Picture yourself 22 hours from home in the middle of West Texas. You and your loved ones are getting blasted by wind on a hot April Fool’s Day, and the campsite you drove all that way to reach is completely unlivable. I bet you’d call that a disaster, because I know I would. For Corbie Hill, who makes music as land is, it’s fuel for a new EP.
That’s just how Hill translates life’s curveballs. His latest album, Free Radio Werewolf, began as his dream of a Western road trip. It’s cinematic in how it chronicles his family’s journey, from the excitement of driving to Memphis or the harsh reality of weather (literally) trying to blow you off the road.
But Hill’s musical evolution runs deeper than travel stories. He has moved through genres over the decades like I’ve moved between states: grunge in high school, post-metal in his twenties, noise experiments, Americana, and now electronic soundscapes.
In our chat, he reflected on how the people in his life often shaped his taste in music at the time, whether it was a cool high school English teacher introducing him to Tom Waits or his ongoing battle with cancer.
What have you been listening to lately?
Corbie: John R. Miller‘s two live EPs, The Fireside Sessions, from last year. I adore his work, just a really phenomenal Americana songwriter. For whatever reason, his music is just like one-to-one accurate to my life. I love his full band stuff, but this is really stripped and direct. The songwriting is so phenomenal, it’s front and center, and I’ll cue those up back-to-back in whichever order.
I like that he drew from a number of his records, because they’re all so strong, and it doesn’t seem to privilege one record over another. There’s also songs from outside of his records that he included and I love that the live version is the only version of that song I can hear.
What is the first musician that you remember discovering on your own and obsessing over?
Corbie: That’s a tough one, because any artist I can think of that’s meant something to me has come from someone. I think that gives so much more depth, warmth, and connection. That artist will always be associated with someone who, whether I’m still in touch with them or not, has been close with me.
In this instance, I’m thinking about how influential my high school English teacher was. I’m from Pamlico County, a very tiny, remote place. A lot of hippies and freethinkers were drawn to it because they could get a piece of land or find a job and just live as they pleased. And so a lot of our teachers got there that same way.
Mrs. Abadia was the coolest damn adult. She would write quotes from the Dune books or Beastie Boys on the board every day. She was so cultured. This was a boondocks public school, but we read The Stranger and Grendel. She was stretching our minds and the person who put me onto Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen. I was making noise recordings but I didn’t know what that was. And she was like, “You should listen to Sonic Youth.”
How has your musical taste evolved since then?
Corbie: I don’t hold still for long. I’m 43 now, so I’ve been through a lot of different phases and evolutions. In the 90s when I was in high school, I was super into grunge and hip-hop. I went through a nu-metal phase when that was a thing. I was into post-rock for a while. I was into noise and drone for a while. I had a metal phase in my 20s.
Country music never spoke to me when I was younger, because all I had access to was the radio stuff. And the people who listen to country music were mean to me. But once I first got cancer at 35 in 2017 and actually started experiencing legit hard times, I listened to more real-deal country. A lot of stuff out of Oklahoma and Texas, plus classic country from the 60s and 70s. And it started making a lot of sense to me.
A good country record is balanced. They’ll talk about the hardest thing imaginable, but then there’ll be a song about it’s pleasant to sit in the sun. That’s the entire song. But that’s life. Life is a balance between those things. The older I got and the harder life got, I just didn’t feel like rock and roll had the emotional carrying capacity for what I needed out of music.
Hip-hop and country both have so much in common. I really wish more people understood that, because they’re both songs about life, as it is lived. There’ll be a song about the hardest thing imaginable, followed by a song about I’m in love and that feels good. It’s great you can listen to a good hip-hop record and get that entire range. You can also listen to a good country record and get that same range.
One of the most significant things for me is how good hip-hop, but especially good country music, have been right by our side as a family, not just mine, as we’ve gone through this really hard stuff.
Are there any records, in particular, that stand out when you think back to the last eight years or so?
Corbie: Open Mike Eagle’s Brick Body Kids Still Daydream. He’s such a ridiculous guy. He’ll talk about real stuff or have a song that just sounds like this dadaistic narration of what Twitter looks like. But that record’s so great because it’s a concept record about a project building getting torn down from the perspective of the building. All four of us really appreciate him.
Jason Boland & The Stragglers and Turnpike Troubadours both have a lot of records that have been really helpful for us. Part of my journey since our luck turned is I got sober. I was like, “Well, if I’m gonna survive this thing, I need to minimize risk. I’m done drinking, I’m done with everything.”
The last two Turnpike Troubadours records are by a sober person who’s learning how to live that way. They’re very powerful, and deeply human. The most recent record [The Price of Admission], which they just surprise released earlier this year, is one of the best country records I’ve ever heard.
When did you first start making and releasing music?
Corbie: I formed my first band in seventh grade with Troy Delaney and Patrick Edwards. We kind of knew how to play some instruments, but we just liked this idea of we’re a band. We used a little cassette recorder to record some songs we’d written; I’d written some lyrics, Troy had written some lyrics, and blah, blah, blah.
I got one of the little Fostex or Tascam turquoise-colored tape deck recorder in high school. I would multitrack on that and make these entire albums. Troy had moved to Kentucky by then, so I would just make a record and mail it to him. It would exist on one cassette, there would be one copy, and I would mail it to Troy, and he would mail me the record he’d made. There was one copy of it. But by doing that, I really learned how to sing harmony with myself, program a drum machine, and write multiple parts for guitar and for bass.
I had some songs where I would set a loop on my old Casio keyboard and then run it through a distortion pedal so it just sounded nightmarish and huge, and then I’d layer guitar and vocals on top of that. I was in the middle of nowhere. I had friends, but I needed a ride for my parents to go see them. So I just went up to my room and figured this stuff out. It was 1998. There was no Internet to speak of.
At what point would you say you started getting involved in a local scene?
Corbie: It was 2005. I’d wanted to form a band forever, I just never could figure out how. And then my friend Dave Reinhardt and I formed this duo in Asheville called Migrations. Me on bass and vocals and him on drums. And it was just this loud, pummeling, proggy, arty, hardcore thing. The songs didn’t really have predictable structures. He was coming from the hardcore world and I was trying to write intricate but also spacious parts.
Dave was really influential, because he was like, “I don’t want to play the same part of a song twice.” So none of the songs had choruses, they just moved forward through a bunch of different parts and then they were over. I’d always written songs, but writing them collaboratively with another person, getting to know other bands, learning how to book and stuff like that was all new. Dave lived up in New York and he’d done a lot of stuff up there, and so I picked up some things from him.
Since then, I’ve always been active in some way. I lived in Greenville after Asheville and I had bands there. I was friends with a lot of noise musicians and we would just play one-off noise shows. Telling people, “This band exists once!” One was called Too Many Hot Dogs and another was Sweet Zombie Jesus. It was just a 17-minute free noise set.
We moved up this way in 2008. I was in a post-metal duo called Battle Rockets and an Americana-ish rock act called Where the Buffalo Roamed that had a really wide-open live show. The finest band I’ve ever been in, though, was Alpha Cop, from 2010 to 2016. So technical. So nuanced and collaborative and inventive. At our best, we were like a severe thunderstorm, completely localized within a dive bar. Sometimes it hurts to think about because I may never touch that live wire again.
I’ve written a bit about my sister battling brain cancer and our music-forward relationship. I feel like losing her has changed the way I interact with music. Have you felt that as you’ve dealt with your cancer diagnosis?
Corbie: I lost my ability to write lyrics. I’ve come to terms with it, but it’s just gone. And that’s not this little side skill. From seventh grade up until I was 35, I was just writing lyrics or whole songs in one sitting.
I’ve written a handful of lyrics since getting sick. But when I did, I felt awful. Eventually it clicked that the way I used to write lyrics was a form of dwelling. When you’ve been through something as heavy as we have — my third time with cancer, my wife’s second — you don’t have the luxury of dwelling.
It’s ultimately a good thing that I don’t dwell anymore. If a symptom or a side effect of that is that I can’t write lyrics the way I used to, either that’s fine or maybe I can learn a new way to write lyrics. But it’ll be like learning to walk again. The lyrics that I appreciate are so much more nuanced. I used to write just dark and heavy music, and that served me well, but the stuff I listen to and want to put out in the world is more nuanced than that.
It’s made me want to write just straight-up, gorgeous instrumental stuff. I don’t think that that ignores or sidesteps the hard stuff of life. That music can remind you that there’s good stuff, can help you plug into the joy. None of us need to be reminded that life is hard. Music can have the role of uplifting you so that you get back out there and aren’t defeated by it.
That’s so true. I’ve gone through countless periods of not listening to artists or records because it’s not what I need.
Corbie: Patti Smith‘s Gone Again is such a magnificent record, but I can hardly ever listen to it. It’s so heavy and so real, you know, especially right now. It’s a masterpiece, but get it away from me. My 15-year-old has been listening to The Antlers’ Hospice a lot, and I’m like, “How can you do that right now?” [laughs]
I love how Free Radio Werewolf sounds like the soundtrack for a video game about a Western road trip/adventure. What’s your process for translating your experiences into sound?
Corbie: What’s funny is I had the name of that album before we took our trip. It was Winter Break 2022; we went out through Oklahoma and West Texas to New Mexico, back across Texas through the Deep South and home in almost two weeks. Stayed in state park cabins, some of them really minimal. But we finally were to the point where we could afford this Western trip.
I had been a freelancer before I got my staff job. We just didn’t have the money. It had been this trip that I had dreamed of really since I was a teenager, just going West. Being a native North Carolinian, I had this huge romance about that wide openness. It’s very calming to me.
I kept this really detailed diary during the trip, processing in real time what I was seeing. And when I got home, I took my time and selected what were the things I witnessed that I would want to find a way to express musically. How do we express this as a narrative? Because it really was a narrative. We headed off across Tennessee, all excited, drove like 13 hours in a day to get to the other side of Memphis. So the first song “To Memphis” and it needed to bounce, to move, like, “yeah, we’re doing this!”
We had to change our route because of a winter storm and got locked into this wild weather, just getting blown all over the road. There was a cold snap, then we went through Palo Duro Canyon and ended up in New Mexico. We went to all the random Roswell tourist places, then down through the desert and Carlsbad Caverns.
It had acts, like in a movie or play. So I took my time and was purposeful in how to capture the feel and how to tell the story. But on the same token, I would pick up my sequencer and start fiddling around, finding a beat or melody and be like, “Whoa, where does this go?” It was a little bit of serendipity, a lot of building a framework and finding how to fit things into the framework.
You recently celebrated the four-year anniversary of your record Space 1981. How did your experience with that project’s electronica sound inform your approach with Free Radio Werewolf?
Corbie: I programmed that during my first relapse. I didn’t know why I was sick yet, I didn’t know what was wrong. My mind hadn’t accepted that I could have cancer again. And so I programmed the entire record in that confusion. None of it was made even after I knew I had cancer. It was just all made while things felt weird, and I didn’t get why my health was so garbagey. Even like the last track, which is the purest hopeful instrumental I’ve ever made.
Space 1981 gave me the confidence to get conceptual on an electronica record. By the time I made Free Radio Werewolf, I had matched that with what I like to do on guitar, which is to have space and atmosphere. I was able to program stuff that I really like. I know that it’s an acquired taste, but where it’s like the sound of a wide open dry space. It doesn’t have a beat, it’s very thin and sparse. It goes on way too long for most people. [laughs]
Tell me more about the pair of projects you have in the works right now!
Corbie: I’ve wanted to marry my guitar work and some vocal stuff with my electronica. Just program something, have some guitar stuff written, and make a record with vocals again. Because before I made electronica, land is had a folkish, Americana-ish sound. I made a solo guitar record during the pandemic and then just went full-in on electronica. So I want to bring the guitar back.
We went on a trip late March back out to Texas where everything went wrong. We never even ended up camping two nights at the same place because the weather was wild. We found this campsite we were supposed to stay at, and conditions were hellish. Howling 94-degree wind on April 1st. It was like being under a giant hair dryer.
So we were 22 hours from home, there was a threat of heavy storms in Tennessee, and we just turned tail and ran. Improvised our way home. And it was crazy, because some of the improvised stuff ended up being amazing. We got creative and found some really cool places to stay. Tenkiller Lake State Park ended up being amazing, we would not have found it otherwise. But it was such a weird, exhausting trip.
Once we got back, I decided to make an EP based on the experience. I’ve got this concept called Copper Breaks, because the place where we found that 94 degree heat was called Copper Breaks. That was supposed to be the goal of our trip and we were only there for like 25 minutes because it was so inhospitable.
I have this idea where it’s an unbroken wash of like six songs, where they blur in and out of each other. I’ve written these lyrics that are really sparse, where a song will have like six lines that repeat or come out once. I’ve worked on programming it and the idea is, once I get around to recording the guitar and bass parts and vocals, to keep them sloppy. It’s supposed to sound messy. It’s supposed to sound like stuff just about to fly apart.
Ultimately, that’s practice for a record that I really want to make called My Name Is Hope. The name Hope goes way back in our family. It’s my wife’s middle name, it’s our oldest’s middle name. We’re looking through these pictures with my in-laws, and there’s this one of Hope Harvey Powell, maybe in the 1930s. It’s just this accidentally iconic photo. He’s somewhere in western Kentucky with his wife. They’re standing in front of this barn, looking like life’s been rough, but they don’t get knocked down.
I saw that photo and knew it was the cover art. But I want to take my time and write some Appalachian hard times-style lyrics and make this record that’s equal parts fingerstyle guitar and electronica. But that’s down the line. Before I knew I was sick, that was how I was going to process my wife getting sick again. And then I got sick again.
What would you tell folks who don’t know about local music but want to get involved?
Corbie: When larger or better-known rock bands you care about come to town and play Cat’s Cradle, pay attention to who the opening act is. You can work backwards from a lot of larger stuff and find out who’s in their circle, and who’s going to be local. A lot of this stuff really is right in front of you.
In terms of hip-hop, it’s listening to a larger act’s record, and when someone has a verse on their song, see who that is. Sometimes that person’s from North Carolina. North Carolina’s got a phenomenal hip-hop tradition.
For country music, people from different states collaborate with each other all the time. I just noticed that off those John R. Miller EPs, he does a duet with someone who also is on the new Blue Cactus record. You can see who’s featuring who and who else they’re playing with. Once you start really paying attention to this web of connectivity with musicians, you’re going to stumble across people who live the next town over from you, or in your own town.
I think that’s the most natural way to do it. You can just jump straight in to go to the small venue and take a chance, but if you’re like me, you go to bed early, you don’t drink anymore, and you don’t want to go to a bar. The least intimidating way is to find out who’s playing with who, whether on their records or at their shows. And that’s the same skill you would use on social media, or YouTube, or on a Wikipedia dive. So use your Wikipedia dive skill, but to find out who collaborates with who, and you’ll stumble across some locals.
Who are your favorite local/North Carolina bands?
Corbie: I love Watchhouse. Before I had my staff job, I was a music journalist for about 10 years. I’ve seen their whole career, profiling them for the Indy for their second record, meeting them at Open Eye. And to see where they are now is wild.
I mentioned Blue Cactus. I really like what Steph and Mario are doing these days,their work is very strong. John Howie Jr. is such a good guy. Love his work. Mipso is amazing.
My good friend Mike Wiley is an actor and a playwright, but I have to mention him as one of my favorite artists. He’s got a show about Emmitt Till and Jackie Robinson. There’s one on Henry “Box” Brown who, before Emancipation, got the nickname because he shipped himself to freedom in a box with air holes.
His latest show, Changing Same, is about the 1940s murder in Durham of Booker T. Spicely. I wrote the guitar parts and played with him on stage. It feels really good to be aligning my morality with my art by contributing to that show. That’s a direction of my musical self that I’m very glad to get back to.
We’ve done that show nine times and got three dates near Richmond in October. I’m really thrilled to play those because Booker Spicely, who was killed, his family was from Virginia, and so it feels very real to do that.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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