THERE IS A long recorded history of musicians applying their melodic and lyrical gifts to explore the darker corners of human existence and navigate a pathway toward healing and redemption. You have the Blues and Spirituals, of course, which offer transcendence amid tragedy in all of its guises. And then there’s Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours, and Beyoncé’s Lemonade, three wildly divergent examples of the album as a cathartic, psychological, conceptual work meant to be experienced in a single sitting, much like one sits still to read a short story or a novel.
Houston singer-songwriter Jacob Hilton, 37, who records under the nom de plume Travid Halton, a portmanteau of his mother and father’s names, might balk at being mentioned in such company. (This is a thoroughly unpretentious man, who describes himself as an “archaeologist turned singer/songwriter.”)
Nevertheless, Hilton’s brand new album Obsessions, currently streaming on all major platforms and available on vinyl, CD and cassette, is a low-key though no less powerful contribution to the concept album genre. Across 10 beautifully recorded tracks, Hilton shares his experiences with childhood trauma, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and OCD recovery.
He’s joined by some of the city’s musical luminaries, including Geoffrey Muller (bassist for The Suffers and Robert Ellis); Will Van Horn (pedal steel player for Khruangbin and Leon Bridges); Matt Serice (trumpet player for Bayou City Funk and Free Radicals); and Ellen Story (violinist for Slow Meadow and The Broken Spokes), who contributes backing vocals to the album’s penultimate track “The Great Remembering.”
Hilton is heard playing resonator guitar, dobro, steel-string acoustic guitar, banjo, and piano, giving the album an indie-folk vibe, with nods to classic country and meter-shifting prog-metal. (Slipknot, KoRn, and other nu-metal bands inspired Hilton as a teenager to pick up the electric guitar.) Throughout Obsessions, Hilton sings with a quiet urgency and a range of expression reminiscent of Jakob Dylan unplugged and Sam Beam a.k.a. Iron and Wine, but with a voice that is uniquely his own.
Hilton describes the album’s first two tracks, “Little Bayou Boy,” a bucolic homage to childhood, and “Blossom,” a harrowing, second-person description of his mother, Tracy Hall, in the throes of a severe psychotic episode, as “two halves of a whole.” Hall, who died in 2010, was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a child; in 2016, Hilton went to an outdoor screening of a documentary about schizophrenia and afterward, was inspired to finish “Blossom,” a song he began at age 15 to express his conflicting feelings about his mother.
“The documentary helped me better understand my mother’s experience, even though I had witnessed it personally for years,” says Hilton. “The next day, I sat with my guitar and strummed the first few chords of the song and the first few lines of lyrics just came out effortlessly.”
Hilton has come to manage the debilitating symptoms of OCD with therapy, sessions with a licensed psychologist, and sticking to a daily routine that includes regular exercise and healthy eating. (Hilton is a talented cook and decided the photo shoot for Obsessions should take place in his kitchen.) Unfortunately, therapy without insurance can be cost-prohibitive for many people, but there are several helpful free online sources, including OCD Recovery, which provides free content on YouTube and Instagram led by people who have recovered from OCD.
While Hilton, who does indeed hold down a day job as an archaeologist, doesn’t have immediate plans to perform Obsessions live, he can imagine one day playing the entire album at a house concert, with all of the musicians on the album as special guests. In the meantime, he is completing a four-song EP, set for release early next year, that is (you guessed it) another thematically tied-together cycle of music.