Richie Kirkpatrick
Silver & Gold, the new album Richie Kirkpatrick is releasing Friday, almost didn’t happen. Recorded and shelved years ago while he was coping with intense illness and dramatic life changes, this LP marks a shift for Kirkpatrick — aka Ri¢hie, leader of much-loved Aughts rockers Ghostfinger and an ace side player for folks like Bobby Bare Jr., Langhorne Slim and Kesha — toward retooling and reexamining his party-forward tunes for a post-party life. The Scene caught up with Kirkpatrick ahead of Friday’s shindig at Soft Junk to talk recovery, recording and recentering creativity and community for a healthier life.
“So much went down in my life,” says Kirkpatrick, whose last full-length album was 2014’s Night Game. “There wasn’t an album coming out for a number of years because … I ended up being busy, then ended up getting really sick. I was sick for a long time.”
Kirkpatrick first became a local music staple amid the mid-Aughts creative foment in Middle Tennessee that centered on places like the back room at Springwater and Murfreesboro’s Red Rose Cafe. Back then, tragic poets were easier to find than tourists on these streets, and he was a perfect fit for the hard-partying final moments of Old Nashville. The affable, often goofy guitar wizard’s lyricism was marked by a flair for the absurd and a penchant for intellectual anarchy. His early work fit so well within the anything-goes aesthetic of that pre-corporate-interest era that it’s difficult to imagine a Music City without it. Over time, he played with bigger and bigger names, and sometimes his own music took a backseat. By the time Kirkpatrick got to work on what became Silver & Gold, he was struggling with alcoholism, and his life was in danger.
“These are songs that I wrote and did the vast majority of the recording of before I got sober,” he says. “I can point to specific vocal stuff where it’s like, ‘That’s delirium tremens, kids.’ Getting this album out is a step in me moving on from a chapter of my life that was really heavy. It was done before I even started that process of getting away from the alcohol that was killing me. But I was so desperately wanting to get away from it, and it was impossible. [The album] should be called I Can’t Stop Drinking and I’m Dying.”
Richie Kirkpatrick
The write drunk/edit sober dichotomy the record presents feels like cleaning fingerprint-covered glasses and realizing just how blurry everything was before. Kirkpatrick’s knack for a hook and speed with a quip give songs like “Chinese Pills” and “Natural Light” a cheerful veneer over an existential tumult that is a little terrifying and a lot relatable. Joe V. McMahan’s echo-laden production lands between the Stones and The Flaming Lips, grounding songs like “Time Ripper” and launching tunes like “All of You” and “I Don’t Even Know Your Name” into the stratosphere.
“When you see things as a reflection of you and you hold it too close, you’re like, ‘I’m going to control the narrative of my life by not putting out this really personal stuff,’ even though that’s impossible,” Kirkpatrick says. “Holding onto it too much, identifying with it too much — this is moving past that. There’s a couple things on [Silver & Gold] that have made me cry now, listening back, knowing that that’s where I was. But then you have to get over that.”
It becomes clear as we talk that Kirkpatrick’s passion for music and the music community is a sustaining force in his life. His enthusiasm for New Nashville — “It’s a whole new audience!” — and old guitars (including a recently restored Martin) are invigorating his creative life at a time when he’d be absolutely forgiven for hanging it up. He’s got new songs, a growing home studio and excitement about the future that can only be described as joie de vivre.
“I was just sick. I was too sick to do anything. I’m just so thankful to be able to live a life and be productive and have a future, whereas I didn’t for a second.”
