The singer and songwriter Richard Buckner has coped with decline and collapse — physical, economic, psychic, the whole spectrum.
He had a front tooth fall out on tour last year. Not long ago his back seized up on him in the Berlin airport right at the start of a three-week European tour, which forced him to endure the shows all hunched and rigid. He’s had a whole album’s worth of recorded material go up in smoke when equipment failed or was stolen.
With the nose-dive of record sales, Buckner’s seen his royalty checks shrink. After putting tens of thousands of touring miles on his truck he’s had doubts about the vehicle’s future. You get the idea. Still, Buckner, who plays Milford on Nov. 3, and Hadley, Mass., on Nov. 4, hasn’t packed it in; he’s just gravitated toward a new mode of touring, writing, recording and surviving as an artist.
Buckner has managed with the uncertainty of the music business up until now. He’s been recording for 20 years, working odd jobs, like operating a forklift in a warehouse or holding signs for a road crew, to pay the bills. He’s been a wanderer, living for a time Canada, in San Francisco, in Brooklyn, and now in the Hudson Valley. He resorted to playing on the streets in his early days. But the current state of the music industry has gotten so dire that Buckner, 50, has had to rethink his approach.
Starting this year he’s made the switch from playing in bars and clubs to performing most of his shows in people’s houses, doing what’s called “living room” tours, where volunteers host the performances and fans purchase tickets online. No sound check, no opening acts, no waiting around to get paid. No loud and distracted audiences clinking glasses and talking over the music. “The people are there because they want to be there, not because they’re waiting for the batchelorette party to start,” as Buckner puts it.
His fans are prepared to focus. Buckner plays his own type of fiercely poetic American music — not exactly folk, not really Americana, not necessarily indie rock and not really country, but something steeped in all of those. His voice has always been a remarkable thing, like a piece of driftwood whose sun- and sand-blasted surface reveals its gnarled grain, smooth and worn. There’s a husk and grit to his singing, but also an expressive and agile ornamental quiver. And his guitar playing can be spare and elegant, or strong and rhythmic. His lyrics often seem to blend movement and the natural elements with glimpses of relationships and enigmatic conversation. He’s never used repeating choruses and refrains as a central part of his songs. The melodies and textures are the hooks, while the lyrics keep shifting over them.
Over the 20 years prior to 2014 Buckner says he had probably played five or six shows at people’s houses. “A couple of them were so strange,” he says. So he never really thought of playing people’s living rooms as a viable alternative to slogging away in bars. But this year, with the assistance of a company called Undertow Music, which helps solicit homes whose owners wish to host a show as well as to collect the online ticket fees, Buckner has played around 100 living room shows, the bulk of his dates for 2014. (Tickets for the shows can only be purchased in advance at undertowtickets.com.) Buckner’s final show of the year, however, will be at a traditional club, Union Hall in Brooklyn.
In another effort to make the new creative, sharing economy work for him, Buckner has participated in the O+ Festival, which creates an opportunity for artists and musicians who don’t have medical insurance to swap performances or artwork for a chance to visit a healthcare professional. (Buckner saw a dentist.)
Often, coming off strings of dates at clubs, Buckner says he “was kind of a wreck.” But this year, when he got to the end of a run of performances at people’s houses he felt “kind of normal.”
“It was a different environment,” he says. “I felt [the tours] were almost breaks instead of work.”
What had been a 10-hour work day playing club dates had turned into a three-hour day at people’s houses.
“I just show up and do my show, concentrating on what I should be concentrating on,” says Buckner. Instead of waiting for the bars to close in order to get paid, he’s generally back at his hotel room by 10 p.m. or so, able to work on writing, or whatever else might need doing. “I feel like I get more out of it. It’s a healthier business model.”
Still, it’s not a completely robust and viable business model. The economics, because of the limited seating capacity, don’t necessarily translate to the kind of revenue that Buckner might have been making at clubs in 1998, but there are other rewards.
“These living rooms — it’s not like a bar hiring somebody to entertain,” he says. “There is a weird sense of community. It’s in someone’s house — it’s a private space. People go into it with a different attitude. In a weird kind of way — with all the crap going on in the world — any kind of way you can encourage a sense of community, that’s a positive thing.”
The venues have run the wide range from glorified shacks in the middle of nowhere, to artists spaces, to mansions, says Buckner. It’s always a surprise.
Buckner is starting work on a new album, one that he hopes will be ready by 2015. (His last record, “Surrounded,” came out in 2013.) He’s often embraced the idea of constraining himself creatively as a spur to finding new solutions to artistic problems: in the past he’s avoided traditional six-string guitars on a record, or required that the instruments and amps be reconfigured in the recording space for each song to ensure a different sonic vibe. This time he jokes about making a record with no strumming on it, or one with no one under the age of 50. And as he gathers bits from his notebooks and snippets of ideas from voice memos on his phone, it seems likely that the routine of playing living room shows will affect the kinds of songs he writes and the way they’re recorded in the studio. He’s learned things about his older material by stripping it down to play in a quieter context, with no real sound system.
“It’s given me a fresh idea of how to approach songs and arrangements,” Buckner says of his time playing people’s houses. “The last couple of records I was so involved in the creation of the sound. It was fun making noise and creating sounds, but as far as putting songs together, I was constantly leaving that out, and I want to put that back in. It’s a different way of letting the songs do their thing.”
RICHARD BUCKNER performs in Milford on Nov. 3; and Hadley, Mass. on Nov. 4, undertowmusic.com.
