Indiana folk rock band Houndmouth has been playing their crowd-rousing indie-Americana music for 15 years now, and through multiple personnel changes there's been one constant: lead singer and guitarist Matt Myers.
Lordy, Houndmouth’s fifth studio album and first recorded with Myers as the band’s sole remaining original member, has been in the works for roughly a third of the band’s existence. For two of those five years, Myers’ songwriting was emotionally incapacitated by an onslaught of change in his personal and professional life. In 2021, original bassist Zak Appleby stepped away from the band to focus on family and other professional endeavors. Then, in 2023 Myers and original drummer Shane Cody had a falling out, which also severed Houndmouth’s recording and rehearsal space, which was Cody’s grandparents’ 19th-century house in New Albany, Indiana — “The Green House.”
You might assume that the two writing free years that followed were dark times in Myers’ journey. But you'd also be wrong. Myers described them as the happiest two years of his life, during which he fell in love and got married. The problem wasn’t writer’s block due to lack of inspiration. Instead, Myers had so much to write about that he didn’t know where to start. Thankfully, he was able to turn to Brad Cook, the esteemed producer of Houndmouth’s 2021 record Good for You. It was Cook and his team in Durham, North Carolina, that were able to get Myers’ creative juices flowing again.
“I hadn't been practicing or flexing the [songwriting] muscle in such a long time, just because of personal stuff. So I went in the studio with producer Brad Cook, and he put some people in place and pieces together to pull me out of whatever was going on,” Myers explained. “His approach is always through people and not music, you know. It's kind of funny because it kind of transcends music — you don't even realize you're making a record until it's probably already tracked and done. He just cares deeply about everybody he works with on a real level. It’s great friendship.”
Myers' return to songwriting started with penning Lordy’s title track, which he accomplished in about five minutes. He started writing alone, during the daylight (as opposed to his usual nights), and in an autobiographical way that was less about telling perfect stories and more about stream-of-consciousness ideas.
Despite the absence of his original collaborators, Lordy wasn’t a solo project for Myers by any means. Longtime touring keyboardist Caleb Hickman and his wife Kay contributed, as well as Cook’s Durham friends Sam Beam (Iron & Wine), MJ Lenderman and Cook’s brother, Phil Cook.
“I had some lines, and I didn't really know what it was about, which is kind of how I start anyway. I feel like, when you say words out loud in a relatively meaningful way, eventually, there's something happening with your subconscious and it's trying to piece it together. [Beam] was dictating, and I was just strumming and singing, and he was on the couch dictating, and he spit it back out to me, and he's like, ‘Yeah, this is not bad at all,’” Myers said. “[Lenderman] and Brad are very good friends. He lives pretty close to Brad, and his playing is so careless and fluid — just playful and great. So that was also nice, to watch somebody record like that, because it shows you how really carefree things should be in the studio and how fun it should be.”
Houndmouth has come a long way in the last 15 years, especially in the last 11, since the release of their smash hit “Sedona.” Myers noted that while he hasn’t watched the show himself, his new mother-in-law is a fan of Grey’s Anatomy, which helped catapult the popularity of “Sedona” when they (spoiler alert!) featured the song during McDreamy’s tragic car accident scene.
Armed with new family at home, new songwriting strategies and more collaborators in his corner, Myers sings from the soul on his Lordy record, ushering in the latest era of Houndmouth, which has the potential to be the band’s rawest and realest yet.
