Sweedeedee
Saying goodbye to Michael Hurley, Boone, and Jocko.
After some unscheduled (but sorely needed) downtime for repairs and recuperation, Attenuator is back in action. Before returning to our regularly scheduled programming, I’m taking a moment to remember one of my favorite musicians.
In the Moonlight
By now, if you frequent certain corners of the internet (or peruse the obits section of the New York Times), you’ve likely heard that folk singer-songwriter Michael Hurley passed away on April 1 at the age of 83. I learned of the news an hour or so before the first obituaries were published, via a sweet post from music journalist and Feeding Tube Records affiliate Byron Coley. It came as a shock, mostly because Hurley still seemed so full of life — in the days before his final departure, he played to packed rooms in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Asheville, North Carolina.
For more than a decade, Hurley was a fixture of my summers thanks to his annual appearances at the Nelsonville Music Festival1, held not far from where I attended college in Athens, Ohio. During my final years in school, I interned at the local venue (Stuart’s Opera House) that organized the festival and ended up volunteering for the festival in various functions (the most memorable was working a dedicated Loretta Lynn merchandise tent, complete with T-shirts and coloring books).
As an indie rock-obsessed college radio music director, I’m sure that I was initially dismissive of the bare-bones folk songs being sung by a guy dressed like a bohemian train conductor. But I recall taking in one of Hurley’s sets (likely at the urging of my friend Brian Koscho) and quickly falling under the spell of a series of surreal odes to booze, tasty food, natural splendor, and a horse’s ass.
The more that I listened to Hurley’s music, the more I wanted to learn about the enigmatic artist behind the songs (not to mention the comic strips about perpetually hungry and horny humanoid wolves that accompanied many of his albums). Not long after I moved to Chicago, I made a trip to Quimby’s to pick up one of the final issues of Arthur magazine, which included a feature story containing one of the most comprehensive summations of Hurley’s life, career, and musical philosophy (written by the aforementioned Byron Coley).
As I kept returning to Nelsonville, I witnessed several eras of Hurley’s career: the tail end of a resurgence via the embrace of “freak folk” revivalists like Devendra Banhart and Woods; his anti-GMO activism; the year or so that he adopted the moniker “Bad Mr. Mike”; and post-lockdown festival enthusiast. I also had the chance to see prominent fans like Yo La Tengo and Joan Shelley sharing the stage with Hurley, playing beloved songs alongside the musician who breathed them into existence.
During one visit to Nelsonville, I was tasked with picking up Hurley from the house where he was staying and driving him to the festival grounds. I did my best to make conversation during our 20-minute ride, but Hurley wasn’t very talkative. I vaguely remember him commenting about the warm weather, but mostly recall him being preoccupied with making sure he’d have enough time to grab something to eat from the green room before he was scheduled to perform (much like his cartoon wolf creations Boone and Jocko, Hurley always seemed to be thinking about his next meal).
Even during the dark, mostly music festival-less years of 2020 and 2021, Hurley still found his way into my life via his sporadic live-streamed performances. My favorite was a meandering set from early 2021, accompanied by a guitarist and bassist on the patio of a bar north of Portland (not far from Hurley’s home in Astoria), filled with deep cuts from across his catalog and covers that I attempted (and mostly failed) to identify.
Over the past few years, I’ve tried to savor every chance I’ve had to see Hurley perform, knowing somewhere in the back of my mind that my opportunities to witness him singing songs were dwindling. The last time I sat in front of him was on a warm Sunday afternoon at the Nelsonville Festival in 2023, when Hurley performed a set on a small, secluded stage situated in a forest clearing. He sang about geese, cooking fish, and whiskey — and he closed with a song about cherry pie.
I’m heartened by the fact that Hurley’s final chord has yet to ring out: during the last weeks of his life, he was busy assembling the artwork for his forthcoming album, Broken Homes and Gardens, which will be released later this year on No Quarter Records. There’s also a decent chance that he squirreled away a healthy stash of unreleased home recordings — transmissions from the past that may eventually emerge in the present (with the blessing of his family and the assistance of some Hurley archivists).
In the meantime, Hurley left behind plenty of records and live recordings to pour over. I recently listened to his 1976 album Long Journey and got a little choked up after hearing the closing track, “In the Garden.” It’s a song I’ve heard Hurley perform a couple of times, including that final set I witnessed in 2023. It took a closer listen for me to realize that this dreamlike ballad seems to address coming to terms with your cosmic insignificance while finding gratitude in being a part of the stream of souls that are briefly able to gaze up at the moon. Like so many of Hurley’s best songs, it finds a simple way to paint a beautiful design.
Sometimes we woke and saw
That the moon had gone
From the left side, to the right side
And the columns of mist were rising
Looked like friends of mine
Who have diedIn the moonlight
In the moonlight
We don't hear but
Water running
Down the stream of
All the people
There is no one
Ever coming
Thanks for sitting shotgun on my trip down memory lane. If you’re jonesing for a Fusion Best 100 fix, rest assured that I intend to publish more entires in the coming weeks. For now, feel free to send this post to any of the Michael Hurley fans you know.
Hurley was a constant presence on the Nelsonville lineup because of his connection to festival director Tim Peacock, who cut his teeth as a music promoter by cold-calling Hurley (who was living in southern Ohio at the time) and booking a show for him in Athens, OH in the late ‘90s.