper to you. You know, there were there were some generals, uh right, So I grew up kind of interested in history and and.
00:30:00
Speaker 1: Was that actually the reason for your name?
00:30:02
Speaker 5: No, I'm named after my My grandfather and great grandfather both named Grant, and Lee was from my dad. His father was Robert Lee Phillips, so they kind of, you know, a little tribute to the grandfather's there, right, Grant Lee.
00:30:18
Speaker 3: I mean, when you first see the name, you think, well, I mean I thought, well, that must be a play on the.
00:30:24
Speaker 4: I still have being and everything. So is that like a Civil War thing?
00:30:27
Speaker 5: I was like, No, not really, but I am fascinated with history and moving to place like Tennessee, you know, there's a lot of Civil War history, for sure. I'm fascinated with all the you know, the ghost of country music that seemed to still flutter about Nashville.
00:30:44
Speaker 3: You know, let's talk about some of the songs in the new album. Sure did you make it through the Night?
00:30:51
Speaker 4: Okay?
00:30:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is one of your longer titles.
00:30:55
Speaker 5: Yeah, I love a good long every now and then, you know, I think there's room for a long title. Sometimes you wake up in Charleston is one of them.
00:31:02
Speaker 4: I guess.
00:31:03
Speaker 5: I was taking a course in the language of the Muskogee Creek. Now I am Muscogee Creek. I'm what's called an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation.
00:31:15
Speaker 1: Now what does that mean?
00:31:16
Speaker 5: Native American tribe whose center is in Oklahoma. My mother is from Oklahoma and her side of the family, and it was something that as I was growing up, my grandmother, who was really important person in my life, you know, she would kind of instill in me this sense of wanting to know, wanting to appreciate and honor our heritage in that.
00:31:43
Speaker 4: Way, you know. Yeah. Yeah.
00:31:45
Speaker 5: She always kind of said to me, you know, like you make sure to really study, you know, and learn where we come from. And I would go to her house, you know, she wasn't real mobile there in her last days, but I would play guitar and she would sing gospel like Malia Jackson, you know, and had a big influence on me. You know, we'd watch Roy Clark and Johnny Cash and they seem to always have the Ten Commandments on as well at their at their house. The movie, you know, gives you a sense of what it was like then. And when I became a father, when our daughter was born, I really kind of started investing more time in trying to understand the history of the Greek people. And later on, during during the pandemic, I took this course and that's where I learned this phrase. There's no word for good morning in the language of the Muscogee Creek, but there is this phrase a stungun jug hyadiga that means did you make it through the night?
00:32:46
Speaker 4: Okay? And I just love that, you know.
00:32:48
Speaker 5: It's like kind of it sort of sums up the feeling of like, man, that was a that was a rough one last night, you know, and it seems like an appropriate way to kind of to talk about this time in history as well, you know. But that's the idea there behind did you make it through the night?
00:33:06
Speaker 4: Okay?
00:33:06
Speaker 3: It's it sounds like it said with a little little bit of humor.
00:33:10
Speaker 5: Yeah, Yeah, that's the idea. It's sort of it's humor in the face you know, of of challenge, you know, But yeah, tell me about closer tonight Closer Tonight. That is a song where I'm basically kind of I guess I'm kind of wrestling with these uneasy feelings, like, well, on one hand, we seem we're being told at least that we're living in this age where we might conquer, you know, certain.
00:33:38
Speaker 4: Ailments, diseases.
00:33:40
Speaker 5: I mean, we we somehow defeated pandemic for at least for a moment, and yet here we are at this moment that's extremely retrograde, and one could argue that we are closer to the possibility of an all out war, of of a of a of a great financial calamity. So it feels as though we are at this cusp where it could go either way.
00:34:09
Speaker 4: You know, we're closer to.
00:34:12
Speaker 5: Self harm or potentially closer to getting beyond it perhaps, you know. And we're also being made aware just how closely we are related and reliant and intertwined.
00:34:26
Speaker 2: Well, let's break and we'll come back with Grant Lee Phillips.
00:34:33
Speaker 3: A song I loved was American Lions. Oh yeah, and I thought you're speaking metaphorically. There were American lions.
00:34:41
Speaker 4: Apparently there were American lions.
00:34:43
Speaker 3: Did that discovery kick off the.
00:34:45
Speaker 5: Song or yeah, I wrote that down in a notebook years and years ago when I was still in La Okay on name Drop. My friend Michael Stipe came to town and he said, do you guys want to go with some friends? We want to go to the Labrett Tarpits. And you know with Violet like that, you know, this is our daughter who's like she was like four at.
00:35:07
Speaker 4: The time something like that.
00:35:09
Speaker 5: So we all went down to the Libria Tarpits and I saw this exhibit called the American Lion. There was you know, like like the MGM Lion, and I started thinking about apparently, yeah, massive, the idea of this thing, just kind of wandering down the Miracle Mile, past the Labriat Harpits, past the Beverly Center, and thinking about time as being kind of compacted everything that I have experienced, all the change and all the unpredictable things that I've witnessed in my life, to the degree that you know, some places, don't you know, they feel so different now. You know, La is a different place, and New York's a different place, but it's a different place for the American Lion too, you know. So I guess it's kind of a meditation on change and the more subtle things that we encounter. And you know, you've asked a lot of questions in these songs, keep saying, you know, what does it mean.
00:36:04
Speaker 3: We're going this way, you're going that way? Last Corner of the Earth sort of feels like it's a bit of an answer at the end of this album. Tell me about that song.
00:36:15
Speaker 5: I guess I have arrived at a sense of finality there. You know, it had to be the last song on the album. It with a title like that, I guess I wanted to to talk about those feelings, no matter how bleak. I think, you know, some part of me, as a songwriter would have felt compelled to to soften the blow or resist that that impulse. But I think despite that sense of bleakness, there's also kind of a there's another note that I hit at the end, you know where I'm saying, hold on to that that coal of hope, that little bit of fire. Sometimes that and sometimes that's all you have, is that little bit, that little spark, you know, because you'll need it.
00:37:00
Speaker 4: So I think there's hope in that.
00:37:01
Speaker 5: I think there's there's it's a weighty song, but there's there's optimism as well, you know, I think that's it does feel to me that we're going to have to walk through some difficulty. You know, we already are. You know, we're into it. We're halfway out on the coals, but it'd be a while before we get, you know, to we get beyond it, you know. And yet there is I have more than hope.
00:37:28
Speaker 1: You know you want to play something?
00:37:31
Speaker 6: Yeah, quiet for now, you're a second.
00:37:45
Speaker 8: All of this could change, like the world.
00:37:50
Speaker 4: Let's go.
00:37:52
Speaker 7: And say.
00:37:55
Speaker 6: So much or.
00:38:00
Speaker 4: Another kind of lone lean names.
00:38:03
Speaker 6: I don't know.
00:38:05
Speaker 4: Where I am to turn? Where turns you tore on the backwards?
00:38:22
Speaker 9: You just dry with your eyes clicked to the curveer to lift your footy you right.
00:38:40
Speaker 7: At the last.
00:38:46
Speaker 6: The corner round here.
00:38:55
Speaker 4: I'm going now.
00:38:59
Speaker 9: And drag it to the summer heats and all the GOLs have warm.
00:39:07
Speaker 6: Out, and you walk between.
00:39:14
Speaker 4: The shoulders of the.
00:39:15
Speaker 6: Night and me.
00:39:17
Speaker 9: We don't glass or dare to speak, dare to speak?
00:39:33
Speaker 6: You don't look backwards. You just try.
00:39:41
Speaker 7: With your eyes glued to.
00:39:43
Speaker 10: The curve.
00:39:48
Speaker 4: To lift your foot till your.
00:39:51
Speaker 8: Ry at the last.
00:40:00
Speaker 7: The corner up here.
00:40:09
Speaker 10: M hmm, hold on time.
00:40:40
Speaker 7: Blowing on a cold of home. Keep that part of you.
00:40:48
Speaker 6: Light.
00:40:51
Speaker 7: Keep it lit, you would need it when it turns off cold, and the sun that's gone inside, and the moon is his.
00:41:11
Speaker 8: M You don't look backwards. You just try, with your eyes clean to the cur to lift your foottowe you are.
00:41:31
Speaker 9: Right at last.
00:41:40
Speaker 6: The corner of here.
00:41:49
Speaker 8: You won't sleep till.
00:41:52
Speaker 9: You are right at last.
00:42:01
Speaker 4: The corner of here.
00:42:08
Speaker 1: M beautiful. All right, Thank you so much for coming in.
00:42:19
Speaker 4: Thank you, thank you, my pleasure all right.
00:42:26
Speaker 2: An episode description, you'll find a link to a playlist featuring our favorite songs from Grantley Phillips, as well as his new album and The Hour of Dust. Be sure to check out YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast to see all of our video interviews, and be sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record Pod. You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing health from Eric Sandler and Jordana McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Tolliday. Broken Record is production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.
