Amid grief, panic, and failure, Neil Berthier (ex-Donovan Wolfington) teaches lessons in perseverance.
Photos by Sarah Toomey
Neil Berthier—the 27-year-old indie rock vagabond behind the emo project PHONY, formerly of the punk band Donovan Wolfington—wears his heart on his sleeve. On “Waffle House,” the lead single from PHONY’s forthcoming album Knock Yourself Out, Berthier confesses in exasperated whispers, “I tried my best to quit smoking, I guess / It’s just not the right time.” It’s hidden under ominous guitars and twinkly keys, followed by weird, electronic bubbling. His words throughout the haunting track are barely intelligible, yet they’re razor-sharp, recounting something of an emotional crisis at a breakfast spot.
“I was out on tour with a friend’s band at a Waffle House in Oklahoma somewhere and it was just this panic of I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. It was obviously triggered by some sense of lost love and family [trouble]. I hadn’t seen my dad in like two years,” Berthier explains over a phone call earlier this month. “My friends took care of me. We got on the road and went to Nebraska or something. And it [the feeling] went away a little bit. For me, it’s trying to get that to go away a lot,” he says. He continues about the song: “That’s how I process something; start at the point where this intense feeling came from, and then go from there. It was that happening, and then chainsmoking—shouldn’t be doing that—and I tried to quit. It was a spiderweb kind of thing.”
While in quarantine, he went three and a half months without smoking but recently got back into it. “I can’t really get into the details of why everything is such trash,” he says with a sigh. “I’m gonna get away from [smoking] eventually. It’s too expensive up here.”
He’s in Newtown, Connecticut about to go hiking with friends at the time of speaking. It’s where he grew up, though he was born in New Orleans and went to Loyola University. He’s also inhabited Chicago, Nashville, and Boston, though he recorded Knock Yourself Out in Philadelphia and sometimes flirted with the idea of driving his tank-like van to Los Angeles. “It wasn’t that I really felt like, I’m doing this because it’s completely out of my own volition, and I just need to do it, with the exception of the Nashville thing,” he says, and then second guesses himself: “But even that—I never really had a desire to be in that place. It just seemed like it was safe. It seemed like it was a good place for me to grow up a little bit and not drink as much and be happy and assimilate to a normal life in some respect.”
The story behind Chicago: He got back with an old ex and describes the situation as a “total mess. The pair split within three months, leaving him to grieve the loss in a new city. “Oh, wow, I’m alone. I’m really far from home,” he recalls thinking. “I had friends there, but nothing like a hometown crew or kids that I grew up with. It just seemed like I was stranded in the middle of nowhere, even though I wasn’t. It’s a huge metropolitan area. I just stuck to writing. That’s the only way I can process anything.”
Then there was Philadelphia: “I just wanted to get out of [New Orleans] and try to take my mind off of my world crumbling,” he rationalizes. Berthier would drive from the city of voodoo to Nashville for a night of sleep, wake up at 6 in the morning, and try to get to Ian Farmer’s (currently of Slaughter Beach, Dog, formerly of Modern Baseball) studio by 2:00 a.m. One night, “dudes” driving from Miami to Boston rammed into Berthier’s van. Luckily, it really is a tank.
This was a long time ago. Knock Yourself Out was recorded over three years ago, and was actually out on Bandcamp at one point. It was originally supposed to be released on Flower Girl Records, a label ran by Sorority Noise’s Cam Boucher as well as Zack Zarillo. It did not end well: Allegations against Boucher surfaced prior to the album release. “I can’t really speak to that. All I can say is how it affected me,” says Berthier. “At the time, I wasn’t interacting with any of that. I had a 12-hour shift at work [on my birthday]—I was working at a restaurant—and this kid came in and was like, I heard about Flower Girl. Your record’s not gonna come out now!” he recalls. “I was so bummed. I walked out and went to the skate shop and some friends bought me a deck and then I went to see an Iron Maiden tribute band. Then I quit my job the next day.”
Berthier’s devotion to music is unmissable. His earnestness is at the forefront of his work; within every song is a catharsis of some sort. On “Turnstile Effect”—the second single, and a favorite track of Berthier’s—the emotional energy is quiet and composed for the first two minutes. His vocals are like sighs and the instruments simmer in the background like a lake’s slow, placid waves. With only 30 or so seconds left, Berthier’s scratchy yells crash through: “Don’t lie and say you would rather die / With me at the end of the earth / I hate to say I love you ’cause it hurts / I love you because it hurts.”
Berthier takes some influence from Pinback, Tigers Jaw, and David Mason, but he emphasizes that his inspiration comes from life experience. “My life’s been pretty chaotic for a few years now and I don’t love that,” he laments, wishing for the ability to relax. Still, as an artist, the upside is that “There’s gonna be some good coming out of it, I know that.” He is working on more music because that’s all he does. Two more LPs are already finished and a third is in the making. “It’s the one thing I feel the most comfortable doing,” he says, finding solace in the process of churning out material whenever he wants. “Everything else—I’m so weird,” he says, laughing. “There’s some sort of unrest with me always and I’m always trying to get out of a situation. At least with music, I get to construct and plan things the way that I want them to be presented.”
PHONY is not Berthier’s first project, but most people know that. It follows his time as the vocalist and guitarist of the cult-followed Donovan Wolfington, who broke up in 2017. It was a necessary experience for him, he says, helping him realize: “this is not the end-all be-all. There is more stuff to go on; there is more music to make. There are things that are more important than this,” he says with gratitude. “I needed to learn that.”
PHONY is unfiltered, vulnerable Neil Berthier, who is constantly submerged in the turmoil that life throws at him. He invites friends to collaborate with him on his records, wanting it to be an “open family thing” after receiving advice from Self Defense Family’s ringleader Pat Kindlon. The forthcoming LPs have features from Greg Mendez, members of Ovlov, and more. Knock Yourself Out, however, is solely him.
As heartbreaking as the record is, there’s space for levity. In the middle is a voicemail from his busy cousin David who now works at The New York Times, and it works as an intermission and as comic relief. In it, David says, “I’m not gonna make it tomorrow night. It’s not so much that I have to be up early, or my age—as you wanted to point out there—I just have a 10-hour day on Friday,” and it’s cheekily titled “I’m Not Going to Your Show.”
This lightness is a special contrast to all of the heavy, dark moments.
The title Knock Yourself Out on its own has lovable humor to it. And even though Berthier grieves, panics, and fails throughout the record, it keeps moving. He survives. And it’s clear why he survives: he is unconditionally and wholly married to music, and he uses it to express himself, to process life, and to uncover truths. Listening to Knock Yourself Out is like sitting beside him for the entire duration of that deeply intense, personal journey. On the jangly “Gold,” he sings, “Well, I’m terrible at being a human being,” and it seems likely that he is a musician first, person second.
Listen to Knock Yourself Out below.