Journeyman singer-songwriter Colin Cutler’s literary approach to songwriting is inspired by his love for Flannery O’Connor. Having grown up in Pentecostal churches and raised in a military family with deep Southern roots, Cutler discovered striking parallels between himself and many of O’Connor’s characters. This connection inspired him to record the Peacock Feathers EP (2018), featuring four songs based on characters from O’Connor’s short stories. The EP not only sparked engaging discussions at conferences but also granted Cutler the privilege of performing at O’Connor’s former home, now a museum, in Milledgeville. The project even caught the attention of BBC Introducing, earning him international recognition.
Five years after his first O’Connor-inspired project, Colin is now revisiting those impactful songs, this time recording them with his stellar band and collaborating with musicians from the Carolinas and Virginia, including David Childers, Dashawn Hickman, and Rebekah Todd. Not content with stopping there, he has also penned four additional songs to expand the project into a full-length LP. Ahead of the October 31 release of Tarwater on Bandcamp (November 3rd on streaming), Cutler wove the tale of his own life and how it has impacted his folk-inspired music.
Explain the title of your album.
The title’s very much tied to the theme–“Tarwater” is the name of one of Flannery O’Connor’s characters, a recalcitrant and reluctant prophet raised by a true believer, doing his best to get away from his upbringing, yet unable to accept the clean answers of the world. The album got its start from the crossroads of where her short story characters intersect with my own life and its characters.
I was also shooting for it to resonate with where the Southern side of my family’s from: where the Tar River runs into the Pamlico in eastern North Carolina. The family farm is an island in the middle of creek and swamp, and there’s a line I’ve had in my notebook for a long while that hasn’t found a home yet, but ties the image of slow-moving swamp water to sin running through a heart.
I don’t use the term “sin” much anymore myself, but see it as kind of the negative space between what you should be, or pretend to be, or are, and how you act, especially under pressure. When there is a discrepancy, I think it’s common to do our best to cover it up and not deal with it, and the resultings actions tend, in turn, to hurt those around. Most of the characters in my songs are refusing to deal with that shadow, and we get to see the results of it. Water is a purifying thing, but it can drown you, and, polluted, it can poison, too.
Tell us about the first song you wrote.
Lord. There were some very angsty pre-teen songs and then some very evangelistic 80s-sounding power ballads from my teen years. The first song I wrote that I’d still allow out in public is “Barstool Confession.” I had just set a grenade off in my personal life–scuttled an engagement and abandoned the fundamentalist Christian structure of how I’d grown up and then Uncle Sam gave me an opportunity to spend a month overseas on a training mission in Germany. I remember sitting in the plane as it was taxiing and having this half-asleep feeling of the plane being like Jonah’s whale; the sun was setting behind us, and I had this vision of the plane and the sun hurtling towards each other in opposite directions around the earth.
The opening lines to the song popped into my head a few weeks later while I was sitting hungover in a Humvee after a night of drinking and dancing with some Albanian soldiers; I was 4,000 miles from my guitar, but I wrote the lines down, and figured out the opening lick when I got home a few days later. One of the things I was thinking about in the wake of my personal shifts was the cycles of generational trauma, and that’s what I tried to capture in both the story of the lyrics and in the structure of the lyrics and music. It’s a three-section song, with kind of an ABC-ABC-AB-Aish format–the story has the speaker repeating the father’s mistakes while the music cycles and returns in a big arc, but also with interior arcs, and the last verse has a shift in the otherwise-repeated chords that hints at a break in the cycle. Nerd stuff that I thought was cool. Anyway, we play it at most shows, and it also ended up in a British zombie film.
Who would you love to collaborate with? why?
I would love to collaborate with Mary Gauthier someday. I was in the Army Guard for 7 years, started writing while I was still in, and first encountered her music when her Rifles and Rosary Beads album came out. It came out the same month I was getting out of the Army after a year and a half of back-to-back overseas deployments. They were non-combat deployments, but a lot of the guys I served with had been in Iraq during the height of the war (I joined the unit a few months after they got back), and every single person I’ve been close to and then lost to suicide was a fellow servicemember. I loved how she handled the stories she was handed–it seemed like it was with care and attention to the voice of the co-writer whose story she was helping bring into the world. And there wasn’t sentimentality–it was emotional, but the emotion was borne in concrete scenes and associations and phrases–Johnny Cash’s “Drive On” is another masterful example of this. We’re also both great admirers of Flannery O’Connor, go figure.
What are some of the best venues you’ve played? Why?
I’ve gotten to play some fantastic rooms and stages over the years, and am grateful for them. But I’m going to say that the venues I’ve learned the most from and still love are street corners. I got my start busking around Greensboro farmer’s markets (and that’s also how I met my partner), and later busked in the mountains and Virginia and in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Romania. Especially if you’re doing it to make the day’s money–and I have stopped to busk when I didn’t have the gas to get back home or the money to buy it–it can put you in an attitude of openness to stop and throw your art into the universe to see what it gives you back. Sometimes that’s the money for a tank of gas (and dinner!), but often it’s people and their stories.
I think there’s something about the openness of busking that gives passersby the chance to open up themselves, and I always try to keep an eye out for those folks and make space for them. I’ve chatted with a Marine veteran who had just got off hiking the Appalachian Trail two and a half times after he got home, an unhomed couple who said they hadn’t been able to see live music for months, a fella who was trying to learn guitar, a little girl who was getting ready to busk on the subway with her dad and a pint-sized accordion, the man who had lost his son to suicide after a school’s abuse cover-up. My attitude is that “Those who have ears to hear, let ’em.” I’m there for the music; the music is there for those who need it.
On the one hand, there’s the time I ended up sleeping beneath a billboard outside the Asheville Greyhound station, but, on the other hand, I met my partner while she was running around in a chili pepper costume advertising for the farmer’s market and I was busking with my banjo downtown on a Friday night. So the universe balances out.
Tarwaterwill hit Bandcamp on 10/31 and streaming on 11/3