Zach Phillips is a certified East Coast underground music lifer who, over the past few years, has found a wider indie audience thanks to his work in the unclassifiable Fievel Is Glauque, a band he leads alongside the Brussels-based singer Ma Clément. Phillips recently released True Music, a delightful solo record full of smudgy, jazzy piano pop. On the occasion, we reached out to him and asked a few questions about songs, and Phillips had quite a bit to say. Read his answers below.

A song for delivering pizzas?

"Song At Tengenji Intersection" by Maher Shalal Hash Baz

I delivered food for years—mostly Chinese, although I had a short stint of pizza work. This was pre-smartphone and pre-reliable-cellular-service in NH and MA so we used physical maps and had to call customers for precise directions to their strange coordinates of tiny street names. I wore out three CD copies of GZA's Liquid Swords in that mode. I was also constantly playing Only Built 4 Cuban Linx by Raekwon, Thank You, Sweet Sixteen, and Accelerator by Royal Trux, I'm The One by Annette Peacock, Do or Die by AZ, and Return Visit to Rock Mass by Maher Shalal Hash Baz. This one is from the latter and seems thematically right. 

A song that makes you want to make music?

"Give Your Little Self Away" by Chris Weisman

One of my favorite songs by my friend Chris Weisman, who is one of my favorite songwriters and helped motivate me to focus on song work when I was still embryonic. That melody! Its perfect case! 

A song that reminds you of Vermont?

“Gone To The House” by Ruth Garbus

An early song by my friend Ruth Garbus on her first tape Ruthie's Requests. Takes me back to incredibly cheap rent, Harmony Parking Lot, and all the tentative confidence of youth. Another of her early songs, "My Apple," also gives me this feeling and gets stuck in my head all the time. 

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A song to listen to at the tail end of an all-nighter?

“3 X 2 = 6” by Vanity 6

We have a lot of vinyl at my place but we mostly spin the same records over and over and over: the Delfonics' and Linda Jones' greatest hits, Eduardo Mateo and Mariana Ingold, the Clark Sisters, Oister "TEAC Tapes," early Thin Lizzy, George Kerr and Sylvia Robinson's first couple records, and, often regrettably, Terry Cashman's "Talkin' Baseball." When I'm faded and it's late I often crave Vanity 6's "3 X 2 = 6," one of my favorite Prince songs, along with "Circle of Love" and Martika's "Love... Thy Will Be Done." Both of the latter are totally ideal recordings, lush and clear and magnificent. "3 X 2 = 6" is much rougher, it has that The Time sound, it's dirty, it's nasty, it's hilarious, it's over the top, it's lovely, and it's about breast math. What more could you want?

A song by a new friend?

“I Don’t Care” by Mick Mayer

Well, we've known each other for a long time, but we've spent very little time together and don't know each other that well, so this came to mind because it's one of my favorite tunes I heard in 2024 and it's really stuck with me. Just so well put together and gratifying on every register. Immediately lush in what strikes me as the tradition of Barry Gibb, though authentically new: this is not Barry fanfic. It's so hard to do this "kind of thing"—well, songwriting in general I guess, but in particular pushing this hard for somewhere in the middle of an "adult contemporary" space—without it sounding like sheer product, a feint, a dead-to-life collection of the signifiers it conjures up. Not a wisp of that feeling from "I Don't Care," which satisfies me in the same way I felt satisfied when I wrote my recent song "True Music," possible to sum up in a hysterical phrase like: "This is almost, hahaha, normal! But it's alive!" For better and for worse, much songwriting sinks, but this tune swims in Olympic-level synchrony. It must have been a great pleasure to write it.

Some other music by newer friends that I've loved recently, I'm sure I'm forgetting quite a lot: elie mcafee-hahn Change Ringing In America; Cities Aviv Working Title For The Album Secret Waters; Dagmar Zuniga in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music; Tomato Flower No; Salami Rose Joe Louis & Flanafi sarah; Jon Elbaz Verdure Azure; Test Subjects Study; Rustbelt You Got Nowhere To Go But You're Going There Tonight.

A song by an old friend?

"Baby Girl" by Joey Agresta

One of his many moments of perfection. Just an ideal little package. Sounds so great, too, thick in an odd way: AKAI MG1214. You don't get to write too many like this. And "Guru Days" by Ryan Power. Ryan's experimenting with writing/recording/releasing at a faster clip than before and I'm all about it. This one's so gorgeous. All his records are incredibly brilliant. And "Wishing Well" by Chris Cohen, my current favorite off his new album. Really cool part-writing on this one.

A jazz song for a snowy night?

I think of Mal Waldron & Jeanne Lee's exceptional record After Hours.

A song that is deceptively simple?

“I Never Dreamed” by the Cookies

I think all simplicity may be deceptive. It's possible that our binary construction operative here ("simplicity versus complexity") yields a structural ambivalence that leads to both terms actually most accurately disclosing the other! It's also possible that everything deserves the name "complex," that hermeneutics (a necessary part of playing or writing music, as one translates and re-translates ideas, impulses and movements in a gestural temporality that both incorporates and violates the typical ways we relate to time) itself necessarily means an encounter with complexity, an envisioning of it. At bottom, the only thing I'm really sure of on the subject is that these terms don't bear stable reference to anything particular. The song that comes to mind was written by my friend Russ Titelman in the 60s: "I Never Dreamed" by the Cookies.

A song by a Uruguayan artist?

"La Costurera" by Jorge Galemire 

If I have one go-to song, it's "La Costurera" by Jorge Galemire. Every second fills me with bliss, and it's over so soon I have to listen again! I could live in this song for ever.

A song from 2024?

"Palermo" by Daryl Johns 

First thing that comes to mind is Daryl Johns "Palermo." Just unbelievable. The rhythmic feel reminds me of Joringho Gularte kind of (try "Darshan," track 3 of Almazen), and the harmonic feel has that classic Metheny/Mays magic. The total effect is pure Daryl, and it's a hit.