Austin – Autry Fulbright is a multi-talented and multi-faceted musician. Known best for his work with …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead, he is finally ready to release more music from his other project, Midnight Masses, after a five year hiatus. While Trail of the Dead plays powerful rock music that Fulbright manages to contort his body to in strange ways, Midnight Masses has a psychedelic, introspective sound. Songs like Preachers Son have powerful lyrics that tend to echo in your head hours after you hear them. You may find yourself sitting there, piecing together their full meaning. The new record, titled Departures will be released later this year along with a two-documentary series. Fulbright has seen a lot of tragedy in his life with the passing of his father and later, producer Gerard Smith, who acted as a mentor on his Midnight Masses project. Fulbright sites his first record as a eulogy and his second as a celebration of life and all the places he has been. I spoke with Fulbright about his inspiration and was able to find where the great depth I know is in his music comes from.
Ilyse Kaplan: Why make a Midnight Masses record now, five years after the first was released?
Autry Fulbright: I was planning to make a record and I got a little bit busier because I joined Trail of the Dead and Gerard Smith [of TV on the Radio] was our producer and he passed away at 36 while I was on tour. It was pretty devastated because he was in one of my favorite bands. TV on the Radio really helped me when I first came to New York. He was this really important person in my life as a friend and a mentor and he was a great producer too. I didn’t want to do it anymore after that. I thought this band was cursed. It started with me being inspired by my Dad’s death and then with Gerard dying, then another engineer who worked on the project died too. I was like, this is terrible and I didn’t want to do it anymore because it seemed like it was a negative situation where I was reliving these tragedies instead of therapeutically dealing with them. It took me about five years to decide to make a record. For one, the label I’m on with Trail of the Dead asked me if I wanted to make a record. I hadn’t really planned on it but, it went from me always debating if I was going to do it and people saying I should and me talking myself out of it to now, being presented with the opportunity to make the record. Now, I’m like yeah I’ll do it and they were like, “well are you going to tour with it?” I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, you know what? Let’s get the band back together.” It was good timing, I was very fortunate to have someone to support it and put it out. Now, I can approach it in a different way than the times when I was unsure about continuing it. I don’t have to eulogize my father; I can memorialize him and celebrate his life. Same thing with Gerard–or anyone that you lose in death, a change in your relationship, or anything.
IK: What did Gerard bring out of your music?
AF: My Dad raised me and inspired me to get in to the music and Gerard really inspired the sound. He was doing so many other records with so many other people in Brooklyn at the time that hopefully will see the light of day. Gerard was really curating, supporting, and documenting a non-scene of musicians in Brooklyn. A lot of these people stopped doing music after [he passed], it was archiving something really cool for the community. I have this idea that one day I’d like to set up a community center in Brooklyn to record the music for free. Corporations have done that already, but I’d like to set something up that is in the spirit of him. He would be like, “practice for two hours every day!” and he would tell me to come over and play that same thing again for an hour. Before he even let me play, he heard some of my stuff and he said all grumpy, “yeah, I’ll record yeah,” then he would turn in to Pat Morita from The Karate Kid and he’d have me working all day moving all this shit around when I thought we were gonna record. Now, when I work with other producers I still think, “what would Gerard have me do?”
IK: What has been your source of inspiration for this new record?
AF: I was on tour in Bristol last year, around the time I was just starting to make the record. On the main drag in Bristol, there’s all these dollar per pound bookstores. I was thinking should I buy books or should I buy records and CDs. I decided to support books because everyone’s got Kindles now and eReaders. I felt that me getting a physical book was like me getting a physical record and not getting an MP3 or something. I got a book on Banksy; I got the Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe book because I’m really mesmerized and inspired by their relationship. I got a book on Phil Spector who was another big influence—pre murder. Then I saw this book with a really striking man with his shirt off. I opened up the book and I saw this one picture and it’s a pimp dude, another picture where the guy is covered in paint and it looks like he’s been huffing paint but it’s really cool. There’s another one where his wiener is out, I’m thinking this is a book about different pimps. It seemed like an interesting, provocative coffee table book. I was like, I want people to come over my house, open up my coffee table book, and see a guy with his penis out. It was by this photographer named Arlene Gottfried. She was a photographer in Williamsburg in the late 70’s, early 80’s. I thought she was documenting different people in New York but I looked through the book and realized she was documenting the same person. He would have these really drastic physical transformations due to schizophrenia, drugs, New York, and age. He was really stylish. Sometimes he would just wear panty hose and look really cool and sometimes he would just have a feather boa, leather pants, and a knife and it looks like the most natural thing in the world for him. The pictures are all in chronological order and there’s somewhere he looks 70 years old and some two pages later where he looks like he’s 30. He was a really chameleonic person and Arlene documented him for 20 years. He disappears after 20 years of these photos. She was waiting for him at a train station and he never shows up, it’s been 10 years since she’s heard from him. His name…is Midnight. I didn’t notice any of that my first time looking through and I was like Midnight Masses that’s awesome! So I’ve kind of made this narrative based on Midnight and his nomadic lifestyle. The album is called, “Departures,” mainly because of death or loss but also because of traveling. I wrote a lot of it while I was on tour overseas. It’s a theme of someone who never feels at home. It’s my story, but it’s also any artists’ story. I feel like it’s no longer my thing of sadness and grief, it’s a community, it’s a band now and it hadn’t been a band for a long time.
IK: It sounds like New York was a big inspiration for you, have you been inspired by other places you’ve lived like Austin?
AF: I really like the juxtaposition of different places I’ve been. I started the record and wrote a lot of the record on tour. I was in Melbourne when I wrote most of the record, waiting to start the tour. I felt like these cities that are very distinct are what I’m really inspired by. I wrote it over seas then came to Sonic Ranch to record with my friend Ian Longwell. I flew [the band] down from New York and for a week we tracked. It was a cool experience because it’s in the middle of the desert. I finished it in New York. Most sessions were tracked about a block from Central Park near The Dakota where John Lennon was shot. Austin though? I like that a lot of people are in bands, that’s kind of cool. You can say anywhere is the best place for music New York, Los Angeles, maybe in your head. What’s cool is that Austin is supporting music; there are a lot of places for bands to play. It’s inexpensive to live and I can just focus on being an artist here. My band mates are here and I’ve never really been in a band where everyone is in the same city. In my main band [Trail of the Dead] my band mates aren’t even in the same country. I’d say cities are definitely an inspiration, for this record New York more than Austin or LA. I wrote 40 songs for this record and there will be 8 or 9 actually on it.
IK: What’s your process of elimination?
AF: Eliminate everything you can. Smash it. Kill it with fire, and anything that survives put it on.
IK: Has Austin been a good place to try out your new Midnight Masses songs on audiences?
AF: It’s been cool because we hadn’t really played here. We were a New York band. We would do SX and stuff but I never played a real show. I was like; I’d like to be in a band here. To me, it’s a thing to do; you go to Austin to be in a band. I wanted to have a band that everyone was here. Hugo, my band-mate, came out to document the sessions at Sonic Ranch and he eventually joined the band. It was cool because it was like people who document a cult and decide to join it.
IK: You seem to have many music personalities and your Trail of the Dead personality is very different from your Midnight Masses personality. Is it necessary for you to have different music personas?
AF: It’s just an extension of me. I have many personas. I immerse myself in any project I’m doing and to me, making music is the same as acting. Everyone’s favorite actors are those that are dynamic and immerse themselves in their roles and aren’t type cast. Even though it’s nice to have a signature and sound associated with you, it’s nice to have different ideas that can be communicated and that people can experience without being like “what the hell?” It was weird when like, Garth Brooks turned in to Chris Gaines, his songs were pretty good but it was kind of like, what’s going on? When I’m doing Midnight Masses, I’m really focused on a certain vibe in the lyrics and the way I’m singing because it’s my project where I sing more. The vibe is a lot different and I want it to be different. I’m not very happy when it gets to loud and bombastic because I want it to be distinctive. I like to do different genres and have it not be shocking; I’m going to be working on a hardcore record soon. Then, the Trail record I can’t even describe now. It’s in our heads now, rather than our hands. It’s still very conceptual. Then, there’s the Masses record, I’m already thinking about the next one.
IK: What music projects do you hope to work on in the future?
AF: I want to do a double LP that I’ll probably start in a year and a half. I want to do a folk record that’s like The Band or Bob Dylan. I get to direct videos sometimes. I really, get to fill all different roles.
Ilyse Kaplan
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