With his latest release Ghost Notes, Preacher Boy pushes the boundaries of blues and Americana into bold, uncharted territory. Across 18 tracks, the artist blends raw acoustic grit with avant-garde textures, crafting an album that feels intimate yet sonically adventurous. Eschewing polish for emotional honesty, Ghost Notes moves between jagged guitar riffs, whispered vocals, and haunting silences—each track unfolding like a whispered confession.
It’s a record that resists easy categorization, but rewards deep listening. Drawing from traditions of folk, country blues, and experimental roots music, Preacher Boy delivers something wholly original—unfiltered, immediate, and deeply human. We sat down with him to talk about the creative risks behind Ghost Notes, the stories between the songs, and what it means to make music outside the lines.
You’ve often been described as a pioneer of alt-blues. What did that term mean to you when you first started, and has your relationship with it changed?
Well, I’d say I took it in the spirit in which I believe it was intended, which was complimentary.
At that time, it felt like “alternative” really meant something—you had these things happening musically all across the genre landscape that felt like genuine resistance to the mainstream. You had the grunge thing rising up as a counterbalance to toxic arena rock posturing. You had acts as diverse as Public Enemy and De La Soul demonstrating that rap could ascend to vital levels of political and social artistry. You had trip-hoppers like Portishead and Massive Attack proving that technology and songwriting could and should co-exist. And you had the first Lollapalooza, which brought together—in a way that made total sense—everyone from Siouxsie and the Banshees, Living Colour, and the Violent Femmes, to Ice-T’s Body Count, Fishbone, and The Rollins Band. So to be heard, seen, and understood as someone who represented a similar resistance to the mainstream was pretty cool.
Now, mind you, blues has never been “mainstream” in the conventional sense of the term, but within the genre’s parameters, a kind of micro-mainstream had very much emerged, and it was very dominated by electric guitar players who were seemingly solely working the narrow areas between the Kings (BB, Freddie, and Albert) and Stevie Ray Vaughan. It felt like no one was talking about Mississippi John Hurt, Charley Patton, Robert Pete Williams, Bukka White, Son House, Sleepy John Estes, Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James—any of those beautiful artists. All of whom were very unique, and honestly, very strange. It was powerful, idiosyncratic music. And they were songwriters! That was the other thing; blues lyrics at that time just seemed to keep reiterating the same cliches about bad women and good whiskey. And to me, the history of the genre just had so much more to offer than that, and so, yeah, I guess in a way I was trying to present an alternative to what was happening at the time, and for people to understand and appreciate that … well, I appreciate that!
And this was a time when early albums were also coming out from folks like Chris Whitley, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Corey Harris, G. Love, and Kelly Joe Phelps—each of whom, in their own way, was presenting a kind of alternative. So it felt like something special was happening, and I remain honored to be associated with that.
Ghost Notes feels like both a memoir and a manifesto. When did you know it was time to make this record?
Wow, that’s lovely. A memoir and a manifesto. I like that so much. Thank you. As to when I knew it was time to make the record, that’s sort of complicated. I guess I can put it like this. I was 100% clear about wanting to make this record, and I can practically cite the day I began the work, because it was very, very intentional. And I can just about cite the day I knew the process was finally over, that I actually had the final tracks, because it had been such a long journey to get there, and the realization that I’d finally made it hit me like a ton of bricks.
As to what happened in between, it was very nearly madness several times over. I lost my way so many times, tore the entire thing down and built it back up again so many times, told myself so many times I should just give up on the damn thing. It was relentless. The album absolutely haunted me like an addiction I couldn’t shake. I wanted to quit it and kick it, but I couldn’t. Ultimately, I’m so very glad I didn’t. It wasn’t an addiction at all—not in the negative sense. It was just something I’d promised myself I was going to do, and somewhere inside of me was a version of myself that wasn’t going to let myself fail myself. I think, because I’d committed to doing the record almost entirely by myself, it was really a case of just living in my own head for far too long.
You’ve lived and worked all over the world — how have geography and movement shaped your songwriting?
I think it’s had a huge effect. I’m a very absorptive songwriter, I think. I feel as if I’m at my best when I’m just vibrating to the pitch of the world around me—wherever I am, and whatever’s going on. It’s not always so simple as, you move to the country, you write about fields, you move to the city, you write about bars—but sometimes, it IS that simple. My missus is a visual artist (it’s her beautiful artwork on the cover of Ghost Notes), and I had noted to her once that her work seemed to change with each new place we lived, and she said it was because the lighting would be different in her studio. I had to think about that for a long time, but it really hit me what a profound thing that was—the way we see the world is shaped by such a profound aggregation of influences, but that complex interweave of influences can sometimes manifest as something as seemingly simple as how daylight moves through the window in your studio. So I think that might be true of songwriting as well. Living in all these different places, you of course see different types of people, architecture, weather. You hear and experience different stories, languages, histories. But sometimes, it just comes down to the way an Irish jackdaw walks a little differently than a Central Park pigeon.
This album spans 18 tracks. Was it difficult to decide what stayed, what didn’t, and how to shape the full arc?
In terms of what songs to keep, I had almost no doubts about that. I set out to write the songs for this album very intentionally, and I landed on these 18 songs long before I’d ever recorded a note for the album. And I never wavered from that point forward. It was always going to be these 18 songs. As to how to “shape the full arc,” I think the arc was always there, it was really just a matter of me becoming clear-eyed enough to see and understand it. The story may be apocryphal, but I believe it was Rodin who described his sculpture process as starting with a giant block of stone, and just chipping away everything that wasn’t the statue. That’s kind of what discovering the arc of the album was about for me, just chipping away what wasn’t Ghost Notes.
You’ve always fused traditional blues with unexpected elements — from spoken word to cinematic storytelling. Where do you think that instinct comes from?
I don’t know that it’s an instinct so much as it is simply the nature of storytelling as I understand it. I think of songwriting as just a form of storytelling, and a good storyteller relies on a bag of tricks to achieve the effects they’re after—from phrasing, cadence, and diction to volume, accents, and even body language and facial expression. Not to mention the elements within the story itself: the narrative, the images, the language.
So, to me, a song is just kind of an enclosed world within which a story is taking place, and you have a fixed array of resources at your disposal to tell the story, and hopefully you use those resources intentionally and judiciously, and if you’ve done your tricks right, you’ll tell a lovely and memorable story.
Traditional blues, for me—the kind practiced by everyone from Skip James, Robert Pete Williams, and Sleepy John Estes to Blind Willie McTell, Mance Lipscomb, and Charley Patton—is so evocative, so strange, so moving, so powerful, so expressive; it’s just ripe with so much more than the seeming simplicity of a voice and a guitar. To me, someone like Charley Patton is a world conjurer. That’s what great storytelling is all about.
Some tracks sound almost haunted, like echoes from another life. Were there particular ghosts—literal or metaphorical—you were writing with or about?
That’s a great question. The term “Ghost Notes” is, of course, a musical term, but it obviously relies etymologically on the idea of actual ghosts, and I was definitely thinking of the connection there as a sort of conceptual throughline for the whole album … a ghost is a kind of entity between two worlds, neither of the living nor of the dead, but somewhat present and with a place all the same. A musical ghost note is similar—it has a space; a place in the music, but it isn’t quite a melodic or a percussive note. For me, that was a good framework to hang the songs on; in that the very idea of a song is an effort to make some sort of space for something; a moment of pause or reflection; an instance—a song is, in and of itself, a kind of ghost, neither actively living nor lost to the past.
Can you talk about the role of acoustic versus electric in this album? There’s a clear reverence for both.
Well, they’re textures, really, and each has its own litany of constraints and opportunities. And they’re metaphors as well—not quite as simple as the binary of country and city, but something similar: unplugged and plugged, intimate and expansive, introspective and extroverted, and so forth. Ultimately, they each require something different of you, and you accordingly give something different to them, which in turn produces something unique for the song.
Did writing poetry in Kerouac’s house change the way you approached songwriting afterward?
I don’t know that writing in the Kerouac House changed my approach to songwriting so much as it reinforced it—or, perhaps, it’s more accurate to say that it expanded my sense of how the writing process works and why it matters. I was fortunate to have been offered that experience, and fortunate that I was able to take advantage of it to the full measure, which meant really committing to a process of controlled improvisation; really aggressively forcing myself to be in the moment of creation, to be open to what the moment produces. And by beholding myself to writing in a Moleskine notebook and typing revisions on a manual typewriter all (in the spirit of Kerouac), I learned a great deal about how the contours, boundaries, shapes, and functions of your tools can inform what you produce with them—so there was a direct lesson there about musical instruments as well. You asked me about acoustic and electric instruments in a different question, and I think this is a good place to add to that conversation by drawing an extended analogy to observe that the different experiences one has on a manual typewriter vs. a laptop are quite similar to what happens with an acoustic vs. an electric instrument. Each makes certain things harder, each makes certain things easier, but one thing that’s certain, is that if you give yourself fully to the experience, you will go someplace you would not have gone otherwise.
Are there any tracks on Ghost Notes that you felt nervous about sharing?
All of them?
Looking back on your career so far, is Ghost Notes a destination or a new starting point?
My answer to this is … yes.
