PHILLIP PYLE: The press release for Hostile Environments explains that you explore “an alternative reality” on this album where you were “never able to escape the constraints” of your past. What are these constraints, and why did you decide to revisit the past now?
RICHIE CULVER: I’m definitely focusing on the past with my music—and maybe with all of my work. There’s not much to pick from within fatherhood, and the kind of normality that my life is now with three kids. I don’t drink, I don’t take drugs, I don’t smoke. I’m as boring as it can be. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
To answer the question, I’m working backwards, and it’s taken a long time to get to where I am now, on a personal level, a work level. So, I’m going back to that classic Tracy Chapman “Fast Car” concept which runs through the album.
PP: “Slow Car” is a riff on the painting Small Town which you made in response to “Fast Car.” What drew you to “Fast Car” as a starting point?
RC: It’s probably in the top hundred of best pop songs ever written. I remember driving into the local town from the seaside village I’m from and it playing on the radio. It was one of those moments before—I must have been seven or eight—I started to understand the components of songs and that endorphins were circulating in my body. I was tuning into something. Then, with the lyrics—”Leave tonight or live and die this way”—I was thinking, is that me? You know those core memories that we have as kids? That was definitely one of them.
So, fast forward to making this record. It’s the most listenable record I’ve made but it still sits in the experimental world, and I was aware of positioning a pop song within the music world I inhabit. It was a challenge for my own ego to make an experimental record that’s loosely based around “Fast Car.” But, when something is so ingrained in me, like that song is, I don’t care, I’m going to go with it. The track and the whole record are about not leaving tonight and living and dying in that way—and staying in the small town, and the freedom that comes with giving in rather than constantly trying to fight to better yourself and this drive that most artists or creatives have. To be okay with normalness, which is something I’ve always fought against.
PP: That song always had a very American undertone to me, so it’s interesting to hear that it also translates to an English context.
RC: One hundred percent. There was always that other layer, of my obsession with America while growing up and everything being better there. Everything was bigger there. Everything was cooler there. In this small town in England, I always felt a million miles away, but that’s—without sounding too cheesy—the power of music.
