In the often-overlooked world of DIY music, Theo Hilton has a storied connection to many around the country, thanks to his tireless touring in the 2000s and early 2010s. Being raised in Athens, Georgia, Hilton would go on to contribute to indie and folk punk bands like Zumm Zumm; Defiance, Ohio; and Nana Grizol. Writing emotional and reflective songs with a literary bent, Hilton is known for capturing the isolating experience of growing up as a queer kid in the South while also addressing larger social and political issues. His advocacy would grow beyond the arts and into academia where, as both a student and a professor at Tulane, he would work on research regarding climate and racial inequities.
Hilton has found it challenging to make New Orleans feel truly like home, but after 10 years of living in the city he has decided to reform his band Nana Grizol with local musicians, officially making New Orleans the band’s new base of operations. Performing Nana Grizol songs solo many times over the past few years, Hilton will finally perform with a full band this month. The morning after opening for anti-folk legend Kimya Dawson of The Moldy Peaches (a show he helped book and produce), I met with Hilton at Café Levant in Mid-City to discuss the decision to reshape the band and how he’s come to find a home here.
Why are you reshaping the band here in New Orleans?
I’ve lived in New Orleans for about 10 years, since August of 2015. And in that time, Nana Grizol has continued to play music and record with my bandmates who live in Athens, Georgia. And since I moved here, we’ve made our third album, which was called Ursa Minor and our fourth album, which is called South Somewhere Else. And to make those albums, I would commute. I think in both cases it was during the summer. At least during Ursa Minor, I was teaching anthropology at Tulane. And so I would teach on Mondays and Wednesdays, and then I would drive on Thursday morning to Athens and work on writing the record with the band. And then drive back on Sunday night to do it again—over a whole summer.
That’s like a nine-hour drive.
It’s a very long drive. And I’m somebody who really enjoys long drives alone. That was not an issue for me but as time has gone on, as my family has grown and sort of initially because of COVID, just the logistics of it became more difficult. And I think also the longer I’ve lived in town—with any new place, certainly in my experience and what I’ve heard from other people who have moved from their hometown to somewhere else, I think it’s just hard to identify a place as being your place or your home. And I think that is even more of a fraught process in a city like New Orleans. So I had some anxiety about it, which I’d be happy to talk about too. But I think over time, especially in the last couple of years, I’ve come to a place where it’s like, “New Orleans is my home and it’s my center of operation,” whereas I think before I was really looking for connections to Athens because it’s where I’m from. So it felt really meaningful to nourish this ongoing artistic and fringe relationship with that town and certainly have very good friends and some family there now. But I think my sense that New Orleans is my place has really become my dominant feeling of where I am and where I do things, if that makes sense.
Tell me about that. You’ve been in New Orleans for a while now. What made you stick around for so long?
I’ve stayed because I love it here. Socially and culturally, it’s a really wonderful place. My network of friends and family that I’ve picked up is really wonderful and strong. And my kids are from here. I feel really invested in being a part of this city and this region and doing what I can to help make it a better place. I think it’s been really over the last two years, not like an immediate shift, but I think for a long time I have felt a great desire to stay here. I feel now it’s really difficult to imagine even wanting to live somewhere else.
What brought you to New Orleans in the first place?
I wanted to move back to the South. I bounced around a little bit and have lived with good friends who I had met from tour life from many years ago. And then to go to school. I had met my partner, Kev. We both wanted to move back to the South because of the proximity to our parents and our family. But also, I feel like it’s a cliché but I think culturally it’s just a friendlier place. I personally really like living in a city but I don’t like living in a city that’s too big. New Orleans is kind of small. It’s the perfect size. It moves at a pace that I really enjoy. I think it’s really possible to know people. It’s really possible to see people who you know on the street or when you go out or when you go to work. I’m doing some work at the University of New Orleans right now, and all of a sudden I’d be like, “Oh, all these people who I know are here and I’m passing them between buildings.” I feel like that’s hard to find in New York or something.
Nana Grizol, comprised of Theo Hilton on guitar and vocals, Madeline Adams on bass, and Matte Cathcart on drums at the Dragon’s Den, circa 2008. (Photo by Eric Martinez)
I wanted to ask about your education because that seems to be part of your experience in New Orleans. You went from a community college in Seattle to Columbia in New York and then finally Tulane. So to confirm, did you go to college later in life? How old were you when you first enrolled?
I was 28 when I started going to college. And part of why I moved to Seattle was my good friend Clyde [Petersen], who has a band called Your Heart Breaks. We had become really close just over years of touring. I later started a record label with him called Cruisin Records. But I was at a point in my life where I think being a touring musician, as much as I was, was really bringing me down. It was a very difficult lifestyle for me. So much of my life was just devoted to making music and touring it, which I really enjoyed, but it was really hard to find time for other things in my life. So I would come home and not spend a lot of time with my friends or community, or become invested in having a job. It was really fun, but it was not super tenable. Going to college was something I realized I really wanted to do, but I had a perception of myself that it wasn’t something that I could do. And my mother died in 2011. And so there was this stew of being like, “I don’t want to be in a constantly touring band anymore. I’m going through a big life upheaval change in my 20s. And there’s a great community college near where my friend Clyde lives in Seattle.” So I moved and lived with him for a couple of years. It was a really nice reset. And I think for me, it was about being able to experience life outside of what I perceived as expectations of what I could or couldn’t achieve, which I think were largely projected by me, but I was like, “Oh, nobody expects that I could pass an English class.”
A lot of your music, going all the way back to Defiance, Ohio, is very political. I’m curious, going back even further, what drew you to that indie, DIY punk world? Was it the political aspects of it or was it just what was happening in Athens when you were growing up?
I think both. I think initially it was the aesthetics and that there was an art and music scene that was accessible to me. I really value just knowing people. Whether that’s people who were making music, or people who were fans of music or the intermix.
Did you feel like you had to write political music?
No. I think that was something that I realized. In some ways, I think that a lot of my early political education came from music. In a large part, I think now that’s what draws me to making music, is that it’s both fun and a way to make ideas really accessible, whether that’s political or emotional. I think it’s all a big stew. I think for Nana Grizol, for songs that I write, I believe something that resonates for people is that those songs [aspire to] help to connect broader structural political currents to a very personal, vulnerable, emotional place. I think that music is a really powerful tool for doing that. For helping people either awaken to a political consciousness or to give a language to our feelings that can help us disentangle them and build a shared narrative. Since I was a kid in Athens, Georgia to now, and I think in my perception even moreso now, I think the tools for talking about what we’re excited about or afraid of or who we are are so necessary because there’s all this alienating discourse around us that’s designed to make us not familiar with ourselves and the people around us. And I think from an early age, I knew that music was a really powerful tool for doing that. I would stress that I really hope that’s something that’s happening with the music we make. And that was a really big deal for me, learning about a way of talking about capitalism, anti-colonialism, gender, race, sexuality.
Did you think college was a way that you could make an impact on the world beyond music?
Yes, I think so. It’s a fraught conversation in some ways because I think that politically or even organically, I no longer really see that as much of a necessity. [College] is a path. That was the template that I had for settling down and getting serious.
Theo Hilton performs solo opening for Kimya Dawson at The Broadside on November 10. (Photo by Dalton Spangler)
I mean, you grew up in Athens, UGA City.
Yeah, and in particular, at the time, going to this community college was something that I just really wanted to try and see if I could do it. And when I got there, Seattle Central Community College… at the time, like many community colleges, it was a really vibrant public institution. So I was going to school in this very multiracial context. Some of the students were still in high school doing bridge programs. Some students were retired and everywhere in between. People were job certificate-oriented, but in the liberal arts program. So they were sometimes talking about very esoteric ideas, sometimes very concrete and really just figuring out how to share space together and be in community and do stuff. And it was funny because I was almost 30 and I was really involved in student life, at least clubs and stuff… I think an emptiness that I felt when I was touring all the time was that we would show up and I would talk to people about the incredible work that they were doing to build community and whatever mutual aid—which wasn’t a term that we used at the time, but I think that people were certainly doing—to build these radical infrastructures where they were, which I think we were able to contribute to. Especially for Defiance, Ohio, provide a soundtrack for a lot of people doing that. The actual experience of moving through the world in that way made it really difficult to be involved. So then I think when I was like, “Snap, now I’m spending all my time invested in community college. This is what I’ve been looking for.” So much of that was built-in and it was so much like, “OK, we’re all gonna learn and build a vision for the future and talk about ideas.” I took public health classes a lot of the time and it was mind-blowing for me.
And so you went on to pursue your master’s and a PhD. What did you end up studying exactly?
This also reflects a political evolution for me because I think early on I was really into big public health interventions as the place to try to do my work, which I think is an important space. When I went to finish my bachelor’s, I studied sustainable development because of this idea that like, “We’re gonna get everybody access to technologies,” but it was somewhat disillusioning. I didn’t really think it through on the front end. When we talk about sustainable development, it’s kind of this code for bringing a lot of technology and these things that people need with this caveat of, “Well, now everybody’s got to go work in a factory.” [It dismisses] community-oriented solutions to environmental problems in favor of an approach that brings in outside expertise, brings in a way of thinking that’s not often relevant to poor people, with this idea that people aren’t the experts on what they need and how their future should look. So as I was taking those courses, getting my bachelor’s, I became quite disillusioned with that. And I discovered the field of anthropology and the anthropology of development as a way of critiquing and understanding how capitalism shades ideas of what is good. There’s a heavy Eurocentric bias there. A lot of projects that ultimately can be presented as being good for people, but are hiding a whole lot in the fine print. And so understanding how to critique that and also how to elevate voices of people who are impacted by those processes and those programs was something I became very interested in, both in a broad theoretical way and in an applied way. And so, throughout my time doing my master’s and my PhD in New Orleans, I became involved in a lot of grassroots advocacy around community-based infrastructure design and development. I worked with a number of small communities in Plaquemines Parish on the Westbank—and I still do—who are basically seeking better levee protection. At the time, environmental planners [were coming in to] say, “This is what we’re gonna do. It’s going to help protect most people but it will put some coastal residents at greater risk, and so be it.” To really understand how communities, especially residents and historic freed people’s communities—communities that were founded by formerly enslaved people in 1869 and during the Reconstruction period—how their safety is underconsidered in those planning programs, but also their visions for the future, what better protection would look like.
It’s like, who do we choose to help?
Right. And ultimately the argument of people who I’ve spoken to as a community-engaged, applied anthropologist, and my own political framework now, is we’re not ever going to come to a place of having a society that can work at all until we can come to a place of not seeing some people’s livelihoods as disposable. Even in this planning process, which there is some merit to, the need to figure out what we’re going to do with the coast and how we’re going to protect New Orleans, et cetera. But like always, always, always, there’s this rhetoric of, “Some people are going to be forced to move, or some people are going to be forced to deal with worse environmental conditions.” And inevitably those are people who include Indigenous people whose ancestors were pushed off of their land, or Black people whose ancestors have dealt with environmental injustice, who have dealt with forced removal and enslavement. Until we can center the security of those communities and the development visions, we’re not going to move past it into a place where we have systems that work for everybody. Something that comes up in my research and my work is that there are a lot of planners and planning institutions that are really well-intentioned that miss that point. Who often are like, “Well, if we just convince everybody that it’s actually best if we don’t consider their needs, then we’re good.” For me, that’s the space that I’ve spent a lot of time really since moving to town, building relationships around, and coming to understand that. I would say it really informs my politics and my art. The last Nana Grizol record, South Somewhere Else, is very much informed by those relationship experiences.
When you used to tour in the 2000s and 2010s, you stopped in New Orleans a couple of times. Did that experience of playing in New Orleans influence your perception of the city before you came here, specifically some of the shows Bryan Funck helped book?
Yeah. Bryan used to book shows for us in New Orleans and in Baton Rouge. When I was in high school, I worked at a coffee shop near my high school called the Above Bookstore and Coffee Shop and bands [that he toured with] like Hatchback would come through. So I met him in Athens in high school and he started booking shows for us when I was 18. We played some house shows. We played this place that was like the upstairs of an old mattress warehouse on Banks Street that I think is pretty close to where I live now. There was this place called the Big Top that I don’t think he booked. The first time I played in New Orleans, I was 18 in a band called Zumm Zumm and we were here during Southern Decadence fest, which was really—Decadence was, from my perception, a little more extreme at that time in 2001 than it is now. That was really eye-opening because I think that queer culture and my search for that, even coming from Athens to here, was a big part of why I was excited to live here and stay here. But that’s another story. We played at the Hi-Ho. There’s this person, David Dondero, who writes songs that I love, had a song that talked about the Hi-Ho, and I was like, “This is it! We’re at the place.”
So you were exposed to some of the queer culture in New Orleans because of Decadence being at the same time as that show?
Yeah. And that there were queer people coming to our shows. And I was cognizant of that. I think then, the first time we came out after Katrina, that was with Defiance, Ohio, we played a house show, but we went to a Common Ground organized house-gutting and cleaning. [We] set up and helped for an hour or whatever. I don’t think I was very cognizant of the broader social dynamic that was happening, but just that there were queer people who were involved, who were wanting to roll up their sleeves in that scene. A very fraught scene also in ways that I learned a lot more about since moving here, but yeah. [laughs] It always struck me as a place where people are showing up to help each other and to see each other.
With the folks I’ve met who moved here, they either feel like they were destined to live in New Orleans or they stumbled in with little intention. What side do you feel you fall on?
This is a cop out, but I really feel like I couldn’t say one way or the other. I would say it’s taken a very long time for me to feel like it’s natural for me to be here. I drive down the street and I’m like, “This is my street.” I don’t think that it feels like destiny but it does feel like being here builds on affirming experiences and relationships that I’ve made over decades.
To bring this back full circle, your new version of Nana Grizol will be debuting at the Pigeon Pit show. Can you tell me a little bit about who’s going to be in the band or how that took shape?
Well, you already know that I’m motivated by opportunities to live with and spend time with people who I’ve known for a long time. So just a little bit more about that process, the band in Athens, we recorded South Somewhere Else in 2019 and then it came out in 2020. Of course, we were going to tour a bunch and it got canceled, and then a lot of things changed. So after that, I was in a funny place because I didn’t feel like it was going to continue to be possible for me to commute to Athens to play in a band. And I didn’t feel like it was appropriate to start playing my songs with other people. And I kind of waffled on that for a while. And I played a couple of shows by myself.
You played at least three or four solo shows locally in the past couple years.
Yeah. And I just didn’t really have the bandwidth to write songs for a while, just in my head and in my heart. And I think as that started to change concurrently, we started getting some more invitations to play shows and we insulated the shed in my backyard so I have a practice space now, which was just a major infrastructural issue. So then finally earlier this year, I went to Athens and had a conversation with the band. They were really surprised that I didn’t initiate this conversation a long time ago. They have been really supportive. And the way that they were thinking about it is that Nana Grizol’s always been, even before it was a band, a solo project of mine. And it’s become pretty established as a band of four people over 10 years. And everybody’s still gonna be involved. And we’re shifting the working core band to some folks who live here in New Orleans.
There’s a lot of people who have played in your band, at least 12, so it just seems like you’re growing that collective.
Yes, and it’s really sweet. I mean, the band, there’s three of us who are playing together right now. My friend Brad [Bingham] plays the drums and I played a concert in his bedroom when we were teenagers in Houston. He played in a folk punk band many years ago called Rosa. We had been in touch for a while and then moved to different parts of the United States. And then we both found ourselves living in town and I realized he was here maybe four years ago, so we started playing music together. It’s been really nice to reconnect and explore our friendship and have it be new again. We’re just both really excited about playing music. Then our friend Noah [Tapper], who I also vaguely knew from folk punk because he is from Brattleboro, Vermont and has played music with Pat and Michael Schneeweis. Michael played in Nana Grizol for a while and Pat has had a number of bands. Currently [he’s in] Friends In Real Life but used to be in Wingnut Dishwasher’s Union. So it’s kind of funny, I don’t really identify as being of the folk punk genre but it’s definitely a part, a feeder.
I wanted to ask about that because you get thrown into different buckets like indie, folk punk, anti-folk. I mean you just played and helped organize this Kimya Dawson show. I’ve even seen twee thrown around online. How do you view yourself?
In some ways I feel pretty open to whatever people feel good about. I realized in my time when I was playing music less that I find genres to be pretty alienating. And I think this in some ways could relate back to thinking about having a political orientation that, as maybe as cliché as this, tries to emphasize relationships and ways that we can see each other and experience each other’s words for what they are over extreme ideology. And I think, within each genre, there are other artists with whom I really identify, and some with whom I very much do not. So I guess I feel OK about it.
With the new band, are you planning to release new music now?
Yeah. So we’re starting [to write], we have a couple of new songs where we’re like, “This is how long it’s gonna be and what the words are gonna be,” and then a bunch that are kind of in their primordial phase.
Now that you’re out of school, you have more time to do music again?
Yeah. Here and there. I feel like in some ways I can be disciplined about some things. Creating a little lacuna of time for writing songs is not my strong suit, but I’m getting better at it. Like with so many things, if I make the time and just do it, then I’ll do something that I’m satisfied with.
Is there a reason why the Pigeon Pit show is going to be the new band debut or is that just happenstance?
Yes and no. I think we’ve been playing for a while. I mean, Brad and Noah have been playing since the spring, and then for a couple of reasons, Brad and I did a tour together and Noah wasn’t able to go. And so it’s been since the fall that we’ve started getting back at it again and practicing. So the timing kind of works out. We’re just ready to play some shows. I was really excited to book a show with Pigeon Pit and I’m excited to hear Holy Locust and June Henry, who I have never seen either of them play before, but I’ve been really interested in what I’ve heard on the internet. I think of Pigeon Pit as being a great band and as being a very kind of energy-driven live band. Nana Grizol has always, [especially] this iteration at this time, [ridden] on our energy and not our technical prowess. So it just felt like an appropriate time. I’m excited because I think the people at the show are going to be able to sing and jump around. That’s the kind of energy that we are able to bring.
Nana Grizol will perform Friday, December 5 at The Broadside alongside Pigeon Pit, Holy Locust, and June Henry. For more information, check out @nana_grizol on Instagram.
Top photo: Theo Hilton performs a solo acoustic set at Gasa Gasa on November 5, 2023. (Photo by Dalton Spangler)
