Hovvdy on 'Big World', The Honesty of Country Music, and Leveling Up
On their sixth record in a decade, the Austin-based duo are paying forth the same gift of compassion and confrontation as the country trailblazers that came before them.
Listening to Hovvdy has always felt like being handed a kite and its string while lying in the grass; elevated and somewhat delicate, carrying itself with a sort of trustworthiness that you can either engage with or lie under. In their sixth album ‘Big World’, the fabric is filmy and light enough that you can simply enjoy watching its pretty courses through the sky, yet dense enough to settle like a heavy blanket should one decide to yank it down over themselves.
The duo’s relationship with assertion has seemingly always recalibrated from the release that came before it, a tension dating from the radiophonic pleas sweetening their earliest work to declaring in statements about 2021’s wily alt-country ‘True Love’ that they ‘threw being cryptic out the window’. Now, with an upcoming supporting slot alongside Wilco and a songwriting career stabling underneath them, Hovvdy have claimed the confidence of deciding when the lyrics ought to either assert or divert - though they all ultimately ride atop playful pinballing melodies and roughhousing guitar, which intrigue, probe, and stimulate even if one should disengage from the lyrics entirely. Their manifold talent, then, is more apparent than ever in ‘Big World’: just as those who seek gritty earnestness can find it in Hovvdy, as will those who prefer levity and playfulness over overt confrontation.
‘‘‘Big World’ organically correlated with Will and I getting into the more professional songwriter world, timing-wise,” Charlie Martin recalls.
“That made making our own music a more freeing process. Maybe in some ways we are more critical of what is a good song or something now, but for me, having correlated more than I ever did with other artists and producers with Hovvdy and having the freedom to be as abstract or concrete as I want to be was really fun on this one.”
Will Taylor, drummer and co-lyricist, agrees and expounds: ‘In the last few years of all the songwriting we’ve done, I feel like there’s good and bad that you run into and sort through, and then you kind of return to your own corner and take the good. I would agree that there’s a slightly higher bar for me to say what I mean and really have the lyrics count. Throughout the years, a lot of my songs have maybe meant something to me or whatever, and they can be hard to piece together, but I think the goal here was to speak clearly.’
“Jeff Tweedy is probably the first songwriter that really struck me with his ability to make lyrics that are not very sensical. He paints broad and wide strokes sometimes, but then he’s very plainspoken in other ways”, Martin attributes to the multifaceted prosaic makeup of ‘Big World’. “Wilco’s Summerteeth is probably my favorite-sounding record of all time. I feel like we’re always referencing that record when making albums, you know? There is just such a trueness through the line in Wilco, throughout the changing of scenes and times. The core thing that I think I’m chasing still is making music that people can find comfort in, and do for others what my favorite music does for me.”
Though their music undeniably pulls from other country-oriented influences apart from Wilco, both Taylor and Martin were careful to pay their respects to the genre’s honesty without overstating their association with its clichés. “I feel like what country has meant to me has changed a lot throughout the years”, Taylor explains.
“A lot of times, there’s a feeling that you get - whether that be a twang or an accent - and I feel like those things still constitute ‘country’, but I feel now, having lived in Nashville and being around country music, we’re in that scene more so.”
“There’s a few different ways you can define that”, he elaborates on Hovvdy’s perception of country music. “Lyrically, I think there is a more stringent or structured way that country songs can be written, and that might not fit our box in the exact same way.
But yeah, there’s a lot of country music that we grew up on that might be the more traditional country or songwriting type thing that we really connect with. There are moments where we love to lean into the imagery of country songwriting, and we just naturally have a little bit of a twang in our voices being from Texas. There’s a sense of earned maturity from a storytelling aspect when you meet someone who is country, and they have stories to tell, or you can learn from them. I think from the beginning, it’s been in the nature of our band to pull from those things.”
Similarly, Martin describes his relationship to country music as somewhat dynamic, and drawn from respect for broader country culture. “I definitely had a pretentious dad who was like, ‘We don’t listen to country’. It’s funny because more than anything, I feel like our music is less influenced by country music and more by country people. Both of my parents are from Mississippi, and all of my family are just real country people. I’ve always been inspired by that, and I think I soak it up, and that comes to the music.”
“We’re really close with the North Carolina scene”, he continues. “Our producer, Ben, lives in Asheville, and we’re friends with all the MJ Lenderman and Wednesday crew, and we played shows with them in the early days. It’s been cool to see the whole progression of ‘dude’ guitar music having been not cool, and now being cool again.”
“It’s exciting, because there’s so much that has the ethos of a lot of the music that I grew up listening to, whether they’re like Wilco or all of those earlier bands of that scene,” Taylor adds. “If anything, it’s just really exciting to have people who are good at making that kind of music, and understand its ethos and emotional dryness. I feel like there’s more of an appetite for the raw, untuned kind of stuff, even with all the tools we have today to make musicians sound perfect. I think that will always appeal to people.”
There are really bare musical moments on this record. “‘Life So Wide’ being the first song on it is something I’m really excited about; it might be the rawest song that we have to date. We’ve been trying to break out of standard tricks we have. I don’t know if ‘grown out’ is the right phrase to describe that, but I think that, like with anything, you get into patterns that can be good sometimes or not as good. In particular, we’re just looking for more raw vocals - less stacks, effects, and tuning.”
“In the past we have leaned heavily on layering, and it creates this very saturated, thick sort of sound”, Martin adds. “We still have that going on in this record for sure, but on my end, ‘Life So Wide’ and ‘Starry’, those two songs are some of the most stripped-back pieces of music we’ve ever made.”
“Give It Away’ was fun and maybe a risk. That song is lyrically really plain-spoken, and we just challenged ourselves and looked into the songs that we love that have staying power and asked, ‘What is there to lean on’? And I feel like usually what I find is that it’s simplicity. Being simple and rhythmic has always kind of been our bag, but we’ve also found a plainspokenness that we haven’t had in the past.” He later elaborated on what separates ‘Big World’ from their past projects: “I think our earlier records are more categorically lo-fi. This record isn’t lo-fi to me, but I don’t know, maybe it is. Sometimes I think people would describe our music as being super sweet and chill, but I think it’s pretty dark sometimes if you listen closely. The nostalgic tag is often used with our music, where it supposedly ‘sounds like your childhood’ or something.”
“I think we’ve gone back and forth being like, ‘Let’s find a new word than nostalgic this time’, but at the end of the day, we’re trying not to define everything as much”, Taylor modifies. “When someone says ‘nostalgic’, I have to think of it as sounding like a song that’s always been there - and that’s a really big compliment. So there’s no beef. Our music has been observed as ‘teen heartbreak’, and for all the teens out there, I want that for them. Categorically speaking, it’s kind of inaccurate, but that kind of stuff matters less and less as time goes on.”
Photography By: Adam Alonzo