{"id":147850,"date":"2025-06-15T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-15T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/?p=147850"},"modified":"2025-06-13T15:11:37","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T22:11:37","slug":"watchhouse-rituals-is-its-most-exploratory-album-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/watchhouse-rituals-is-its-most-exploratory-album-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"With a Custom Bouzouki, Vintage Tenor Guitar, and Layered Studio Work, Watchhouse\u2019s \u2018Rituals\u2019 Is Its Most Exploratory Album Yet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On its seventh studio album, Rituals<\/em>, North Carolina duo Watchhouse\u2014Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz\u2014explores themes of home, presence, time, and the patterns we come to depend on. Co-produced by Marlin and Ryan Gustafson of the Dead Tongues, the album gently expands the band\u2019s sonic palette. It introduces new textures and approaches while holding onto their signature warmth and lyrical clarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Formed in 2009 as Mandolin Orange (the duo officially adopted the name Watchhouse in 2021), Marlin and Frantz began as an acoustic project whose sound hewed closer to traditional folk and bluegrass, with Marlin on mandolin and guitar and Frantz on fiddle and guitar. Over time, their touring and recorded lineups have featured a rotating cast of collaborators, but the core of the band has always remained the duo and their intimate harmony singing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few weeks before the album\u2019s release, I visited Marlin and Frantz at their home in Chapel Hill. We talked on the back porch, surrounded by bees, birdsong, and a thick coating of yellow pollen\u2014the seasonal price of spring in North Carolina. As we spoke, it became clear that Rituals<\/a><\/em> marked a departure from Watchhouse\u2019s usual methods. The familiar role of acoustic rhythm guitar was, on many tracks, filled instead by a custom-built bouzouki, which became one of the album\u2019s defining sounds. Marlin\u2019s mandolin\u2014often the band\u2019s lead voice\u2014was frequently set aside in favor of a vintage electric tenor guitar he discovered hanging on the wall of a music shop in Telluride, Colorado.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Meanwhile, the band\u2019s long-standing preference for live tracking gave way to an exploratory, layered process\u2014overdubbing, stripping back, and rebuilding songs in search of something more open-ended. Influences from traditional Irish music and instrumental jazz began to filter in, subtly shaping the record\u2019s sense of space and interplay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After we wrapped our conversation, Marlin handed me the bouzouki we\u2019d spent so much time discussing. I sat down and picked out a few chords and melodies, surprised by how quickly the unfamiliar feel of the instrument pushed me into new territory. It made my hands\u2014and my ears\u2014reconsider habits I didn\u2019t know I had. Like Rituals<\/em> itself, it offered a different perspective: something familiar made strange, and in that strangeness, something quietly transformative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bouzouki seems to be a big character on this record. When you\u2019re writing these songs, do they grow out of specific instruments like the bouzouki?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marlin:<\/strong> They do, especially on this record, more so than most. I was just getting into the bouzouki right before the pandemic\u2014I had discovered that Paul Brady and Andy Irvine record<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the best ever!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marlin:<\/strong> Yeah. And I was pretty obsessed with it. And from there I was listening to Planxty, and Donal Lunny, and some of the Andy Irvine solo records as well. So then I really wanted a bouzouki, and Emily and I did some duo recordings where I actually borrowed Tim O\u2019Brien\u2019s Nugget, just to see if I even liked the bouzouki. And I loved it! I liked Tim\u2019s in particular, because it\u2019s based on a guitar body, like an archtop guitar. And it has these octave strings on the G and D, so you get these accidental melodies with it, almost like a 12-string [guitar].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I wanted to find something like that, but there aren\u2019t a whole lot of makers doing that, so I hit up our buddy Gil Draper, who\u2019s a bouzouki builder in Knoxville, Tennessee. I said, \u201cI want a guitar-bodied bouzouki, but I don\u2019t know where to look.\u201d And he said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you look for an old tenor [guitar], and then we can convert it.\u201d So I started scouring the internet, and I found this 1932 Martin archtop tenor. It\u2019s got a round hole, whereas a lot of other Martin archtops had f-holes. So I was like, man, that might be kind of cool to give it a real guitar sound, while still having that arching to support the extra tension of the eight strings. But it had a messed-up neck, so I sent a picture to Gil saying, \u201cWill this work?\u201d And he was like, \u201cYeah, dude, let\u2019s try it.\u201d So I sent it to him, and he built a new neck for it, and three months later he sent it back to me. I just love it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The custom bouzouki used on the new album, built with the body of a 1932 Martin tenor archtop guitar, Photo: Isa Burke<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These songs were all kind of written on that instrument. And from there, I\u2019ll introduce another instrument\u2014we were in Telluride and went into Telluride Music, and they had a 1939 Gibson electric tenor that had the original Charlie Christian pickup. I took it off the wall, and it was already tuned like a mandolin. They let me plug into this nice little amp, and I sat in there for like an hour playing tunes. I put it back on the wall, but a few months later I couldn\u2019t stop thinking about it, and I finally called them up and it was still there. So I scooped it up. So even though a lot of these songs were written on the bouzouki, that [tenor guitar] ended up being the main instrument that I played on the album.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tenor is a big character on the album as well.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frantz:<\/strong> I feel like you played tenor on most of the record, and now especially as we\u2019re starting to work up these tunes [for the live show], I end up playing more of the bouzouki parts, which is cool. It\u2019s kind of the strum-like-a-drummer thing! That instrument is really fun to play as a rhythmic instrument, because I feel it\u2019s a little bit more percussive than a dreadnought guitar. So that\u2019s been really fun for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This record has a lot of layering of guitars and stringed instruments, but it doesn\u2019t seem super arranged; it feels really organic. Is that partly because having bouzouki as the first rhythm instrument lets the textures grow in a different way?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marlin:<\/strong> Totally. I really wanted to play on this record based on Planxty, but also Gil Evans. I was listening to this album The Individualism of Gil Evans<\/a><\/em> a lot, and a lot of those records that he did with Miles Davis, like Sketches of Spain<\/a><\/em> and Birth of the Cool<\/a><\/em>. And I particularly love how on those records there\u2019s a very audible drive and a very audible swing. Those two kind of work against each other and with each other, and I wanted to play with that on this record. I felt like the bouzouki did that. Emily, the way you play guitar, you\u2019ll often have the bass and the backbeat going, whereas on the bouzouki, you\u2019re kind of swinging the backbeat, with less emphasis on the downbeat. That seems to leave this airier sound in the band that leaves space for everything else to be a little more on the beat and driven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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