By his own admission, Matthew Houck does not excel at answering questions.  Houck, aka Phosphorescent, replies cautiously, with a poet's reluctance to say any more than what he knows to be true.  When I asked how he feels about the interview process, he said simply, "I hate it.  I kinda have a hard time saying what I mean in this scenario."

In four years as the center of the loose collective that is Phosphorescent, Houck has produced two full lengths and an EP:  A Hundred Times or More, The Weight of Flight, and the most recent, Aw Come Aw Wry.  His music is loose, ramshackle folk with a wistful tone and an inclusive policy toward instruments.  One has the sense he could grab anything vaguely musical that fell of a truck and use it to create one of his sad carnivals.  For the recording of Aw Come Aw Wry he picked up a few items from the Salvation Army.  Houck takes the sounds of funerals, circuses and campfire sing-alongs and threads them all together with his tender, quavering voice.  The result, like the drunk at your local dive bar, is both boisterous and vulnerable.

Houck grew up in small town Alabama.  His mother was a school-teacher and his father worked in the health department.  His southern accent is mild - the southernness comes out more in a comfortable cadence than in any sort of twang.  In his music you won't find any catfish or good ol' boys, or any rockin', boastin', self-consciously southern attitudes, a la Lynyrd Skynyrd or Old Crow Medicine Show.  Aw Come Aw Wry feels soaked in the flavor of the South, but it's not a caricature.

When he was 18, Houck hit the road.  He traveled through the south-west, living out of the back of a pickup and playing on the streets for change.  It's not a time he romanticizes.  "I was kind of a mess," he commented.  His version of Willie Nelson's "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys" probably tells more than he ever will on the subject. Houck strips the song raw.  His broken-down delivery restores a dignity and power to lines in the cowboy classic that could otherwise seem a bit hokey:   "Old worn out memories with no one, no place to stay."  It's a writer's lament - "Picking up hookers / instead of my pen / I let the words of my youth fade away" - that becomes, in his hands, the intimate confession of a wounded man.

Critics have hailed him as the next Bob Dylan and the London Evening Standard called him "the most important American in his field since Kurt Cobain."  He may be, in terms of talent, the equal of those two; as far as social impact, of course, it's a little reckless to predict.  I wonder if the comparisons affected him.  "No," he said.  Then he gave it a moment more thought.   "No...uh, no is the answer," he finally decided.  Most of his answers come out like this:  they are considered and then delivered in as straightforward a manner as possible.  Surprising though this answer may be - an artist could be forgiven for getting cocky or overly self-conscious when hearing comparisons like that - it also sounds as unblinkingly honest as everything he says.

He clearly is not affected by what the critics say.  And, of course, this is what they recognize and respect.  Houck is chasing a sound.  Most of his talk comes back to that sound:  his biggest concern of the moment is gathering the personnel he needs to make it happen.   "I would like to be able to take out a full band and not worry about being able to eat," he said.  Phosphorescent is a revolving crew that tends to swell with proximity to Houck's adopted home town of Athens, Georgia.  He takes an obvious glee in getting a crowd together on stage.   "Locally, it's the best it's ever sounded.  We get about thirteen people.  Every show is a real thing," he said.

There's a scene in the film Pollock where Jackson Pollock says, in defense of his art:  "It's like a field of flowers; it's just pretty, you don't have to break your head trying to figure out what it means."  The very last track of Aw Come Aw Wry, "Nowhere Road, February 21, 2005" is an 18-minute-long recording of a thunderstorm.  It's completely unadorned:  just the thunder rumbling in and the rain starting to fall.  Any displaced southerners may be rendered helpless with nostalgia; it moved me embarrassingly close to tears.  Studio time being financially out of the question, Aw Come Aw Wry was recorded in a house outside of Athens, and "towards the final days of recording, this wild storm kicked up, we had the mic going so we just left it going.  It sounded so nice," he explained.   "People have made a big deal out of that. I think some people thought there was a hidden track, and listened all the way through, and were like, "What the fuck?'"  If they'd listened to the album, they would have known better.  Houck hides nothing.

What's truly impressive is how organically a thunderstorm fits at the end of this album;  it's as if all of Phosphorescent's songs were naturally occurring phenomena, and Houck just was smart enough to leave the mic on.  As he said when declining to explain the title Aw Come Aw Wry - his last non-answer to me:  "Better to let it be it's own thing, without me stepping all over it."