Love.

It has been the catalyst and impetus of the overwhelming majority of artwork since some quick time after our ancestors lined the partitions of Lascaux and Chevaux caves with the earliest types of inventive expression.

Usually – too typically – musicians go for the straightforward path of beating the long-dead ‘my coronary heart is damaged and no different will ever measure as much as the love I’ve misplaced’ horse. Relatable? Solely to these with a pulse. Fascinating and impactful? Not remotely.

Enter singer-songwriter Matthew Houck, A.Ok.A. Phosphorescent.

After months of touring behind his fifth album, Houck returns to Brooklyn to search out many of the central parts of his life totally engulfed in flames. His long-beloved dwelling/studio in Brooklyn has been rezoned and have to be vacated. Life on the highway has decreased his relationship to unidentifiable ash, by which he’s left to sift and seek for some semblance of value. So, at 4:00AM on a Thursday, he does what any artist with integrity would do, and books a flight to Cancun that leaves in 2 hours.

Houck settles in a hut on the seaside 110 kilometers south of Cancun, within the (not for lengthy) small village of Tulum. Armed with a guitar, pocket book, and a pen, he units out to map his present scenario by sketching what will probably be a warmly-received, critically heralded LP, Muchacho.

Houck’s efforts naturally flip to a postmortem examination of his failed relationship and the dusty crossroad at which he stands. Whereas most artists can be content material to wallow in defeat or cry into their tequila, Houck chooses the trail much less overwhelmed – defiance.

“Track for Zula” is, doubtless, a battle-cry-turned-victory-march of a track. It dares the listener to unleash this monster known as love, stare it down, and urge it to go for the jugular, as he claims

You’ll not see me fall, nor see me battle to face
To be acknowledged by some contact from his gnarled palms

Because the track – and Houck’s defiance – progress, a special sort of animal circles, not not like a shark, parallelling the shoreline, duck diving the waves of power simply earlier than they crash: exhaustion.

A tired-sounding Houck approaches the exit after ripping a deadly strip off of affection, leaving one final notice, maybe a warning to his future self, or to like itself, promising

My coronary heart is wild and my bones are metal
And I may kill you with my naked palms if I used to be free

So long as there’s heartbreak on the earth, “Track for Zula” will lay in wait, ready to pounce at anyone prepared to face up, mud off, and put one blistered foot in entrance of the opposite.