When Matt Myers arrived at producer Brad Cook’s Durham, N.C. home to begin work on what would become Houndmouth’s fifth full-length album, Lordy, he was greeted with a simple gesture that ended up setting the tone for the creative burst that would follow—a hug.
“I was going through this life situation and after extreme things happen in your life, you don’t know where people will stand with you,” Myers says, as he thinks back on his initial meeting to discuss what would become Lordy with Cook over two and a half years ago. “But seeing him for the first time in a while— just being accepted fully—and for him to say, ‘Let’s make a record,’ it made me feel like, ‘This is going to be great—let’s go.’”
It had been a whirlwind few years since Houthmouth’s previous record, 2021’s Good for You, arrived near the end of the global pandemic. Produced by Cook, that LP circled back to the group’s Americana roots after a brief detour into more electro-colored music with 2018’s Golden Age, nodding to the success they initially experienced with their hooky, bluesy 2015 breakthrough single “Sedona.”
Yet, in the time since the world reopened following the Great Pause, the now 38-year-old Myers experienced a personal roller-coaster he’s described as “surviving, rebuilding, accepting and thriving,” ending one relationship and beginning another while his band weathered the loss of several core members. Founding bassist Zak Appleby stepped away from life on the road to focus on family and explore the professional interests he started pursuing outside music during the COVID era, and his replacement left in 2023. Adding to that upheaval, a year later drummer Shade Cody parted ways with the band after a falling out with Myers that was magnified in the social-media landscape. It felt like a particularly impactful break—in addition to being a ground-floor member of Houndmouth, Cody had utilized his grandparents’ 1800s home in New Albany, Ind., the Green House, as the band’s rehearsal space, clubhouse and crash pad. His departure also left Myers as the last member of Hountmouth’s original lineup. (A fourth co-founder, Katie Toupin, moved on in 2016 and launched a solo career.)
“My personal life was kind of an extreme situation, and, at the same time, I fell in love and got married, so there was that contrast and I was feeling a lot of things,” Myers says. “I was processing it creatively so when it came time to write songs, I basically just sat down and started saying things and let the subconscious do the work. I really had to rely on my friends—you always think that it is hard to write a song, but it can be very easy. I just needed some friends to put the mirror up and even dictate lines for me that I’m just spouting out.”
A sharp left-turn from Good for You, which was tracked at the Green House and leaned into that back-home, band-centric vibe, Myers traveled to Durham to work with Cook on his own and, through several trips over the course of about two years, the singer/guitarist slowly chipped away at his latest batch of songs a couple of weeks at a time. Thankfully, the natural rapport Myers had developed with Cook while working on Good For You returned immediately.
“We always kept in touch because he’s a really great friend and producer,” Myers says. “The writing process was a little bit different for me because it’s less story oriented and more drawing from where I was—it was a little bit closer to home.”
Cook served as a true collaborator throughout, acting as a songwriting confidant and editor. “As I was piecing it together, he let me know that this one bit could be a whole song,” Myers explains. “He’d say, ‘You can stop here,’ or he reminded me, ‘You don’t have to be perfect about it.’”
The result is Myers’ most personal and vulnerable collection of songs yet, a de facto solo album filtered through the might of a Houndmouth release. The singer-guitarist says that he was clear headed while he honed the material, working on the tunes while light filtered through his kitchen windows instead of at night, his usual mode of operation. Part of that, he has explained, had to do with being newly married. He also admits that he’s never been the type of songwriter who simply sits down to work on new music every day, instead preferring to wait for the muse, or a deadline, to strike.
“It’s always taken me a long time to write records—we always had maybe four years in between records,” he says. “I know some people will have 20-40 songs, maybe even 100 songs, to choose from, and I’ve always worked in a way where if an album needs to 11 songs, I’ll write 11 songs.”
With Lordy, which explores the emotional seesaw Myers has experienced in recent years, the singer-songwriter felt like the tunes he’s compiled flowed into a cohesive statement, despite the LP’s long gestation period.
“It was all very pointed, so in terms of an album, it works together, but it was written over the course of such a long time” he says. “There are times when you’re diligent, you’re waking up and actively flexing the muscle every day. I did that for a while, which obviously helps and is what I should be doing. But when I wasn’t doing it, I felt like that’s when the rawest songs came out. I would go for a long time and then just land on something and just keep writing lines to it and then I’d have a whole bunch of stuff. I’d just have to edit it down and think, ‘Hey, what do you wanna say here?’ If I’m writing a song, I’m venting, and it can get kind of mean or self-loathing. When you can gauge what you actually wanna say, you can be pointed about it. And then I was all in on the song I was working on.”
With Myers now serving as the lone core member of Houndmouth, he relied on Cook’s close-knit “Durham crew” to bring the sessions to life. Matt McCaughan, known for his work with Hiss Golden Messenger and Rosebuds, and TJ Maiani, whose credits include Sylvan Esso and The Tallest Man on Earth, held down the drums while the producer’s brother and Megafaun bandmate Phil Cook fleshed out the sessions on dobro, keyboards and harmonica. Another frequent Cook collaborator, Gen-Z indie-slacker guitarist MJ Lenderman—who was in the middle of his own career breakthrough as a solo artist—also came in for a day to lend his services.
“TJ added a whole different flavor,” Myers said. “And MJ Linderman put some guitar down and some silly bass stuff. It was really fun.”
Cook also enlisted Sam Beam to assist on the songwriting front, a role the Iron & Wine principal has become increasingly comfortable in as part of the Durham crew.
“I had this unfinished thing and started spouting out lines, so he just started dictating and I was like, ‘Oh, this is good,’ and then he helped organize a few things and threw out a few lines,” Myer explains. “Brad’s really great at that as well. He’s also a great writer.”
Myers enjoyed the change in approach, feeling confident 15 years after his band formed in New Albany to assume much of the musical weight on his own. “The way I was working with Brad, most of it was just me on an acoustic guitar with a mic and then we’d just sing it and build from there,” he says. “From a producer standpoint, I imagine wrangling a band is a lot, especially if you’re accessing the songs through an emotional standpoint, instead of a purely musical standpoint. Brad and I could just get into it and it kind of streamlined everything.’”
The writing experience helped him sort through a few particularly impactful years.
“Going through a crazy time but also it being the happiest two years of my life—it was very therapeutic writing,” he says. “But, also, I’m always gonna try and find a story and characters and not make it the focal point.”
Keyboardist Caleb Hickman, who joined Houndmouth after Toupin’s departure, contributed a bit at various points in the process as well.
“Caleb’s been touring with us for a really long time,” Myers said. “He and his wife helped me write quite a bit and Caleb came out and played keys and sang on some stuff.”
Moving forward, Myers plans to support Lordy with a Houndmouth live band that includes Hickman, steady bassist Zac Anderson and drummer Noah Denney, a newer addition to the lineup. They officially celebrated the record’s release at Livingston, Mont.’s Pine Creek Lodge with a two-night campout and routed through the country on a headlining tour during the summer months. Myers has enjoyed how the road has already morphed his latest batch of material in both obvious and surprising ways, noting that they had only played about four of the record’s 11 tunes live before its release.
“The songs always take a different shape live from when we go and record them, which is fun,” he says. “Our live show is very different from the record because we don’t have all the moving parts. It’s really fun to be able to pick and choose the different parts. You are also a little limited, which is always fun.”
As Houthmouth introduced the Lordy material to receptive audiences, Myers was pleasantly surprised which of his songs seemed to be resonating the most.
“Playing a song live after a record comes out is so much better than playing it before its released because you can see which songs hit,” he says. “Sometimes people gravitate toward songs I didn’t necessarily feel were strong. People really seemed to like ‘Carbondale’ and ‘Don’t Wanna Talk’ and, with those songs live, you don’t give a lot to it. It’s kind of chill. ‘Never Gonna Die’ is chill the whole time and I’ve always thought a song needs to be a big thing—it has to get somewhere. But I realized it can just kind of be and cruise and let it be enjoyable.”
The outing kicked off in Alaska, an important stop on Mayers’ bucket list.
“It was a trip—the sun never went down,” he says. “We finally hit all 50 states recently. We had four shows back-to-back, and I can’t even describe the sun not actually setting. You are getting four hours of sleep a night and it was our first four shows of the tour, so it was like, ‘We’re absolutely ready now.’”
Looking ahead, their September run will include a handful of bills with Danial Donato and Molly Tuttle, Houthmouth’s latest flirtation with the extended jamband universe.
“We’ve always ended up at festivals, not always total jamband festivals but sometime, which I’ve always loved,” Myers says. “We have structured songs, like folk songs, but we’ve still always left so much space to work with. Or, if someone messes up and misses a line, everybody holds the pattern. It’s very adjacent to the jam scene in that way—our approach to music in general. So it’s always been refreshing for us to go to a jamband festival and be accepted. I’m stoked [to play with Donato and Tuttle]—I love that shit. I was really into the blues when I was a kid. There’s so much space and there’s just so much soloing in time.”
Myers is also stoked about trying out new creative approaches for the next Houndmouth album, whether it’s working closely with a producer like Cook or testing out a more live-in-the-studio method. And he believes the last few years have simply made him a more confident artist.
“I’m open to all of it—especially now,” he says. “I feel like I have more tools to work with, just letting things kind of be and not taking it so hard. Musicians, in general, are so hard on themselves, so to shed some of that has been nice.”
