al Riggs & Lauren Francis: Bile & Bone
[Horse Complex Records; Sep. 18]
A couple of weeks before the release of Bile and Bone, their new album with Lauren Francis, al Riggs’s right arm is wrapped in a cast. Recently, doctors had removed a ganglion cyst the size of a Brussels sprout from Riggs’s wrist—a lump that, while mostly painless, had been bothering them at least since they named an album ganglian in January.
Riggs recounts this episode with the same wry, detached bemusement that features so prominently in their music. They recall the bizarre experience of going under general anesthesia only to wake up what felt like seconds later, the surgery completed. Now they have to keep sunscreen on the wound for a year, which is just the kind of idiosyncratic detail that might appear in an al Riggs song.
“Every time I go out, I have to put on, like, SPF 30,” Riggs says with a laugh. “I’ve never heard of having to do that, but I’ve never had this intensive of a surgery.”
An intensive surgery might be just about the only thing that could slow down the prolific output of Riggs, who writes and releases music at an astonishing clip. Since they started performing solo in 2012, they’ve put out dozens of full-length albums, with numerous one-off singles and covers in between, all while finding time to join The Mountain Goats on their Goths tour in 2018.
Now they’re deep in the publicity cycle for Bile and Bone, which comes out September 18 on Riggs’s Horse Complex label. Yet even in the weeks before the surgery, Riggs was rushing to finish another project from their home studio in Durham.
This is to say that a new al Riggs record is hardly a rarity, even if they’re consistently excellent. But Bile and Bone is different than their usual projects. For one, it’s the most purely collaborative effort Riggs has released to date, with Francis sharing equal billing for her contributions as producer.
“I’m not lying when I say that if anything on this album sounds different or good, it is because of Lauren and her influence,” Riggs says. “Everyone that I bring in to work with ends up changing the song.”
It’s also the longest time Riggs has spent developing a release. When it comes to producing music, they’re an embodiment of the DIY ethic. They’re a staunch defender of Apple’s GarageBand software, which they have used for years—“if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Riggs says—and they typically mix tracks on their own.
But Bile and Bone germinated over a span of years, with some of its tracks featuring ideas from as far back as 2016. To mix and master the recordings, Riggs and Francis enlisted Alli Rogers, a local musician whose engineering experience includes working on the crew of erstwhile Raleigh resident Bon Iver’s acclaimed i,i.
The result is an album that is at once intimate and expansive while staying true to Riggs’s identity as a songwriter. Their plainspoken lyrics and thorny acoustic guitar work remain central, but they’re elevated by Francis’s arrangements, which place nearly orchestral flourishes over insistent yet understated rhythm tracks.
“Let’s make something big and pretty for a change,” Francis says, explaining her way of thinking about the project.
The first track, “Werewolf,” was the first song Riggs shared with Francis when their collaboration began. The song unfolds like a spring morning, opening with a memorable image: “If you’re sitting straight up in the middle of the city/You can pass through eight different weather patterns in a day,” Riggs sings as an electric piano sparkles to life.
“Love Is an Old Bullet” follows, featuring backing vocals from Vaughn Aed’s Rook Grubbs, who also sings on the title track. “Apex Twin” is a highly personal meditation on childhood and multiverse theory that’s named after the famous British electronic musician Aphex Twin (though you’d be forgiven if you don’t hear a resemblance). “Dying Bedmaker Variation” includes an interpolation of an arrangement by the legendary American Primitive guitarist John Fahey, while the last two minutes of album closer “Past Few Shows” dissolve into soothing ambiance.
But of course, it wouldn’t be an al Riggs album if there weren’t some mischief to “pull one over on the audience,” as Riggs puts it.
“I want to make a very knowingly beautiful and well-made album, and everything about it, I want it to turn people off,” Riggs says. “How can I make a really beautiful thing surrounded by all of this disgusting imagery?”
Though these are some of the prettiest songs Riggs has written, they arrive under a title evoking guts and gore. The cover art, which was designed by illustrator and graphic novelist Cameron Lucente, features the ripped, shirtless chest of a werewolf, which Riggs maintains has nothing to do with the music, beyond the title of the first track.
Viscera and comic-book monsters aside, Bile and Bone is remarkably inviting, thanks in large part to Francis’s dexterous guitar and production. Riggs and Francis seem to have as harmonious a producer-songwriter relationship as one could hope for. They rarely disagreed over arrangements.
“‘Picture it better,’ is what I kept saying to myself” while recording the album, Riggs says. “This isn’t a fight; this isn’t a battle for dominance; this is a collaboration. And as someone who hasn’t really collaborated at this level before, that was a hard thing to come to terms with early on. But once I did, everything flowed naturally.”
“I’m very low- and high-maintenance at the same time, I think,” Francis adds. “You have to know what hill to die on. You have to pick and choose your battles.”
Francis is modest about her contributions (“I never thought my name would be on the record!” she admits), but it’s clear she was instrumental in crafting the record’s atmosphere. After hearing some of her earliest arrangements, it became evident to Riggs that Bile and Bone was no longer “my” record, but “ours.”
The collaboration goes back to when Francis lived in Chapel Hill, performing with her former band Fluorescence. Impressed by her playing, Riggs wanted to get to know her. It wasn’t long before Francis joined Riggs’s backing band on the Mountain Goats tour.
“I was immediately blown away,” Riggs says of the first time they practiced with Francis. “She’s adding all these ideas to the song that I didn’t even think of.”
By the time work on Bile and Bone began, Francis had moved to New York. Riggs would send her demos of the songs, and Francis would record ideas for accompaniments. Some of the original iPhone recordings that Riggs sent, in fact, wound up on the final mixes, including on “Dying Bedmaker Variation” and “Livalon.”
But for the most part, they sought to avoid remote recording as much as possible, and Riggs made the trip to New York twice to work on the album.
“I basically had an IKEA desk with two monitors on it and an Apollo Twin interface,” Francis says of the cramped Chelsea apartment where the initial sessions took place. “We made a pop filter using a pair of hosiery and a hanger.”
Work on the album continued between Durham and New York over the months that followed. A last-minute addition to the Hopscotch lineup in 2019 allowed Riggs and Francis to play songs from the album live for the first time, in an enviable slot at Raleigh’s Fletcher Hall ahead of Daughter of Swords, Gruff Rhys, and Cate Le Bon.
The final stretch of production was bookended by two events involving the late John Prine, whom Riggs considers a hero and a major influence. In November 2019, Riggs had the chance to see Prine perform at DPAC, just as the recording for Bile and Bone concluded. In April, Prine died of COVID-19. At the time, Bile and Bone was in the final stages of mixing, and Riggs and Francis chose to dedicate the album to Prine.
“There’s a kindness and an empathy and a sweetness to how he writes, and a simplicity to it all, that works no matter what he’s singing about, no matter what he’s doing,” Riggs says. “It hurt when he died in a way that it didn’t hurt when other people that I grew up loving died. When Lou Reed died, it was bad. When David Bowie died, it was bad. When John Prine died, it kind of broke me in a weird way.”
Prine worked as a mail carrier before he was discovered, writing music in his head—simple songs narrated by characters on society’s margins—as he rode his daily route. Riggs similarly mines empathy from the mundane. Even their most politically charged subjects (the U.S. government’s persecution of “sexual subversives,” the stigma surrounding mental health, and the fallout of the 2016 election) and their most fantastical lyrics are always grounded in a refreshing honesty and humility. Bile and Bone is just the latest example—though, knowing al Riggs, it will only be the “latest” for so long.
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