Feature: E.G. Phillips Decodes ‘Nashville Recordings, Vol. 3: Travelogues’
Photo credit: Chris Cothran
What was the creative process like for this particular EP?
This is the third project I’ve worked with on with Kenny Schick, a producer who lives in East Nashville that I got in touch with a while back when I was going to a music conference out that way. The songs for this EP were done in tandem with the EP I released last year about this time called ‘Nashville Recordings, Vol. 4: Wear and Tear’ — the choice to release volume 4 before volume 3 was ultimately me being kind of cheeky.
Each track starts out with me sending Kenny a demo (usually just a voice memo running through the song) and some notes about the approach. I also compile a set of reference tracks for the overall project (or in this case the two different volumes). Then Kenny comes up with an arrangement and there’s some back and forth (we went through couple rounds of making Nevada “crunchier”). That gets fleshed out instrumentation-wise and we bring in whatever session musicians we need (like the trumpet and accordion, for instance, on this set of songs). I was meant to go out to Nashville and record vocals there as well as do a show, but illness forced me to push that off and we ended up doing the vocals in San Jose when Kenny was visiting family (he’s originally from the Bay Area). Coincidentally that was at the studio where my first album was mixed.
Could you discuss the lyrical themes or messages conveyed in 'Nashville Recordings, Vol. 3: Travelogues?’
This volume is comprised of songs from my back catalogue that I’m fond of but hadn’t got around to recording before. I had a number of songs related to travel that I thought would work well together thematically and under the same sort of musical rubric. Strictly speaking the subtitle of this volume should have been “Travelogues and Itineraries” but I really didn’t think of that until after I’d hit the distribute button. There are different relationships to travel with these pieces — the need for escape, the adventures you have along the way, and ultimately the weariness of a journey’s end.
What impact do you hope this EP will have on your audience?
I see this one as a sort of immersive journey — taking the listener along for the ride, sometimes literally. There’s an escapist aspect to it, but also, as with all journeys, a chance at self-reflection.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got started in music?
I’ve always dabbled in writing to some extent — as far back as kindergarten I was illustrating my own stories and getting my parents to fill in the speech bubbles — and I wrote and co-directed a play my senior year of high school. A lot of the writing I did was short stories (or sprawling, unfinished novels) with a sci-fi/fantasy bent.
I was a bit of late bloomer getting into music in general (The Beatles were my first musical love owing to my parents LP collection — although I did wear out at least one copy of Peter and the Wolf as a kid), but I was encouraged by a friend to start playing guitar in college about the same time as I was introduced to Bob Dylan, and then it was off to the races as far as creating music went. But I was terribly shy about sharing anything until much later in life. Then for various reasons the dam broke and I started doing open mics in the Bay Area and eventually recorded my first album through the connections I made there.
Where do you find inspiration for your songs or musical ideas?
Musically I draw a lot on classic sixties music like Dylan and the Beatles, but also jazz — I spent a lot of the late 90s and early 2000s looking through the bargain bins of music stores for cheap Blue Note CDs and the like. I do like to experiment quite a bit with different harmonic progressions and have sort of developed my own vocabulary and sense of color.
Lyrically, it can be anything really — I tend to draw a lot on myth and history as well as geography, but a lot of that owes to the richness of the language involved and the depth the associations we have with place names and the like. Ultimately any given song has to do with what’s on my mind and what I’m trying to work through emotionally.
Tell me about the wildest song you’ve ever written but never published.
I dunno, would you consider a song with footnotes wild? I have one about San Francisco’s gold rush era that has some whacky stuff going on just owing to the colorful characters and place names involved. I also have one that’s a bunch of Homeric epithets strung together along with references to Deuteronomy 28 (the Bible’s most “metal” chapter) that goes some interesting places. Both of those are works in progress, publishing wise, actually. In general, I try to preserve a bit of wildness in all my songs by never trying to go down terrain that’s too well trodden.
