ZACK KOUNS

Appalachian artist Zack Kouns is getting used to being accepted.

“It’s a new thing in my life – being liked by people in public. I’ll be honest with you -- I have to adjust to it. It’s a new phenomenon to me. I’m so used to making extremely unpopular music. I don’t know what switch was flipped, but things have changed,” he says.

When Kouns and his bandmate Morgan Garrett arrived in crisp white matching cowboy outfits at a cheeseburger-themed festival in Athens, Ohio, an entourage of mostly strangers congregated around them. Once they launched into the stagger and drawl of “Aww Man,” the audience went hog wild.

Kouns describes their duo, Scream Culture, as “deranged honky-tonk music. It sounds like you’re at a rodeo and someone’s screaming something through a megaphone. You can guess what they’re saying is upsetting, but you’re not quite sure what they’re getting up to exactly.”

When the duo records at Garrett’s home in Maysville, Kentucky, they aren’t alone. On one side, a neighbor constantly paces back and forth at an alarming rate between his front door and Garrett's car. The other neighbor sits on a fence, chain smoking, occasionally nodding off, but mostly staring through the window and making intense eye contact with the duo as they record.

Kouns calls the latter neighbor a “professional botherer,” with more than a tinge of envy in his voice. “What a lucky duck. He’s on this earth just to professionally bother people.”

Kouns makes his living not through deranged honky-tonk music but with wild plants. Currently at work on an a fairy calendar and a children's, both with Appalachian overtones, Kouns splits his day mostly between research, gardening and walking around the woods. He also sells medicinal tinctures and flower essences, and he teaches over 100 classes a year on herbs.

His recent solo musical performances range from space folk to gospel music, the latter inspired by regular attendance at a Christian anarchism church. In the past, Kouns has reworked Michael Jackson songs, made noise in a silo, performed esoteric rituals, played saxophone half-naked, strummed banjos, struck congas, meditated with a harmonium, recited poetry, spouted mouth wisdom, and more.

“It all comes from the same place. I just feel like this broken pitcher that’s constantly being poured into, gushing out on all sides at all times, and I’m desperately trying to get it to stay in and hardly any of it stays in at all,” he says.

Listen to his fantasy album with commentary from Kouns while reading some of his thoughts on select tracks:

Zack Kouns'
Fantasy Album
Tracklist

Bruce Springsteen - "Streets of Philadelphia"
Eddie Noack - "Psycho"
Michael Jackson - "Human Nature"
Taylor Swift - "Love Song"
Jad Fair & Danielson - "Solid Gold Heart"
Hank Williams - "Six More Miles to the Graveyard"
Appalachian Birds - Field Recording
Leonard Cohen - "You Want It Darker"
Merle Haggard - "What I Hate"
Bruce Springsteen - "Hungry Heart"
Neil Young - "Philadelphia"
Kris Kristofferson - "They Killed Him"
Laura Clapp - "Helicon Live 2 Demo (excerpt)"

Bruce Springsteen - “Streets of Philadelphia”

I know the moment that I became a musician. I was ill a lot as a child. I had a rare pancreatic disorder. So, I was flying back from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Just that day, my mom bought me the Philadelphia soundtrack. I listened to Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” on the flight home, probably 25 times, maybe more. It’s not a long flight.

At any rate, I knew at that moment, I’m a musician. This is what I’m here on this earth to do. I know it for sure.

Springsteen has a way -- maybe it seems quaint or ridiculous -- but he has a way of toeing the line between joy and agony in the same song. I’m drawn to that idea of talking about the agony and the ecstasy in the same song. I think all remarkable art comes from that.

The last 50 to 75 years of Western art is just agony, no ecstasy at all really. Being able to express both within the same piece of art—when I hear that, I always think, “I need to work with this."

Eddie Noack - “Psycho”

There’s this one song that Scream Culture has. It’s called “I'm the Hungry Ghost Mama,” after this character I’ve been thinking about over and over again, this hungry ghost.

I feel like this hungry ghost lives inside of me, where it’s just constantly grabbing and taking everything from the world, and it can never get filled up no matter what happens. In this song, I do this kind of scat singing. But the zenith of it is me going, “I’M THE HUNGRY GHOOOOOOOOST…..mama.” There’s this delay on it so it goes, “mama…mama….mama…mama…mama…mama,” like over the course of thirty seconds.

And it just hit me the other day that I stole that from Eddie Noack’s “Psycho,” where every line ends with “mama,” with this long space before he says it.

Michael Jackson – “Human Nature”

When I made that Michael Jackson album, well, what drew me to it: I thought about how unusual of a person he is, but how bad his lyrics are, universally very poor, with a couple of exceptions. His music is incredible, truly genius, and if these lyrics were better, this would be the best music of the 20th century.

But it’s not. It’s so radically flawed by the character he tried to create, rather than embracing who he really was. I wondered, what would be like if this true genius really made the music that he was on this earth to make?

It never occurred to me to record them. It was really important to me when I was writing and scoring it that I send it to Michael Jackson, and say, “It would mean so much to me for you to record this.”

I did research at the time of how to get things to him, to his agent. I sent a copy of the score and lyrics to Neverland Ranch. I sent those off to him, maybe in 20005, 2006, no response back unfortunately. I was proud of what I wrote. Proud of everything I did with it. So, I thought, if he won’t do it, I’ll do it.

And an interesting thing happened. I went over to Europe to promote the record. Two days, or maybe three days, after it was released, Michael Jackson died.

All the promoters said, “This is the record that killed Michael Jackson,” which was a heavy weight on me, because that was not my intention at all, I have the utmost respect for him.

At the same time, I thought, well, maybe they’re right. Maybe this is, psychically, the thing that pushed him over the edge. Who knows? Difficult to say. In the psychospiritual realm, it’s very difficult to say what’s happening there. I couldn’t say for sure. I embraced it after a while.

It was an effective promotion technique, regardless. Here’s this deranged outsider lunatic that killed Michael Jackson with his lyrics. That was not my intention at all, but it led to a pretty interesting tour I would say. And I enjoyed myself.

Taylor Swift – “Love Story”

For a three-month period, I listened to nothing but Taylor Swift. She is an extremely incisive songwriter, but it’s not appropriate to give tragedy a happy ending. That’s not right.

We’re all going to die. That’s just the facts. It’s not appropriate to gloss that over. We’re all going to die. So, her lyrics about Romeo and Juliet in “Love Story” bother me.

I don’t think death’s tragic at all. I’m not afraid to die. I don’t want to die, but I’m happy to die at any moment of my life. I’m ready to go.

Treating it like a tragedy is a mistake too, but glossing over tragedy is the greater mistake, I think.

There are things in pop music that I can understand are palatable to a lot of people, but the ideas are dangerous. It’s dangerous to express things that are watered down. It’s dangerous for people to engender those ideas. It’s important to counter those ideas with something else.

Popular music is a raging battle for the souls of the entire world. I’ve always enjoyed music, but ultimately, the important thing for me, is, what’s the message?

Jad Fair & Danielson – “Solid Gold Heart”

I think there’s a lot of fake happy music made by people who are not really very happy at all. I think there’s a lot of new age bullshit and gospel music. Gospel means “good news” and there’s not much of that in gospel music. A lot of modern Christian music is just pathetic. The only word for it. Pathetic people who are not happy at all who are pretending to be happy.

Danielson Family, as well as Half-Handed Cloud, are making unusual Christian music. They’ve gotten the message. And the message is, heaven is already here you don’t have to wait for it. We’re already here, there’s a lot of terrible things happening in the world, but let’s go ahead and act like we’re already there. That’s not a really common message.

We’ve had 250 years, or maybe 2000 years of tragedy in this civilization, so it’d be nice to hear a different message for a change. I’d say we’re all about tired of hearing about tragedy.

Of course, it’s really important to talk about really horrific things happening. I think that’s part of being a happy person. You can’t really be joyous if you ignore the challenging things that are happening in this world. You’re just full of shit if you do that.

Real joy has to be built on the foundations of the complexities and difficulties in this world. That has to be part of the core message.

Hank Williams – “Six More Miles to the Graveyard”

You’ve lived it. You understand it. You’ve had that exact experience. That’s what a good song really does. Any great work of art does that exactly. Where you know exactly where that person’s coming from.

Field Recording of Appalachian Birds

Most of my tears are from rapture; joy and rapture.

Like the other day in Maysville, Kentucky, I heard the birds singing, the scent of the autumn olive carried by the wind. I saw this art exhibit, seeing people being able to express these intrinsic ideas…that’s just a miracle. The joy of friendship. All of these things are worth crying over.

Leonard Cohen – “You Want It Darker”

You want it darker? I love that sentiment. That sums it up for me.

I would say Leonard Cohen never misses a beat. Even his last album is completely perfect musically, completely perfect lyrically.

Merle Haggard – “What I Hate”

Merle Haggard’s last songs are great, like the one about chemtrails. I listen to that nightly. He picked up on it. To the end, he remained completely current.

Things I Hate. I think every person on this planet can understand that message: Things I Hate. And the things he hates are just, yeah, all of us hate them. They’re really deep things that ought to be hated, that ought to be directly countered. Incredible. Perfectly written song.

Bruce Springsteen – “Hungry Heart”

The song “Hungry Heart” has maybe the best lyrics that have ever been written in the 20th century. The music is awful though, very bad.

He’s always on the money with the lyrics. He hits this melancholic but joyous note that say, “I’m glad to be alive but I’m also fucking it up.”

Kris Kristofferson – “They Killed Him”

There’s so much care put into country. Kris Kristofferson is someone whom I look up to a tremendous amount. Lyrically, never misses a beat. Musically, very rarely misses a beat. He’s really locked in to what it means to express yourself and to have some kind of musical expression in the world. And there are a lot of country people like that.