Local musician Perry Owen Wright stopped by Live & Local last week, following the release of his new album “Buried Utilities” – his first new music in 20 years.
Listen to the album on Bandcamp.
Perry Owen Wright had a successful run in the mid-2000s with a project called The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers. Peaking in 2005 with the acclaimed album “The Mother of Love Emulates the Shapes of Cynthia,” Prayers and Tears built a strong national following in just a few short years. But Wright shelved the project as his own life moved on – he’s now living happily in a home at Eno River State Park, with his wife, two young kids, and a research job at Duke – and while he continued writing songs privately, he says he had no particular plans to get back into the music scene.
Until December.
“I had a session booked in December to help another band think through some songwriting stuff,” he says. “I was very excited about it, I was really honored to be asked to do it, (but) it didn’t end up happening – and I was surprised at how disappointed I was when it didn’t happen. And I was so disappointed that I thought, ‘I really should just do something. I should make something.'”
Wright channeled that energy into a global songwriting effort called the RPM Challenge (“RPM” short for “Record Production Month”), which encourages musicians to write and record an entire album in February. He says that challenge gave him the perfect opportunity to release new music, without the built-up anticipation of a 20-year wait.
“I definitely felt pressure: if I was going to release any more music (after 20 years), it would have to be good,” he says with a laugh. “(So) the whole point of this February thing was, even if it’s not that good, I did it, and it’s out, and I’m proud of myself for having done it. It was giving myself permission to try stuff.”
Wright didn’t have to worry about the quality. Quietly released on Bandcamp in March, “Buried Utilities” is a terrific collection of 10 tracks in a wide range of styles, from hard rock (“911 Emergency Communications Center”) to hushed acoustic tracks (“Landfill”) so intimate you can almost hear those pipes and cables churning under the ground.
Each song explores a different iteration of a common theme – public utilities, as they silently affect (or reflect) our everyday lives – all showcasing Wright’s signature skill as a lyricist, with words that double as poetry:
Beneath the earth flow rivers unseen, in constant motion flowing;
your feet stand there above the pipes, high among the temporary buildings.
Beneath your skin flow rivers unseen, the body and the blood and the memories:
your own buried utilities.
(That’s from a song whose title advances the metaphor: it’s called “The Gas Leak on North Duke,” a reference to the fatal explosion in 2019 caused by a sudden pipe failure – and by extension a reminder of our own bodily fragility.)
But the album didn’t start out that way. Wright says the first song he wrote was “Snow Days Before the Pandemic,” a melancholy rumination on the haunting persistence of memory and the bittersweet release of forgetting that was inspired by a friend’s divorce – but then he wound up dwelling more on a brief aside in the lyrics, about how high-speed internet makes it possible to work even on snowy days when you can’t leave your house.
“If infrastructure takes away your ability to get a snow day, what are the other things that infrastructure is enabling or unintentionally harming? What are the influences of these unseen things?” he says. “In Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, he talks about (how) indoor plumbing (enables us) to hide the fact of human digestion, the fact that every great city is built on this river of flowing excrement. And so I had this idea (to focus on) these invisible utilities.”
Perry Owen Wright will take the stage Friday, August 28, at Rubies on Five Points in Durham along with Scivic Rivers.
As for the future, Wright says he has no specific plans for new music releases – but he also has no plans to stop writing, and he’s grateful for the impact he’s already been able to have.
“My wife and I joke that I write songs in the place of going to therapy – to make sure I’m living a reflective life, to have the feelings that I’m not necessarily in touch with, the things that get sublimated, the things that I ignore, the things that I push down,” he says. “I think of it as like being at somebody’s house, and finding a shoebox under the bed…and it’s full of a bunch of pictures, all capturing moments in time. I’ve always written songs that try to capture a single sort of moment…
“I put (‘Buried Utilities’) out and didn’t really tell anybody about it, I did it mostly for myself, but other people found it and sent me very nice notes. (And) I still get notes that say, ‘Hey, Prayers and Tears, your old band, is one of my all-time favorites.’ It’s very nice. You know, my life has moved on, I love my job and my family – and I do not regret not living out of a van any longer! – but it is very nice that it’s still remembered.”
Perry Owen Wright stopped by Live & Local last week to discuss “Buried Utilities” and perform three songs: “Snow Days Before the Pandemic,” “Certified Mail,” and “Public Observatory.” Listen:
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