Longriver’s David Longoria explains how the great outdoors made it onto his album

Austin musician David Longoria’s recordings under the name Longriver are more than just standard singer-songwriter fare. The Longriver album features instrumentals, found sounds and poetry, all flowing together like its aqueous namesake. Longoria’s voice and guitar playing are clear and clean, yet the record is by no means antiseptic. The music is instead warm and inviting. I spoke with Longoria by phone about recording the album, and about his love of nature.

The Pitch: Both times we’ve set up this interview, you’ve been going camping. Is that a way to get centered before touring, or just in general?

David Longoria: I think in general. I really like camping, especially in central Texas. It’s really nice. There’s, like, so many places within three hours of Austin that are pretty awesome. Like, kind of hill-country spots with a lot of hills or even bordering on mountains, and riverbeds that are beautiful and rocky, with real waterfalls and all that.

The reason I’m interested is because the outdoors really make it onto your record.

Yeah, a lot of those sounds — like, the frogs, I got on the Green Belt, which is this hill-country creek area near Austin. Some of the rain was on my front porch. The crickets are somewhere near south of here. Yeah — a lot of camping! I love camping, and I don’t really do it enough. I was out, and I’d hear it, and I’d be like, “Whoa!” and then I’d record it on my phone. It’d be what I’d hear, and I’d be like, “That sounds wild.” Especially the frogs. They’re just so wild. It’s neat. We were just out camping, and we were listening to this little Bluetooth speaker, and you’d turn off the stereo, and we’d be like, “The crickets are louder than our music. Pretty cool.”

What inspired bringing all of those nature sounds onto the album?

I recorded that album on my own, in my apartment. It’s produced by Jeff Cooper, who is my friend, who’s basically like a compulsive helper. He can’t help but help. He’s this awesome guy, and he’s like, “You need to record a record? I have this box. Let me give it to you. You need a microphone? Here, this should work.” He just kind of told me how to do it and was just like, “Here, go make some recordings.”

I had this idea that I was just going to make a tape. Just a cassette tape. That inspired me, and some of these songs weren’t even written yet. It was making my own kind of thing, you know? I was going to make my own thing and give it to my friends and stuff. At that point, it became really informal, and I was like, “I can put a poem on there! I can put music on there. I don’t necessarily have to write a bunch of songs, they can just be compositions.” So, it was born from that pretty free way of making a record without thinking about it.

It was serious, because I made it on my own. I made it with a lot of intent and love or whatever, but it wasn’t made in the kind of way where I’m gonna buy some studio time, and I’m gonna lay down some hot tracks. [laughs] It’s a slightly different approach than I’m used to.

Where did that poem come from?

That one was written a couple years previous to making the tape, while on the Colorado River. That comes from a collection of poems Abandon Press published, which was my friend Travis, who makes these really nice books on an old machine that he found, with some old type. It’s over 100 years old: a Chandler & Price. It’s foot-powered — straight out of the Industrial Revolution. It’s smaller, which means about the size of an old Volkswagen Bug or something.

He asked me to make a book of poems, and I’d never really written poems. I’ve had a lot of writings, but I hadn’t been like, “Here’s a poem.” It’s like: If you were a sculptor, and you were like, “I have a lot of stone, but I haven’t really carved anything.” So, I made this book of poems, and most of them were written on the Colorado River, and while I was there I saw this cow drinking from the river, and I thought, Cow River, and I named it that. “I See the River,” which is the poem on the tape, is the first poem in that book.

Longriver with Travis Champ and Ben Cissner

Saturday, November 26, at Night Blooms Darkroom and Bookstore