With an expanded reissue on a thriving Manhattan label, Port St. Willow’s debut LP, Holiday, recently earned the kind of second chance that typifies long-shot success stories. Originally self-released in 2012, the intimate concept album now stands at the brink of a much broader audience, with Holiday’s listeners being offered their own timely opportunity: After the album, Nick Principe—the solo multi-instrumentalist behind Port St. Willow—may never tap this same vein.
“It’s a record I probably wouldn’t make again now,” Principe says. “Because it was a record where I needed to work through something to find the voice of what I wanted to be doing musically as well as narratively.”
Anchored by a bedrock of circular drum patterns and Principe’s alluvial falsetto, Holiday, comes tied to a Westward narrative: needing the time and space to record an album coursing with the need for time and space, the Putnam County native left his home in New York and bounced from boho Santa Cruz to the considered pace and low-cost roominess of Portland, Ore. Principe internalizes and reacts against the same cyclical forces—where he’s been and where he’s going—right down to the decision of what to call his one-man band. The name Port St. Willow is both an amalgamation of places the 26-year-old musician has lived and a reference to a folk-based album he scrapped in order to pursue Holiday’s broader sonic potential.
“This age of backstory and romanticized notions…all of that bothers me. Starting from an honest place was the only way I could make peace with it,” Principe says, deflecting the biographical guesswork that might be inspired by his lyrics. “I can’t really control outside perceptions. I also don’t want to self-edit myself into a mode of paralysis—you have to say what you want to say and realize at a certain point it’s no longer yours.”
Oppositional forces push and pull throughout Holiday: the individual testing the outskirts of family, the personal ensnared with the universal, existential pain coming into contact with natural wonder. Navigating these channels and snags serves both as a theme of Principe’s music and a fundamental concern following the musician’s move back to Brooklyn. In this era of rapid information and rampant self-exposure, how does an artist find the freedom to make sense of the world through song without becoming trapped as the story of those songs?
“There’s that line of self-indulgence where you feel that you’re excluding people and I really am against the idea of anyone taking on a special importance. Everyone has a family and for me it’s less family and more relationships…” he says, adding that “It’s conscious living— recognizing what’s important to you and what you want to spend your time doing. And the most difficult to negotiate can be the fallout from that…whenever you move away from your home, one: you’re changing your perception of it, and two: everything’s continuing without you there. We’re a pretty small family, and to be the one who left…there were no particular pieces that were stressful other than life. Feeling like things are separating, but this is how it happens, this is how you become an estranged person from your friends and family.”
The complexity of those feelings finds expression in the lyrical immediacy of Holiday, where Principe’s roots in singer-songwriter styles still come to the surface even as he gravitates toward more ambient soundscapes. Principe enthuses about Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden as well as artists like Grouper and Eluvium, musicians who layer atmospheric landscapes into a connected whole and use their tonal palates to evoke emotion rather than dictate it.
“After growing up playing a lot of folk music, I started collecting pedals,” he says. “Somewhere in Santa Cruz I had a symbolic trading of my one acoustic guitar for three guitar pedals. [Laughs]. It was very poetic.”
Also inspired by the circular nature and loose player-feel of jazz, Principe says a guiding mantra for Holiday was “Busy/Quiet,” returning again to that tension between counter-weighted forces. For texture, Principe sought to “turn his guitar into a synthesizer,” and thanks to hooking up with local Portland instrumental duo 1939 Ensemble (comprised of David Coniglio and Jose’ Medeles of The Breeders), Principe managed to assemble “My first kit had that had some character to it.”
“Then I just got a pair of brushes,” he says. “And when I’d get home from work I’d play drums for an hour and it wouldn’t be about anything other than creating…almost as a meditative thing. Creating these loops—not necessarily so that I could get the loop and copy/paste it a thousand times onto a project, but it would be about playing for seven or eight minutes and getting a good take of playing for seven or eight minutes. So you could get that true feel in there of an actual person playing.”
That human feel comes through as one of Holiday’s most salient elements, where the complex polyrhythms never sound machine-born. And though Principe prefers to think of Holiday as non-narrative, the album avoids becoming ethereal or diffuse because Principe grounds the whole in both rhythmic and narrative structures.