Philadelphia-based band Cosmic Guilt records and performs as a ten-piece, drawing on the voluminous experience of its members in various bands and as side players in the studio. It was founded by former Low Cut Connie members James “Jimmy” Everhart and George Murphy. At the end of May, they released their second full-length album, titled Palace of Depression, drawing on some semi-local folklore and ideas that were prominent in their life experiences concerning gaining perspective. Bringing in a strong influence from forerunners of Cosmic Country sounds, the band also derived “parables” from their lives and local lore to create a specific journey that adds to the structure of the album.
The album was crafted “like a painting” over time and recorded in Philadelphia at Hi5 studio, with select tracks recorded at Silent Partner, owned by engineer Matt Barrick (The Walkmen, Fleet Foxes). The result was an album that’s mysterious and atmospheric and also strongly suggests an inner journey comprised of self-critique and determination to build a better future. I spoke with James Everhart and George Murphy shortly before their album release show, where the band intended to perform the whole of Palace of Depression in order to share its musical and lyrical story in a complete way.
I understand that you have a release show coming up. How many people do you need on stage to play your songs?
George Murphy: It’s essentially the whole ten-piece band that recorded the record. We’re going to play the whole album.
When you say “the whole album”, do you mean you’ll be playing it in sequence, too? I was already wondering about sequencing on the album because it seems to have an introduction, “Doors of Perception.”
James Everhart: There are two different ways of sequencing a record that I try to achieve, and I think that we have on this one. The short answer is that I would love for people to listen to it in order. But also, I would just love if anyone listened to it in general. [Laughs] But the songs have a cadence and a flow that works, and then there’s also the theme of the album, which does kind of flow through a very loose “plot.”
George: I fully concur with that. A lot of the artists who have influenced us come from an era of time when albums still meant something. Without making a full-on concept record, I still think it’s been pretty important to us, as a band, to make cohesive albums that you can sit down and listen to. I think we achieved that on our first record, though this one has a little bit more of a fully formed idea.
Though recording the album was spread out over about 18 months or so, it was like working on a painting. We’d find the spots that could use a little more transition. James, Josh, and I spent a lot more time on the sequencing of the record this time, making sure the songs did have transitions from track to track but could still stand alone as singles.
That introduction really sets the stage for the album and lets people know that they are on a certain journey.
James: Well done, George!
George: That first track was the last one recorded for the album. We knew that we wanted to open with “Bend the Truth”, but I think we take a lot of influence from the 60s and 70s and mild Psychedelia, especially for this record. There are a lot of recurring visuals throughout the record, so that little intro was a way to set the tone.
Where does the spoken-word audio clip from on “Doors of Perception” come from?
George: That gets into a much broader question, which is that the album shares its name with a roadside attraction, a controversial one, in Vineland, NJ.
Wow! I live very near there, bizarrely. Go ahead.
George: It’s very close to a Wawa. At the start of the Great Depression, this eccentric called George Daynor claims to have been a failed gold miner in Alaska who basically walked across the country to find his home in Vineland, New Jersey. An angelic vision came to him telling him to build this “palace” to his depression as a way to get through it. The story is a lot more nuanced and messed up than that, as you dig into it.
There’s a book called The Fantastic Castle, which we recommend. It was featured in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. He also collaborated with a filmmaker, which you can see on Youtube, and there’s a Wikipedia page. I came across that name first, and we’re big on names in this band as pieces of inspiration. When we looked at the record, we saw there were a lot of themes from our songs that mirrored the story, so then we leaned into that a little bit.
That is just amazing. Of course, it is pretty brave to name an album Palace of Depression.
George: It is. But it means many different things. [Laughs] The first record was one we made through the pandemic in our own sort of palaces of depression. This record is about getting through it all and coming out the other side, trying to better yourself as a person and learn from past mistakes. It’s about being determined to change. It’s a heavy title, and it’s a catchy title, but it’s got a lot of meaning to all of us.
The title track is a super-upbeat song with Americana-Country leanings, but some of what you are saying about coming through something really rings out in there. The song is really knocking down limitations and rejecting various positions.
George: That song was inspired by a show that we played in Arden Guildhall in Delaware. The day of that show, I was rear-ended on 95 and had my life flash before my eyes. Then I went to Arden, which is a very safe space for me, having grown up in Delaware. Going there, being surrounded by nature and my people, and getting it together to play the show made an impression.
Then, in January 2023, we were tracking at Silent Partner, and James and I were sitting in the control room. I had been listening to a heavy diet of Flying Burrito Brothers and Michael Nesmith at the time, and I started playing a riff from a Flying Burrito Brothers song, and then it morphed into the seed for this song. We went with that immediately, and we walked into the other room, and on piano and guitar, we plunked out the basic framework of the song.
It’s designed to sort of mirror an experience with drugs, to give the audience the experience of that. It starts out normal, then it gets real weird, then you find yourself again. Those things coalesce to tell the story, which is kind of a min-summary of the whole record. The song itself is a love letter to Michael Nesmith and First National Band, and simultaneously, to The Kinks. The choruses are very much inspired by Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part 1. We were wondering how to celebrate these artists we really love in a way that fit in with the pastiche that the record was already shaping up to be.
I did really think that it might have a Monkees vibe. I’m an evangelist for the influence of The Monkees, and people get mad at me about it. For once, I was right!
George: They are one of the most underrated bands of all time. It took me a while to get into Michael Nesmith’s solo material, but when I did, it was like a light switch got flipped. What he was doing, essentially, we came to find out, launched the ship for everything that we became as a band. He was the first at the party for what would late be called Cosmic Country. No one really knew what that was, but he was in all those circles.
He was hosting the hootenanny at The Troubadour that The Byrds were going to, and that Gram Parsons was hanging out at. I don’t know that he gets due credit for his role at that flashpoint of music that we are often associated with. There’s a lot of repetition in music, but if you don’t find a way to reinvent the wheel with reverence, it going to come off sounding inauthentic. I hope we have achieved what we set out to do, which is hipping folks to that vibe.
I can see a folklore kind of feeling with songs like “Pentecost” and “Goldminer” that have a storytelling aspect. It isn’t spelled out, but there’s a narrative feeling, like old ballads.
James: I always feel like a song should have a utility, to a degree, so a lot of those contain at least little parables, as well. There’s something that I learned or might have learned the hard way, and the song is my way of accepting that advice and passing it along.
George: “Goldminer” is the second to last song written for the record and feels like a reflection of where the record ends up. There’s a lot of self-examination as you try to dig yourself and accept yourself for who you are, with your flaws and failings. It’s also about learning from the things that sent you down a panic spiral, and try to do better tomorrow. In the same way that we examine things like folklore as a way to make sense of our own world, that’s what that song means to me. I’ve had the lived experience of everything I talk about on that record, and now, here I am, looking back at it all from the palace wall.
James: That’s exactly what I was going for. I think learning to dig yourself is a theme for a lot of people. When I was writing that, I started with filler lyrics and humming the melody. Sometimes I might have words that resemble English words, but for that song, those words were actually what I started singing. He’s digging. The guy is a failed goldminer. Let’s loop that back in somehow.
There’s an interesting parallel in that the guy started as a gold miner, who ends up at the palace, whereas the album ends with the song “Gold Miner”, like a reverse journey.
George: The spoiler alert is that he’s sort of the horror story of what will happen to you if you don’t do the work that the record talks about. As it happens, he took a lot of credit for the work that his wife was doing at the time while he was being abusive. In delving into the story, we realized this was a local legend that glorifies the ringmaster, but in reality, it was built on the back of the person who was sort of indentured to him.
The good news is she wound up getting away from him, as far as we can tell. But it’s that whole thing of having to look at all the sides of the stories that we’re told and deriving your own meaning from that. It’s the whole idea of giving yourself a second glance and not writing yourself off.
It’s such a modern folktale.
George: I think that’s really true. We weren’t really out there looking for that stuff as inspiration for this record. We were just working on our favorite songs and putting them together, but I guess we make the things in life that we love to consume the most, and for us, that seems to be a love for cohesive storytelling.
