phoneswithchords embraces life with no rewinds

Arthur Alligood has been thinking a lot about time recently. While his current project phoneswithchords is a relatively new endeavour, his debut album, Formerly – first released on Worship Circle Records – is rapidly approaching its 20th anniversary.

Asked about his origins as a Christian artist, he notes that most people know him either for his work under his own name or as phoneswithchords, but not both. He chalks the Alligood era up as being a product of his environment. He doesn’t seem ashamed of the period, but somewhat reluctant to claim it as his own. “[Growing up Christian], you’re taught that if you have a gift, you have to use it,” he says, his look turning just slightly wry. “And obviously, you have to use it for God. If you can sing, then you need to always use that gift. Music was connected to this very spiritual meaning of what [it] meant.”

Living north of Nashville in White House, Tennessee, surrounded by churches, Alligood talks about having been funnelled into a church circuit while cutting his teeth as a musician. There was a single all-ages club a 40-minute drive from where he lives, but, other than that, his options for other music venues were limited. As such, Alligood describes his first decades as a musician as someone softly trapped by circumstance.

“I don’t really identify as a Christian anymore,” he admits. “That’s kind of why phoneswithchords started. I didn’t want to do the music that I felt like was in me now under my name, because it felt like there was so much connection to all that. I wanted a clean break.”

Going back to those early records, you might be able to sense a little bit of that detachment. Alligood’s sense of songcraft has been well-developed since that 2005 debut, but when you’re working within the confines of CCM (contemporary Christian music), there’s only so much you can do to rock the boat creatively. As Alligood copped to, these records don’t always sound like he’s making music for himself, but rather God. Or perhaps more accurately, the church-going populous who’ve inferred what godly music should be.

Still, his skill shines through, and it’s little surprise that he went on to win the 2011 Mountain Stage New Song Contest. His prize? A fully-funded album – which would become 2012’s One Silver Needle – featuring Jim Keltner (a legendary session drummer who worked on several Beatles solo albums and played as ‘Buster Sidebury’ with The Traveling Wilburys), Leland Sklar (best known for being James Taylor’s bassist), and the late Michael Ward (guitarist for The Wallflowers).

When considering the pros of doing things the old way, this is what immediately comes to mind for Alligood. “That’s the best band I will probably ever have. I think maybe we did a second take on one of those songs, but it was like, ‘Here’s the sheets, count us in.’ I’d never played with that calibre of musicians.”

The downside? “It kind of tricked my brain into thinking that I was on a trajectory I really wasn’t,” he says. “Play with those players and you’re like, ‘Maybe there’s a little buzz.’ You win the contest, it’s paid for. That was the first experience where I was hearing, ‘Oh, this is going to do great.’ And then it didn’t really do anything.”

You can find reviews of One Silver Needle around the web, and while they largely skew positive, you’ll quickly notice that the album’s reach didn’t stretch far beyond the circles Alligood was already established in. Four albums in and doing things “by the book” wasn’t working. Sometimes it felt like it was, only for Alligood to realise that all the time put in, and all the songwriting awards and talented name studio musicians in the world, can’t force your breakout. “Growing up around Nashville, you’re fed all these lines,” he says. “You’ve got to do it this way. You got to hire this producer. I have much respect for that formula, because it’s tried and true. But I was second guessing myself.”

Alligood frequently found himself struggling to maintain ownership over his art, wrestling both with his perceived obligation to God and with a sense of inferiority to those he believed knew better than him when it came to the industry. He’d write songs with the most rock-solid, unfuckwithable structural integrity, only to falter when faced with his peers. “Back then, I would write so no one could fuck the song up, no one could mess with the arrangement. But then I would let go and let people put their stamp on it. Every time I did that, I just felt this loss. I’d have an idea for this production thing, or this ‘x’ thing, and I wouldn’t chase them because they’re the professionals.”

Things slowed down after One Silver Needle. 2015’s The Shadow Can’t Have Me is a record we don’t even touch upon: Alligood skips it, expressly talking about post-One Silver Needle fallout as though the record didn’t actually happen. “Coming out of One Silver Needle, I went through a really tough divorce,” he says. “So I was like, ‘I gotta figure out something to do. I can’t keep doing this.’ So I just got a job and tried to figure out my life. My kids were little, so I was trying to be there like I felt like I needed to be. And then I was trying to figure out what role music was going to play in my life if it wasn’t to play in front of people.”

Alligood didn’t realise how foundational music had become to his way of life. While he was often dissatisfied with the surrounding minutiae, cutting off his creative outlet didn’t produce the results he’d hoped for. “[My therapist told me], ‘You’ve used this thing to cope with and process life, and now you’ve just ripped it out from underneath yourself.’ I was just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

So, in October of 2020, Alligood launched a Kickstarter for his return album, appropriately titled Better Late Than Never, successfully raising the $25,000 needed to bring it to fruition. He reconnected with One Silver Needle producer Mikal Blue, seeking to put proper cap on that era and close it out on his own terms. “That final record was such a redemptive thing,” says Alligood, admitting that he’d become a little bitter. “I was able to go to the same studio that I was at, with the same producer, some of the same players. After doing that, I just felt like, ‘This is closing a chapter on my solo body of work.’ I don’t want to say anything else under my name at this point.”

That said, once again, the process of Better Late Than Never’s release was one of frustration. While he revelled in playing again with Michael Ward and working with Toad the Wet Sprocket’s Dean Dinning for the first time, the album sat in limbo for a full year while waiting for a confirmation on a major feature that ultimately fell through. What was meant to be his quickest turnaround for an album, one that aimed to marry the polish and professionalism of his early days while eliminating the red tape, became his longest.

And this is how we get phoneswithchords. While waiting for the feature that never came, Alligood began independently working on an album that was a massive left-turn from everything he’d done since first picking up a guitar more than 25 years prior. He recorded, mixed and ‘mastered’ at home, alone, abandoning the songwriting conventions that he’d stuck to for so long.

That album was cut the kid, a collection of lo-fi, off-the-cuff songs that eschew choruses for a stream of often devastatingly frank and honest verses. This was not music made for God or radio or anyone but Alligood himself. “Making cut the kid, I was just so fucking done with all that. I was tired of waiting. I was tired of pop songs. I was just done. So I did the exact opposite. I feel like the shift was already happening in me, even before that record. I just needed that wait time to push me.”

Ironically, as it often goes, when you stop trying to specifically appeal to others, that’s when your own appeal shines through. Alligood connected with Z Tapes, who released the album just three months after Better Late Than Never, and the longtime musician was quickly embraced by the DIY community. While Alligood no longer considers himself a Christian artist, it’s still unsurprising that he hit it off with the members of A Place for Owls, a band sitting at the unique intersection of DIY emo and CCM.

Alligood has consistently worked with the band’s Ben Sooy and Nick Webber ever since, and found himself with a larger network of friends and connections within just a couple years than he’d ever had when he was doing things “properly.” Soon, his community was large enough to launch an idea he’d had a decade earlier: a series titled You Have Until Lunch, where he’d invite artists to write a new song within 30 minutes on camera, in attempt to capture the “songwriting process” we journalists so often ask about before being met with confusing answers.

“I registered the YouTube channel You Have Until Lunch in 2011. I’m one of those people that has a tonne of ideas and I’ll register the domain or get the Instagram,” says Alligood. “But, back then, I didn’t feel like I had the community. Then when I fell haphazardly into the DIY Twitter scene, I had these friends where I thought, ‘I could launch this now.’ So I sent out a message to 20 of those friends, and literally every single person was like, ‘This is incredible. Yes, I’ll do it.’”

Since launching nine months ago, the series has had 42 episodes, featuring the likes of Josaleigh Pollett, Mon Nobi, Full Blown Meltdown, Birthday Dad, Labrador, Copeland James and many others. One episode’s creation has already made it onto a proper release, which Alligood takes immense pride in. “There’s this band, Sailor Down, from Massachusetts. It’s really just this girl, Chloe, and she wrote a song in the session that she fleshed out and is now on her EP. To me, that is the ultimate success.”

Released last month, phoneswithchords’ latest album, The Speed of Time, is in many ways a product of the community building and horizon-expanding of the past few years. While cut the kid was an isolated record of anti-pop, The Speed of Time signals a return to pop songwriting. Nick Webber is a major creative force on the record, too, mixing, mastering and co-producing, as well as playing on half of the songs. Alligood also brought in live drums for the first time on a phoneswithchords release, recruiting Doug McCarthy (aka devəlmāˈker).

This, on paper, might seem to point to similarities with his early records, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The Speed of Time is undoubtedly the biggest outlier in Alligood's discography – a record he describes as Beatles-esque, but plays out more like if Phil Spector tried to produce a Sparklehorse album from inside a broom closet. It’s both filthy and lush, depressive and optimistic, and simultaneously the most playful and mature Alligood’s music has ever been.

First and foremost, though, The Speed of Time is about time, and how much of it we spend dwelling on a past we can’t change and a future we can’t predict. “Everything feels so fast and it really was affecting me,” Alligood admits. “I’ll be 46 in May, so I’m thinking about those kinds of things. These songs just kind of spilled out, and I realised that in some ways they were just directed toward my kids. My oldest just turned 18 and my other two daughters are about to turn 16. We agree very little on music. I don’t get a say when it comes to being in the car much. It’s Taylor Swift and, you know, Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan and all those people. But one of the only bands that we can all agree on sometimes is The Beatles.”

On The Speed of Time, Alligood leans much further into layered harmonies and atypical play methods when compared to his previous records, and a large driving force of its sound is Alligood’s shift from acoustic to electric guitar. Adapting to the instrument in record time, somehow yanking a better tone out of his brother’s borrowed axe than many seasoned players in a studio can manage, Alligood describes going electric as though he were a child describing a new toy, obsessed with testing its limits. One of the things he did was cut up pieces of lined cardboard and shove them under the bridge of the guitar. “Without distortion, it sounds completely horrible. But with distortion,” he smirks, “it’s muted just enough that it sounds cool.”

Throughout our conversation, Alligood emphasises the importance of this lyric in the title track: “The past is all over / The future never showed up / The present is water / Go fill your cup.” Forty-five is perhaps an age where you’d expect to really start appreciating the present for what it is. But it’s something we should all be more acutely aware of, whether you’re 15 and terrified of your future prospects in a world that seems to be crumbling around us, or 75 and dwelling on decades of mistakes and missed opportunities. You can reinvent yourself as many times as you want, at any time, at any age.

But why not right now?