Philip makes REALLY incredible and beautiful songs that I can only describe as how a forest must sound when it’s growing and no one is around. Take a minute to get quiet and go listen closely (especially to “tree king” immediately after reading this interview, you’ll hear what I mean).

 

 

 

Words: Rebecca Urias 

 

http://www.myspace.com/musicofphilipallen

 

 

Where are you from?

My life is split up into thirds. I am 21, so I spent 7 years in Oklahoma, 7 in the Ozarks in Arkansas, and 7 in Atlanta suburbs.

 

How did growing up there influence you?

It’s hard to say. Especially with Oklahoma and Atlanta. I was so young in Oklahoma, and so I have a feeling it influenced me in very many ways that I can’t know or explain.Arkansas is easy, because I loved Arkansas and grew into it so quickly. My family was building a house there, and so in the meantime we rented another house in a town of about 8,000 senior citizens called Bella Vista. We were there for about a year. I loved it there. It was like living in a hilly, wooded town filled with grandparents. I played and explored the woods and the big deep ravine behind the house. Even though our time there was not long, it is mostly what I think of when I remember Arkansas. I especially love to think of the winters there. It didn’t snow very often in Arkansas, but every February, towards the end of the month, it would come down all at once in the night, about fifteen or twenty inches of snow. The power would go out and for the evening, everything was so quiet. The winters in the Ozarks – thousands of leafless black trees making blurry lines out of the tops of hills – are, I think, really the roots of my sense of home and beauty. So much of what I find myself taking a moment to look over or listen to in some way reminds me of those blurry hilltops.I can’t say much for the Atlanta suburbs. They are just like any other suburbs.

 

When and how did you first become interested in music? How long have you been playing?

My sister and I took classical piano lessons with a really wonderful teacher in Arkansas for several years. Her name was Fran and she was in her seventies. She was tall and thin but a strong person. She had a studio in her basement with two big Steinways. One was nine feet long and the other seven. Old and imposing instruments. Her studio was dark and looked through wall-sized glass windows out into the cloudy green woods behind her house. The Ozarks, as I remember them, were always very cloudy and green.My sister kept up with it and eventually got a degree in music and is still a very talented pianist. She plays very beautifully and vividly, I think. I got my first guitar, though, on New Year’s Eve 1999. People were talking about the millennium bug and I was just trying to play some chords and maybe get some calluses on my fingers.Soon after that I lost interest in piano and I think I started writing songs—very bad songs—right away.I didn’t really become interested in the kind of music I like now until later high school. I don’t think I owned or seriously listened to a Beatles record until I was 16. I sometimes hear about these musicians who say they always had instruments lying around their houses and were listening to Bob Dylan or John Lennon out of the womb and I am very jealous. My parents are not musical and I am still discovering Bob Dylan and John Lennon.

How many instruments do you play?

It depends on what you mean by “play.” If I have to, I can get pretty good at recorders, piano, accordion, xylophone. But that only goes in spurts and I forget how to play them right after I’m done working on whatever song I’m using them for.Mostly I play guitar and I am getting pretty good now at harmonica.

 

What kind of songs come easier than others?

Bad ones.

 

Ever get in trouble in school as a kid? If so, spill the beans!

Not really. My sister and I were homeschooled, and we did pretty well. My dad has a plaque in our house that shows male student of the year from 1993 – 2005. I won it every year.

 

Recommend a book, a movie, and a song you think the world should know and why.

Movie: Stardust Memories by Woody Allen

This movie, as best I can tell, is a pretty good American version of a movie called 8 1/2 , which is an Italian movie which seems to be about moviemaking but which is mostly about the moviemaker himself and so also about the meaning of his life or life in general. It’s heady, artsy stuff. My mom hasn’t seen it but I doubt she would like it.Stardust Memories deals with the same sorts of things, but it is about Woody Allen instead of Frederico Fellini, and so it is funnier. It is funny and beautiful, really.Both have fantastic endings, though, and I think you should watch both of them.

Song: The Colour Green by Sibylle Baier

The record of the same name was released in 2006, and it is a transfer of fourteen songs from a couple of reel-to-reel tape recordings from the seventies (that I imagine were stowed under a bed somewhere). Her son discovered them and had them published. The title song is, I think, the most beautiful song on the record. It is a very human song, but not in a dramatic, pretentious way. It is just very normal but beautiful (like a rainy day or a handwritten letter is ordinary but beautiful).”The letter I wrote: Dear friend, I think of you on the top of Empire State. Dear friend, I’m lonesome. Dear friend, I’ve been well. How do you spell your name? The city has changed me. I am no longer the same.He wrote to me: Woman, I’d like to stay. Liberty Statue has got so many stairs, but when you need help I will be there.”

Book: Love Alone is Credible by Hans Urs von Balthasar

This one is a little harder to explain. It is very philosophical, but it is not droll. ‘Scuse me while I wax philosophical for just a minute. European thinkers in the 20th century started asking how they could know or even think anything about God if God is infinite and beyond being, while we are finite beings who think always in terms of the finite world of beings and being. It is an old question and not an easy one, but old difficult questions have a way of working their way back up through the ground.Balthasar, a Swiss theologian, tries to answer this question by suggesting love—a love which bowls us over and destroys our concept of love—as the only way to think of God. It sounds pretty simple but it is very serious philosophy.Sorry if that was a too didactic. College turns people into windbags. 

 

Favorite poem?

I don’t really know anything about poetry and have not read very much of it. I am trying to learn. But I think “Grace” by Wendell Berry is very beautiful.

 

When you’re not making music, what is your day job?

In the wintertime I am an undergraduate student in Chicago studying philosophy. I have got one year left. During the summer I develop pictures at a photo lab in a big mall.

 

Is there anything you particularly try to express through your music?

I am still trying to figure that out. It is nice to try to express things through music because if you create something beautiful or maybe a little off kilter you can feel pretty sure that you are going to affect the right kind of person in some good kind of way.But when words get thrown in it gets very complicated, because words are so complicated. I have a lot of trouble writing words to songs. I sometimes feel like the things that are most important to me are things I don’t want to put in a song that is supposed to be performed. I think there is something sort of strange about that. Like girls on the internet who take lots and lots of pictures of themselves. But maybe spilling your guts is part of what makes a good song. I am still trying to decide.For now I am just trying to write more honest lyrics. I have listened to too much Marc Bolan (whose words are mostly complete nonsense) and I am finally realizing that his words are okay but they don’t get you very far. I am trying to write honest lyrics, and trying decide what “honest” means.I am still learning. Musically I am still just an adolescent; awkward and maybe a little overconfident. I am still buying my shoes too big so I can grow into them later.

 

What is the center of the world for you?

The big grasslands by the coastal road towards the south point of the big island of Hawaii.

 

What are you listening to this very minute?

In my head: “Brother: Son” by Br. Danielson. I recently drove from Arkansas to Georgia alone and I listened to his “Brother is to Son” record over and over. His music and words remind me a lot of Sunday school, and there is something very good and innocent about that memory.

 

What do you find particularly inspiring?

Strange places. Animals. Echoey rooms. Being alone and quiet. Children’s stories and poems. West Virginia. Frustration. Garrison Keillor. Winter trees. My mother’s father. Christmas. 

 

How was opening for Sam Beam (the singer of Iron & Wine)?! Nervous? Wonderful? Awful? (we all want to know!)

The most I could say about it was that it was a whole lot of fun. Everyone was very warm and gracious and clapped a lot for me though hardly anybody knew who I was. There were about 2500 people there, I think. That’s a lot of claps.And I was not nervous, though I thought I would be.After I played I got to go sit in the audience with my fellow plain ol’ anybodies and listen to Sam Beam. So it felt like I got to play at a show I bought a ticket to. That was maybe the funnest part.The best thing to come of all of it really though was that I played with a string quartet made up of two good friends and two near strangers. So I got to play music with some of my favorite people, and became friends with a couple of people I didn’t know so well who are now squarely and permanently inducted into my group of favorite peoples.It was just so fun.

 

Are you going to go on tour anytime soon?

It seems very unlikely anytime soon. I have only a handful of recordings (a handful which would fit into very small hands), and I have only played three shows in my life. Two of them were mostly for friends and the other one was opening for Sam Beam.This coming fall and winter I am going to focus mostly on writing good songs and recording them. I may play a few small shows in Chicago, but other than that, we will have to wait and see. 

 

Which musicians inspire you the very most and why?

It’s hard to say. I think it is probably Bob Dylan, Marc Bolan, and Sacred Harp music.I only started writing songs I liked after I heard Bob Dylan’s music, and that was only two or three years ago. If I had never heard Bob Dylan I don’t know what my music would sound like. Maybe like Coldplay, or someone.Marc Bolan was a high school discovery but it only really set in how much I loved him a couple of years ago. He has a sense of melody which is very singular to him. His voice is also very strange, which I like.Sacred Harp music is a southern church hymnody, and is also the oldest American musical tradition. The sound of it is impossible to explain, so I suggest you simply go look up some recordings (or check out Matt and Erica Hinton’s excellent documentary about Sacred Harp singing, “Awake, My Soul”).I am also very inspired by certain very good friends, Joseph Levon (of Latino Tanks, who I sometimes sing with), Gabriel Ellison RiCharde (who I will hardly sing without), and Steve Slagg, who write I think, very good music.

 

Can you do a handstand?

No. I am so uncoordinated I am surprised sometimes that I can walk.

 

What is a typical day for you?

(I refuse to answer this question because the answer would be too boring.)

 

And finally, do you know where these roots go, where they end or where they’re growing? Or is it a mystery?

I’ve got a pretty good idea, but mostly I think it is a mystery

 

http://www.myspace.com/musicofphilipallen