How Flannery O’Connor Inspired The Music of Colin Cutler

As a young college student, singer-songwriter Colin Cutler had his first run-in with the works of Flannery O’Connor, the writer who wound her Roman Catholic upbringing and Georgian roots into stark, darkly funny tales of people seeking either salvation and transcendence or more earthly pleasures in the deep South. In O’Connor’s relatively slim bibliography, Cutler found some surprising parallels between her characters and his life growing up as he did in a fiercely religious family in North Carolina and among the fellow grunts of Fort Benning when he did a brief stint in the Army.

His fascination with the writer led to a stretch of self-directed study into her work and, following in the trail laid down by equally O’Connor-obsessed artists like Bruce Springsteen and Lucinda Williams, sparked a fresh creative fame. In 2017, Cutler recorded Peacock Feathers, a four-song EP of songs written from the perspective of some of the characters in O’Connor’s short stories. The music was appropriately gritty and bluesy and inflected with the rhythms and spirit of gospel.

As his work started to catch the attention of BBC DJs and fellow O’Connor scholars, Cutler was inspired to expand on his initial recordings. Working with a full band and a more electric sound, he re-recorded the four tracks on Peacock Feathers and wrote a bunch more to create Tarwater. The recently released album has a juke joint energy coursing through it and a humidity that seems to sweat out the sins and the booze that these characters are often soaked in.

I spent a little time on the phone with Cutler recently to discuss the development of this album, his interest in O’Connor’s writing and wrestling with his faith. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Paste: In the notes for Tarwater, you talk about how you were wrestling with what you referred to as Flannery O’Connor’s “Christ-haunted South.” Is this in part because of your own upbringing in the Pentecostal church?

Colin Cutler: I was raised in Pentecostal churches. Southern Baptist was actually a relief from that, in my teen years. And then I was Presbyterian during college. I was homeschooled, too, for most of my time growing up. Then I went to a very conservative college, Patrick Henry College. You may have heard of it via one of our lovely North Carolina reps who’s no longer in Congress, thanks be to God. Madison Cawthorn failed out but that was before my time. I was very much, I guess, a true believer at the time. Some shifts that have happened in my life about 20 to 23, which is about the time I started writing music. O’Connor was one of the catalysts for that, weirdly enough. Growing up in very evangelical, fundamentalist spaces, the stories that were being told were pretty much either Bible stories being retold or the Salvation Army kind. You know, successful in life and hits rock bottom and finds Jesus and is successful. I was getting bored with that, and one of the things I appreciated about O’Connor was this sacramental vision of the world. That you could experience the divine through the physical and through the human. With the Pentecostal background, we’re trying to get past the world and experience God directly. So that really changed how I viewed the world, and also how I viewed how to do art. I realized, “Oh, I don’t have to tell these allegories. I can just tell the stories of people and let whatever truth is there shine through those stories. Then I went down to grad school, and it was the first environment that I was in where I was completely making my own way. After I left home and went to college, my circles were still very much college-associated, still very much church-associated. It wasn’t until I moved down to North Carolina that I was like, “I just have to find my own community here.” And I did in the songwriter scene hee in Greensboro.

Do you still hold on to some elements of your religious upbringing? Some kind of faith in the divine? Or is that something that you’ve left behind entirely?

I have not gone to church in years. I think that Jesus, as its representative, was a pretty cool guy. I don’t really have a lot of time for his followers or proclaimed followers. Whether He’s the son of God or not, I don’t know. My practice has been to narrow my willingness to affirm down to the things I can actually know and experience. I think that the songs catch this longing for some sort of spiritual experience. Because there were some things about it that were pretty interesting. And the one thing that I miss about the church and the military, both, is the sense of mission. Everyone knows their place, knows what we’re all aiming for. I also see the flipside of that because that mission can often be used to control people and that sense of place can often be used to control people, especially when it gets tied up with hierarchy. And that I’ve got absolutely no time for.

You found Flannery O’Connor’s work during your time in college, and it clearly resonated with you. What can you tell me about the experience of visiting her home and museum in Georgia? What did you come away with?

One of the reasons that O’Connor really resonates beyond the theological and intellectual level is, she says in her essays, she’s talking with this professor and he’s convinced that the grandma in [O’Connor’s 1953 short story] “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is a witch. She’s even got a cat. And he’s completely baffled as to why students don’t see her the same way. And she says, “Well that’s because they all have Southern grandmothers and great aunts who are probably very much like her.” Just the experience of a Southern rural family. My dad’s side has been in eastern North Carolina since 1704. He grew up going down to the family farm. They’ve still got a hog parlor there, but no hogs or anything. That very much resonated with me, and then when I went down to the museum, I was like, “Yeah, this feels a whole lot like the farm we grew upon.” She had a very similar physical imagination to what I had growing up as well. The fields, the woods, watching the animals, watching the sunset. Even the repetitive nature of the work. It’s an a-frame house with a big front porch screened in. A very typical Southern farmhouse at the top of the hill with a barn in the back.

Since then, you’ve received a grant to continue studying O’Connor’s work. What can you tell me about your work on that project?

It was with the National Endowment of the Humanities. That’s already done. I spent all of June down in Milledgeville. My first visit to Andalusia was back in 2011 when I was at Fort Benning. I went back down in March of 2022 and did a presentation at Georgia College and also on her front porch at Andalusia and played a bit. This summer, there were 25 of us O’Connor scholars from all sorts of different backgrounds. Some had PhDs, some were community college instructors like myself. Some taught in prisons. Just to get all those different perspectives on her and her work, and also to get to the Special Collections Library, was just a fantastic opportunity. And also to realize a lot of us are fairly conflicted about her and that’s okay. Especially because in 2020, one of the big topics of discussion was, “Why are we teaching her?” I think it was an important evaluation of her. The grant itself was to go down there, work with these other scholars and get into the special collections. I had a couple of research projects while I was there, none of which really turned out much that I was hoping for. It felt like nerd summer camp.

As you were writing the songs that made up the initial EP Peacock Feathers, was it easy to narrow down what stories and characters you wanted to focus on?

I went with the ones I was most familiar with. After I graduated college, I did a little self study, read all her short stories, her two novels and her letters and essays to get a feel for her. I could tell that she was good, but I wasn’t really sure if I liked her. I would say that the stories that I went with for writing songs were the ones that resonated with me on both an artistic level and a personal level.

Was it a good exercise for you to write songs in another person’s voice or from a fictional perspective rather than delving into your own life and experiences?

It was, and I think the fact that I chose the ones that most closely aligned with my personal experience, made that a little bit easier. But also, the artistic choices of: How much of this is their story? How much of this is my story? How do I write this in such a way that anybody can approach this song whether or not they’ve read the story? That was probably the most challenging part of it.

But in writing those songs and taking on the voices of these characters and seeing their experiences reflected in your own life, does that change your perspective on your personal experiences?

Yes, I think so. And one of the things that I appreciate about O’Connor and how she handles her stories and her characters is that, unlike a lot of the art that I grew up with, by the end of the story, they don’t necessarily have an answer. Usually they think they have the answers all the way through and then they get to the end and they realize that maybe there isn’t an answer. Or they’re pushed to the point where they need to make a choice and we’re not allowed to know what that choice is. I think that very much aligns with where I’ve ended up myself. In the end, all I can do is make a choice. You’re going to use your ethics and morals to guide what those choices are, but you’re not always going to know what the right one is until well after the fact.

You re-recorded the four songs from Peacock Feathers for Tarwater. How was that process for you? Was this a situation where the songs evolved as you played them live or you being in the studio, tearing them apart and figuring out how to play them again?

I would say most of them matured as I was playing them live. I wrote most of the songs between 2014 and 2016. In 2018, I recorded Peacock Feathers and even in that process, some of those songs were still changing. Like “Mama Don’t Know,” I recorded it one way and then was lying in bed that night and realized, “No, what I need to do is put the capo up on the fifth fret and that’ll let me do the things I’m hearing.” That’s the basis for how I play it now. Probably the biggest difference is just having more electric guitar. I got back into electric about 2021 after about 13 years away. I actually started off as a metalhead and picked up the banjo at about 23. Also just bringing in other musicians to add much more texture to the songs. The Peacock Feathers recordings are fairly bare. It was me and one other singer and one guy playing all the other instruments. These recordings are much more filled out and lush.

I think the biggest question surrounding all this is what your family thinks about what you’ve done with your life and career considering how you were raised and all that you’ve gone through in your spiritual life?

They’ve occasionally told me they’re proud of me. Sometimes they wonder when I’m going to “make it.” I told them, “I get paid to go play my music, and it’s a decent part of my income. I don’t have to go out and do cover shows that I don’t want to do, so I’d say in my book, I’m making it.” In terms of the spiritual, I think my mom’s still a bit worried. We’ve had some conversations about where the boundaries lie in terms of what we’re going to talk about. We all get along fine. We disagree on a fair number of things, but it’s all good.

In addition to your artistic life, you’re a teacher as well. How do you like that work?

I really enjoy it. Back in 2018, when I was looking at getting out of the Army, I had a few different options. One, take a military job overseas or two, go over to England. I did an ESL certification and a Master’s in creative writing [in Georgia] and cut my teeth doing music seriously. I was looking at the choice of staying in the military and going over to Germany or going to Nashville and trying to make it in that scene. I talked with a friend of mine and he asked me, “Colin, would you enjoy just being a performer and songwriter and not having that teaching aspect?” And I really thought about it, and decided that I wouldn’t. One of the fun things I do with the music is sometimes I go out and do presentations, whether on O’Connor or on Appalachian folk music. I really do enjoy teaching, especially at the community college. There’s just such a diversity of life experience, of age groups, of different backgrounds. I enjoy helping them get their feet under them in the academic world and get them prepped for whatever their future holds whether it’s going on to a four year university, working in HVAC or making cakes

What does the future hold for you and your music? What comes next?

This year, we’ve picked a lot more festival spots, which has been super exciting. Merle Fest. Carolina Bible Camp Bluegrass Festival, which was an interesting one on multiple counts. We had a really good time. We were like, “We’re definitely not bluegrass, but alright, we’ll take it.” The plan for next spring is to take time off from teaching and take the band out on you. We’re starting to plan a couple of Southeastern runs and then one run to the Northeast and then one run just across the country. We’re gonna see what comes out of that. I’ve got a couple more projects on the burner too.