The Chatham Arts Council is investing in artists through our Meet This Artist series, introducing you to 12 Chatham County artists each year in a big way. The fine folks at Hobbs Architects in downtown Pittsboro are powering our Meet This Artist series this year. Architecture is art, and the Hobbs crew values art in our community. So, take a look. Meet your very inspiring neighbors. Meet musician and writer Corbie Hill.
At the crossroads of music and storytelling stands Corbie Hill, a Pittsboro local, staff writer at Duke Magazine, and mastermind behind the musical project land is. His latest album, “Free Radio Werewolf,” is an ode to the open road and the expanses of the American West, encapsulating a lifelong passion for narrative woven through sound. In this interview, we delve into the origins of his creative expressions, the symbiotic relationship between music and writing, and the endless horizons that inspire his artistic works.
You write and make music. When did that creative spark begin?
I can’t remember a time before. I remember being a little kid hearing Willie Nelson’s “On The Road Again.” I was three or four, and I was like, “What is this?” The song made me feel things at a super young age that I couldn’t yet articulate. I remember being at a McDonald’s or Burger King with my family and seeing motorcycles drive by, and I’d start making up a song about motorcycles. It was little kid stuff, but I was like, “I’m going to make up a song about this thing I see.” I’ve always sung about, written about, or drawn pictures of things in my world.
Did you have formal training along the way or was it always something that came to you organically?
I went to public schools in Eastern North Carolina. The arts were more a result of the people I was around. For instance, in elementary school I was a huge Star Trek fan. My friends and I would make up a little sci-fi story. Super cheesy, super reductive, but technically our own creation.
Once I was in middle school, I played in the school band. I was expected to play trumpet because my grandfather played trumpet, but it didn’t speak to me. By seventh grade, I picked up guitar and friends were like, “Oh! I’m getting into drums!” So we started writing our own songs. Those were the instruments that I could make my own. While I had teachers who encouraged that, it wasn’t encouraged in as helpful a way at home.
My musical “training” was thanks to the people I was hanging around with at the time, some of whom I still collaborate with today. My friend, Patrick from seventh grade (who formed our first little band), mastered the new record.
That’s wonderful. To still have friends from way back.
Yeah. Here we are at 42. I think he’s still 41.
Now, now. I wasn’t going to ask your age.
It’s whatever. It’s just numbers.
True. Though it does give context to your origin story growing up in rural NC. I mean, learning a new skill like guitar would be a different experience without access to the internet tools we have now.
With the rudimentary internet that there was, you could still download guitar tabs. It took forever and there were fewer people putting them together. At that age, I was super obsessed with Pearl Jam, and I could find Pearl Jam tabs in the seventh and eighth grade with some hunting. They were just Word files, basically made up of zeroes and ones and lines. There weren’t any video tutorials, so I stumbled through guitar for about a year before I realized, “Oh, this is a power chord. Oh, finally, now I can do a C chord! It doesn’t hurt my pointer finger!”
I think more to your point, there were fewer–this is going to sound really close to “back in my day”–but there were fewer distractions. And I was bored, because Eastern North Carolina is really boring.
Oh?
Really, really boring. It was and is still a mega-remote region. I hear people who are like, “Oh, Pamlico County, what a wonderful place!” and I’m like, “Yeah, to visit. Try living there.” I don’t go back super often.
I was a bored teenager there. Sure, I would hang out with my friends, but I didn’t have a car. I didn’t live physically close to them. So, I would play guitar or play with a drum machine for hours and hours and I would use cassettes. There’s this trick: if you have a 4-track cassette recorder, you can flip the tape over and record on each side, layer and layer and layer. There’s a way to bounce between cassettes so you can layer as many layers of instruments as you can imagine. I was making entire records in high school that just exist on these cassettes. They sound really muddy compared to what you can do now, but it was still layers of guitar, drum machine, two layers of vocals, and bass.
There’s something about the dirty, gritty quality of that that I almost prefer when it comes to – don’t get me wrong, I love a beautifully produced, bells-and-whistles album as much as the next person, but there’s something about that.
It really made me appreciate hearing humanity in a record. There’s this guy I’ve been listening to a lot, John R. Miller. He’s from West Virginia, based in Nashville now. Really great Americana guy.
There are a couple of records where you catch a mistake, and you can tell why he left it in. There’s one song that sticks out, “Holy Dirt.” Right before the chorus, the line is “Sometimes you got to f*** up before you can fly,” and then as soon as the chorus starts, the drums stutter. I can just imagine them in the studio listening back and him being like, “I said ‘you got to f*** up,’ but then you f****d up. That’s great!”
Tell me a bit about your work as a writer.
Really, my music and my writing are one and the same because I’m into both for the storytelling.
When do you work best? Are you a morning person or a night owl? When do you find yourself the most inspired?
So, I’ve got a multi-part answer for that one. For one thing, I’m useless in the evenings now. I rarely see 11 p.m. anymore. I work best in the mornings before noon. I wake up; I go for a run; I come home and start writing.
Inspiration’s a tough one. Being a working journalist has taught me that the time to create is when you have time. I’ve really honed that muscle of writing when I have time to write – programming a track when I have time to program a track. A lot of professional musicians, artists, and writers don’t believe there is such a thing as writer’s block, and neither do I. Writer’s block is just your mind telling you to work on something else or to write even if it’s bad. I edit as I go, so even if it’s bad, I can fix it.
Travel seems to be a big source of inspiration for you as well. Can you speak to that?
As a writer and as a songwriter – I’ll keep this to music, but it’s true for both – I’ve always written with a specific place in mind. I think, “This is where this song is happening. Here’s where it happened. Right here.” I can’t write without a sense of place. And the flip-side of that is when I go to a new place, it inspires my writing.
“Free Radio Werewolf” came out of a trip that had been decades in the making. I had only been out west once in my life when I was a teenager. I had gone to Montana to visit an uncle who ran a ranch for the University of Montana. The trip made a deep impression in my life, and I had wanted for a long time to go west with my family and do it our way. The album was inspired by a sense of place, but it was also a dream trip I’ve been planning since 1997, hungry for the American West.
What is it about the Western US that speaks to you?
The space. There’s something about the openness that calms my mind.
I love the mythology of the American West, and by that I don’t mean cowboys and prospectors. I mean the sheer otherworldliness of it. I spent a lot of my life not having the money to travel, so somewhere like Texas or New Mexico is super exotic for me.
Certainly is! Especially when you’re raised in the swamplands of Eastern North Carolina.
Yeah, you get it! There are people for whom, I guess, it would be less exotic because they have fewer barriers to travel. But for me to finally be able to do it, to pull it off, and have it be this perspective-altering trip, I had to mark that with a record. It’s funny, I had the title of the record in mind before the trip, but I didn’t know what it would sound like. The sound needed the space to come out.
Now that “Free Radio Werewolf” is released, what’s next on the horizon?
I have an idea (that I’ve only shared with a couple of friends of mine) for a double record. I haven’t written lyrics though. I basically lost the ability to write lyrics in 2017. It’s something that I once did to reflect, but can’t with the way my mind operates now. As I get a little older and more mature, what used to feel like reflecting now feels like dwelling. I’m like, “Why am I doing this?” I’m into country music and Americana and hip hop because those are forms of storytelling that tell the entire human experience. I think what I would like to do is learn – relearn – to write lyrics, but in a way that fits who I am now.
I need to get back into writing fiction, too – short fiction. I had a really good run writing short fiction a few years ago. I meant to keep that energy going, but then I got more into composing music. I can only be in so many gears at one time.
Yes, there are only 24 hours in a day.
Yes, and I work full time, and I have a family, and I’m in the PTA. Calm down, Corbie! But I do want to get back to writing fiction. I’ve got some short fiction that’s in the first few stages of completion. I’ve got some characters I really like and some terrible sad things that are going to happen to them. I just need to write. I can’t wait to torture my imaginary friends! I know some of them are going to rise to meet the occasion.
Stream “Free Radio Werewolf” by land is on Apple Music, YouTube, and bandcamp.
Follow Corbie Hill/land is on Instagram and Facebook.
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