We were lucky to catch up with Christopher “Preacher Boy” Watkins recently and have shared our conversation below.

Preacher Boy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I really appreciate being asked this question right now.

In so many ways, I’ve been so fortunate in my career, in that I’ve been able to work with so many people I admire, on so many projects I love and believe in. And I can say with full confidence that just about everything I’ve been involved in creatively has been genuinely meaningful.

But all that said, I’ve just wrapped up a project that honestly kind of stands above it all in terms of how much it’s meant to me.

I’m speaking of my new album, Ghost Notes, which has an official release date of November 1, 2024. I don’t exaggerate when I say I’ve been working toward this album since February of 2019. Having finally reached release day, it is, of course, not for me to say whether I’ve achieved what I set out to achieve—that will be for listeners to determine—but as far as I’m concerned, I’ve never been more ambitious or more driven to make something special and—hopefully—timeless.

My whole career in music has in many ways been one long chase after elusive goals. I’ve always wanted, somehow, to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable binaries. I wanted to be as raw and ragged as Bukka White, but just as beautiful as Nick Drake. I wanted to be as pure and as spontaneous and as zen-like as Robert Pete Williams, but just as poetically epic as Bob Dylan. I wanted to play with the tenderness and syncopation of Mississippi John Hurt with the passion and ferocity of Joe Strummer. I wanted to gather within me, pull forth from me, and synthesize a lifetime’s worth of influences the way The Band did, while simultaneously breaking new ground and rewriting old rules the way Captain Beefheart did. I wanted the guts of the Rolling Stones and the soul of Townes Van Zandt. I wanted to be a funky storyteller from the swamp like Tony Joe White, while being just as clever as Elvis Costello in the library.

I could go on and on and on. The point is, that every record I’ve ever made feels, in retrospect, like a moment in time along a grand journey—a moment where everything was tried, where some things succeeded, but no final destination was ever arrived at.

That’s not to say that Ghost Notes is a “final” record—I certainly hope not!

But I really do believe that by giving myself the time I took to make this, and by inhabiting the intentionality that drove me on, I’ve been able to get as close as I’ve ever come to resolving all these kinds of binaries. In saying that, I in no way mean to suggest I’ve attained the heights of all the incredible heroes I just named. I simply mean that I feel like I’ve finally landed on a group of songs, and a story, and a sound that brings all my intentions together in a way that leaves nothing outside the circle. It’s been a hard-fought battle—and I don’t use the term “battle” loosely—and I tore the whole record down so many times along the way it’s a bit of a miracle it got made at all. But it did, and it’s finally here, and I don’t think any album of mine, or any project I’ve ever worked on, has had more personal meaning that this one.

Preacher Boy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Oh boy. Well, this is quite a question. Who am I, and what do I do? Well, for the purposes of this interview, I’m going to focus on music, though I’m also a poet, as well as a “professional” writer (as in, I get a regular paycheck and health care as a salaried writer).

I’ve been writing, recording, and performing under the name Preacher Boy since the very early 90s. I got my start in the Bay Area, when I was living in and moving around through different apartments and warehouses in Berkeley, Oakland, Point Richmond, and San Francisco.

I got in my first proper band when I was about 20 years old. I was going to school at UC Berkeley at the time, and I’d just come back from winter break, and I was despondent about not doing anything worthwhile as a musician, and I was walking across campus, and I saw a flyer on a lamppost from a band looking for a guitarist. Now, at the time, I was pretty consumed by country blues music, but I also loved a lot of other things as well, and I was looking at the influences this band had cited on their flyer, and it was bands like The Replacements and Husker Du and REM and X, and I thought, I like those bands, I can play like that, so I decided to audition, and I got in the band. At the time, it was what you’d call a “college rock” band. They were already doing quite well, so it was quite a rocketship for me to suddenly be in a successful band, and we were playing all the right clubs in the area, like Paradise Lounge and the iBeam and Nightbreak, and Bottom of the Hill, and the Hotel Utah, and Berkeley Square, and the Starry Plough, and the Full Moon Saloon, and Gilman St., and within a couple years we were really on fire, with a possible record deal in the works and paid-for sessions in a top studio in town with a big-name producer set up to work with us.

In the middle of all this, I decided to leverage some of this success to put together a side project, just calling on some of the great musicians in town that I knew, and doing a set of all my favorite country blues songs, but done up in kind of a funky, more modern way. Well, it was supposed to just be one show, but things went so well, we just kept getting really good gigs, and suddenly I had a successful band on my hands.

And then I nearly cut my left-hand index finger off.

I was suddenly out of commission, and unsure if I’d ever play guitar again. I was despondent and desperate. I left the college rock band, where I was primarily the guitar player, and I decided to go with my ragtag alternative country blues band, where I was the singer and songwriter, and where much of my guitar playing was slide guitar and fingerpicking—which I thought I could still do despite the injury. I had to pretty much relearn to play, and all my chord forms are really weird now, but I crawled my way back.

So, fast forward a couple years, and I got signed to Blind Pig Records, which at the time was one of the two main independent blues labels in the country. There were two Preacher Boy albums on Blind Pig Records. In their day, they were oddly quite controversial. Back then, there was no “Americana” genre, no “No Depression” magazine. No “Martin Scorcese presents The Blues.” No “O Brother Where Art Thou.” Young musicians weren’t getting record deals by playing accordions, banjos, mandolins, and slide guitar. They especially weren’t getting signed to blues labels. So Blind Pig, in a way, was kind of brave and visionary. But when the critics came with claws out, they capitulated pretty quickly, which kind of broke my heart. Sure, a lot of reviewers expressed gratitude for there being “something new” in the blues world. But for every one positive review, there would be another one crying that “this wasn’t the blues.” It was pretty ugly, and Blind Pig and I got real adversarial real quick.

So, yeah, the relationship went pretty sour, and I eventually got off the label and headed overseas, where I toured and played for much of the next few years. My missus and I took a big leap and moved to rural Ireland. She studied at a small art college. I got a publishing stipend from my English record label. We moved into a 200-year-old stone house outside of a little fishing village in the Burren. It was a totally magical couple of years.

One of the albums I made in England ended up being heard by Eagle-Eye Cherry, who was then riding high on “Save Tonight,” and I eventually got invited to open up a huge European tour for him, which then led to me co-writing and recording a bunch of songs with him that were produced by Rick Rubin. We’d moved to Denver by that point, and I got flown out to New York for the Rick Rubin sessions. That was an amazing time for my music career. I performed for more people on that tour than I probably ever had in the entire rest of my touring life. Working with Rick Rubin was pretty remarkable. And I was actually making good money through publishing. I had a real publishing deal. I was making a living as a songwriter. I felt like a king. I signed a new record deal, and put out another Preacher Boy album. I was able to really branch out my sound. I was getting more experimental, and loving it.

Not long after that, my missus and I were living in New York, and I got an opportunity to record a solo acoustic album at the famed Magic Shop, and that became the debut release on what would become my own record label, Coast Road Records. That was in 2004, when there weren’t yet a lot of independent artists running their own labels. The streaming era was still nascent, and Coast Road Records actually got a physical distribution deal with RedEye, which was a great break for me, being so small and so new at that time. So I toured that record hard, driving myself all over the country—something like 6,000+ miles by the end of it all.

And that just about broke me.

By that point, I’d been at it non-stop for a decade-and-a-half straight. I’d signed record deals, played in front of thousands of people across something like 20 different countries, worked with the likes of Rick Rubin, and founded my own record label. And yet, I was exhausted, broke, and feeling like I’d gotten exactly nowhere after all that work. I was running out of money, running out of energy, running out of hope.

So, I took time off. I thought it might be permanent time off. I was convinced I was never going to play music again. We were living in Chicago at that point; my missus was studying at the Art Institute. I remember dumping equipment in the trash cans behind our apartment. It was brutal.

Fortunately, I didn’t stay dormant for long. With amazing support from my missus, I went back to school and earned an MFA in creative writing-poetry. She went back to school and earned her fine art degree. I was awarded writing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and The Jack Kerouac House. I had my first book of poetry published, Short Houses with Wide Porches (Shady Lane Press). We got married. And we had a kid together, and then an amazing daughter.

At that point, I was a husband, a dad, and a man with a music and poetry career behind him, and no idea what to do next. I felt like maybe it was just all over, that my creative days were behind me. I was a new and different kind of exhausted. I was parent-exhausted. I was soul-exhausted. I was job-exhausted. I was working at jobs I hated, to pay bills and make sure my daughter and my missus had healthcare. I was both happier and more miserable than I’d ever been.

Well, finally, the music began to kindle again. I started playing again. I started writing again. I slowly, every so slowly, began to occasionally play shows again. My daughter got older and started going to school. I got out of those horrible jobs and found ways to get paid for writing. I was able to work from home, which made making music more realistic. It meant spending more time with my missus and daughter, yet also being more creative.

In 2016, music suddenly exploded all over again for me. I released three new albums in a single year. Between 2016 and 2019, I was as musically busy as I’d ever been. I was averaging about 200 performances a year through that time.

We’d moved to Santa Cruz to raise our daughter. I got a residency and started playing weekly at a small venue in town. Eventually, I was asked to start booking the place. They had two other locations that had live music, and I started booking those as well. Between the three venues, I was booking something like 450+ shows a year. I was getting paid pretty well for it, and it really helped cement for me my feeling that I was genuinely back in the game, in a way that felt sustainable.

And then along come COVID, and lockdown, and shelter-in-place. That was the end of the booking gig. That was the end of live performing. Fortunately, it was also a crazy kind of forcing function. Suddenly, we all had to get our home studios in order. And we began to work on projects virtually. I was getting to reconnect with fellow musicians and collaborators who lived in New York, Austin, New Orleans, Los Angeles, London, Nashville, and more. I got to be part of some amazing music that way.

At the same time, I had started the process of creating Ghost Notes, the album that would ultimately take me five years to finish. It’s finally out now, and those five years were consumed with music and other creative work. Not only did I keep pushing forward on Ghost Notes, but I also started three different other new side project bands, joined two different punk bands, saw my second volume of poetry get published (Famished, Pine Row Press), and more.

And so, here I am in 2024.

I’ve been recording and releasing Preacher Albums for almost thirty years. And I think Ghost Notes is by far and away the best yet. So I like to think I’m still improving! I’ve been on other record labels, and I’ve founded my own. I’ve lived, written, and recorded in San Francisco, England, Ireland, Denver, New York, Chicago, Santa Cruz, and more. I’ve been a touring musician and a studio musician. I’ve been a booking agent and a record label owner. Along the way, I’ve also been a poet, and I’m now also a “full-time professional” writer.

It wasn’t how I planned it, but it’s somehow all worked out, and I’m still at it!

In your view, what can society do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

This may seem like a somewhat controversial perspective, but I don’t necessarily believe society should be under any obligation to “support” artists and creatives.

The mere fact that I’m trying to create, or have created, something artistic doesn’t automatically mean I deserve support from society. I kind of recoil at this type of thinking, honestly. It feels presumptive and entitled.

It’s this same logic that undergirds that idea that just because you spent 20 years learning your instrument, spent $4,000 on your equipment, and drove 600 miles to get to the gig, that you automatically deserve to be paid a certain amount. That’s just nonsense. You have to see it from the venue’s point of view. From the venue perspective, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve played for half a decade, are performing on a 1952 Telecaster, and drove all the way from Peoria to Reseda to do the gig, or whether you live two blocks down the street, just learned your first C chord, and are performing on a plastic ukelele. What matters to the venue is the value you bring to the venue. Do people come out, do they like it, do they stay, do they pay, do they write nice reviews afterwards, and do they come back? That’s what matters to them.

Whether anyone likes it or not, it’s currently a marketplace world, where you set a price on your offering and wait to see if you have any buyers. If you do, great. If you don’t, you have choices. Hold out, change, or acquiesce. You can stick to your price, you can change your offering, or you can give in and accept. But there’s no such thing, in this kind of economy, as objective value.

Which, I guess, is the beginnings of the real answer to this question of what society can do to support artists and creatives. The real answer starts with acknowledging that “society” itself can’t do anything, because society is us. So, what are we going to do? And what kind of society do we want to be?

Well, the real answer is that we have to change society if we want the arts to have a viable place and role. We have to decide as a people that we value the creative arts, so much so that we believe they should be a given, treated as a necessity, as fundamental as access to food and shelter. We have to ask ourselves, do we really want to live in a world where healthcare, housing, and food—absolute baseline necessities for life in a society—should be for-profit industries? Or do we need to rethink our society and our economy, and rethink what participation and membership in society really means?

When we were living in Ireland, we lived about a mile outside of a very small fishing village. Only about 200 regular residents. There were a handful of pubs in the village, and on Wednesday nights in one of them, there was a singer-musician who would perform with a few of his mates. They’d just set up in a corner around a table, and they’d mostly play instrumentals, and the business of the pub would carry on around them with drinking, laughing, storytelling, newspaper reading, what have you. But then, every once in a while, the one man would sing, and the place would just go dead silent immediately. And he’d sing a ballad in this beautiful, cracking, hoarse voice, and it would be so moving, and everyone would just be rapt. And then he’d finish, and everyone would just go right back to what they’d been doing. It was stunning, almost like a moment of prayer. Well, this went on for many, many weeks, and we made sure to be down at the pub every Wednesday. He wasn’t always there, but when he was, it was always remarkable.

So, a few months later, we finally managed to buy an old clunker car, and we used it to take a trip around the country to see some sights and visit some other cities. We even made it to Dublin, all the way on the other side of the country. There turned out to be a huge trad music festival on, and as we were looking at the posters, what did we see? Right underneath the headliner by only about two names was our man from the pub! It turns out, he was a very well-known and successful songwriter, musician, and performer—famous and successful enough that he was nearly headline-level at this massive festival that was featuring the likes of Christy Moore and The Dubliners. But back in the little village where he lived, he was just the fellow that sat in the corner with his mates every Wednesday to play music. Just another piece of the village puzzle, just as interesting/uninteresting as the plumber, the mechanic, and the lady at the register at the SPAR.

And that’s the idea, isn’t it? That a musician, a creative, an artist, can and should be a valuable and valued part of the community, bringing something special and essential and necessary, but no more or less important than all the other people in the village who also do and bring something important and essential to the village table. Because that’s the real truth about art and creativity, isn’t it? That we need some of it in our lives, just as we need fresh water to drink and good, healthy food to drink. Art allows us a moment of reflection, a pause to feel, to be moved, to connect. It can enervate our spirit, call us to attention, put a breath of life back into the mundane. It teaches us about everything from empathy and compassion to systemic thinking and collaboration. It helps us to be human.

Now, of course, people have to earn a living. So that’s really another question about artists and creatives—should these really be full-time, paid endeavors? Many of my heroes didn’t earn a living wage from their music. And honestly, doesn’t the best creative work emerge from the minds and souls of people who’ve had to live a little, struggle a little, understand a little, work a little?

Maybe that’s really what we mean by “supporting” artists and creatives, and really, maybe it’s something we need to extend to us all. That we can all earn a living wage without exhausting and burning ourselves out in the process. Maybe we can have a life where we contribute, but we also always have some time and space to think, to create, to share.

When I was a younger artist, I believed that being “full time” was the only thing that mattered. It was a badge of honor, proof that you were legit. I felt ashamed anytime I had to take on a “day job” to make ends meet. It felt like failure.

Well, that’s nonsense.

Listen, I’m proud of how hard I work, and I’m proud that I’ve continued to produce creative work for decades, and that I’m still doing it. And I know now that what matters isn’t whether I earned my living wage from “creative” work or not. What matters is that I’m still trying to produce work of integrity. It certainly hasn’t always been easy, but in the end, I feel very fortunate. I’ve made a decent enough living by my pen and my guitar that there’s a roof over my family’s head and food on the table. I’m not even close to being wealthy. I’m still very much in the “I have to check my bank account” every few days realm. But I’m still doing it. And I feel fortunate that there are enough people out there who value my contributions that they, in effect, are willing and able to subsidize my efforts through the money they spend on the things I offer. Hopefully they feel like they’re getting their money’s worth!

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I don’t know that it’s a goal exactly, and I’m not certain that what I do is part of a “creative journey” per se, but what I feel I can say is that creative work is, for me, a kind of ongoing awareness ritual.

As a process, it’s a kind of mechanism for ensuring one is present in the world, vibrating with it like a tuning fork, paying attention, absorbing, processing, remaking. It’s what storytelling has always been about—taking in the world and trying to make sense of it.

And as something to experience, creative work is a force that can awaken you, call to you, bring you to awareness. It can lift you or devastate you, affirm you or deny you, bring you joy or cause you deep grief. Done well, with skill and purpose, it can help you live intensely, with awareness. It can help you be fully human.

So I think that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to live a life of awareness using the creative process as a means of engagement, and I’m trying to create work that will be, for others, what the creative work of others has been for me.

I think I’ve just always believed in story—in stories, storytelling, and storytellers. I think the ability to tell stories is likely our most fundamental evolutionary differentiator. I think stories—creating them, telling them, experiencing them—is just absolutely human nature. From the caves of Lascaux to the songs of Billie Eilish, we’re telling stories to help explain the world to ourselves, to help explain ourselves to ourselves, to help explain ourselves to other selves.

Over the years, I’ve had to come to the realization that I’m just not a “big tent” artist. I’m not a populist like Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift, I just don’t write songs that are going to be singalongs in stadiums. I’m not a Billy Collins or Amanda Gorman kind of poet either; I’m not getting invited to any inaugurations. I just occupy my own kind of strange little corner of the world, and in that corner, I listen to some strange little stories, and I tell some strange little stories, and I guess it means a little something to me and the strange little people in this strange little corner. I guess I’ve come to realize that, in the end, that’s ok, because we’re all doing what we do to get by. And we mean a little something to each other.

Collaboration is a big part of this. My missus, for example, is a visual artist, and her work, and the way she thinks about it, and the way she thinks about the world, are hugely influential to me. Her artwork is on the cover of so many of my releases, and her works aren’t there as decoration—her work is a deep part of my work. Ghost Notes, for example, was literally not possible, not releasable, without the inspiration of, and incorporation of, the four works that are on the cover of the double vinyl design. The project wasn’t a completed circle until her work became fully integrated into it.

And I’ve been so fortunate to work with so many amazing mentors and collaborators, people who’ve shared their talents and their insights, who’ve helped to shape my worldview. People I’ve written, recorded, and performed with. People I’ve workshopped poetry with. People with whom I’ve written, edited, revised. Creative work cannot happen in a vacuum. Creative work is human work.

There’s one more thing I want to stress. It’s about independence.

My record label is Coast Road Records. Our slogan is: “Music of Quality. Independent To The Bone.”

Being an independent artist, and an independent business owner, is important to me. I take pride in not being beholden to a corporate capitalist machine that is profoundly anti-human. There are other ways to transact business, to exchange value for value. To build, to grow, to thrive. When I first started Coast Road Records, I had one standard that I set for myself. I wouldn’t make another album until the last one had at least paid for itself. I didn’t need the label to produce profit, I just wanted it to be sustaining. I wanted it to stand on its own in all its independent glory. Including Preacher Boy, there are 11 different artists represented on the label. I’m proud to play some kind of part in all of the projects, and I’m proud that, two decades later, Coast Road Records still exists. Still releasing music of quality, still independent to the bone.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://preacherboy.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nationalblues/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PreacherBoyAndTheNationalBlues/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@PreacherBoy
• Other: Record label website for Coast Road Records: https://coastroadrecords.com/

Image Credits

All photographs by Amy Marinelli