The Kosse Cafe is one of two diners in the small Texas town two hours northeast of Austin, with mint-green walls and a tiny salad bar. On a Saturday afternoon, there are roughly 10 people inside, mostly men, but no one really says anything. Further on up the road, there’s the roadside neon of Boss Hog’s and their alligator chili. The sign welcoming visitors to Kosse claims it’s “a little town with a big heart.” The water tower stands vigilant of anyone who disagrees.
Greg Ashley sits across the table smoking a cigarette.
“You could smoke anywhere in this town – HEB, the gas station,” he says.
After a meal of mostly meat and starch, we head to the cabin his parents own here in Kosse. Ashley’s Dodge Ram rambles several miles before turning and creeping down a narrow dirt road. He stops the truck next to a red, white, and blue mailbox and unlocks a creaky gate. The cabin sits way back on the land; a long porch up front, firewood and a feeding pen to the left, garden to the right. Inside is his recording equipment – a clarinet, keyboard, 4-track, guitar – all in wonderful contrast to the horse decor.
Ashley, who fronts Oakland’s the Gris Gris, came here to write songs for his upcoming solo album, which is partly recorded. The Gris Gris’ most recent Birdman release, the free-jazz freak-out For the Season, was born half in Oakland and half here in Kosse. 2003’s woozy Medicine Fuck Dream, another solo LP, was also partly recorded here. Corn-fed Kosse is a perfect breeding ground for Ashley’s dark daydreams.
“There were still songs from the [last time] we were here,” he says. “I just wanted to do something on my own again, some more mellow stuff. Sometimes it’s all there right away, but that’s rare. Most of the time I have an idea for a part, and if I can’t expand upon it within 10 minutes, I don’t give up. I’ll just kind of forget about it. I have all these parts floating around that don’t really go together, so eventually I’ll have to change the key or something so it’ll work in this song. After that, usually, I have an idea of what I want to write the song about.”
There’s a small pond to the east with a blue paddle boat sitting ashore. Ashley says last week a snake slithered over his foot while he was in it. We narrowly escape collision with a nasty looking spider’s web and wonder aloud what poison oak looks like. It’s the first day of fall, but the air is thick and muggy, and the woods are dense; Ashley admits he’s gotten lost a few times. We don’t, because we get creeped out talking about The Blair Witch Project.
Ashley grew up in League City, a suburb of Houston, and his dad worked for NASA. In the liner notes to the vinyl version of Medicine Fuck Dream, there’s a photocopy of a concerned letter from his parents after his mother found out the title of his album. “We are embarrassed that the word ‘FUCK’ is directly associated with Greg Ashley’s name on the Internet. Millions can view the granddaddy of foul words in association with our name.”
“I just thought the name sounded cool,” shrugs Ashley as we sit on the porch. “They’ve always been really supportive of me.”
Ashley is almost baby-faced, with a mop of messy brown hair, freckles, and bright blue eyes. He’s a slight figure who looks way younger than 25, even when he’s chain smoking and talking about 9/11 conspiracies. Still, he seems like an old soul, not some acidhead who spends his days jerking off on Spacemen 3 records, as those in the press that have heralded him a boy wonder/musical genius for the new psych era might have you believe. He doesn’t mind the term genius but credits not having much of an audience early on and friends who would tell him his music was shit. This drove him, as did living in the suburbs. “Apple Pie and Genocide,” a live favorite, was written shortly after 9/11 while Ashley was living briefly with his parents again.
“That was my attempt at a Bob Dylan song,” he explains. “[After 9/11], even reasonable people were like, ‘Yeah, let’s get ’em!’ I didn’t want to write a preachy anti-war song. A lot of those Sixties anti-war songs, and even a lot of that early Dylan, it gets kind of uncomfortable and preachy.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a nuclear holocaust. I think it’s more about the energy crisis. I mean, just as far as getting food, right? OK, all your crops are fertilized by petroleum products, and your tractor runs on diesel fuel, and you till the fields with the tractor, then you package the crop in plastic, and you take that in a semi to the grocery store 400 miles away, and you drive to the store in your gasoline-powered car, and then you swipe your plastic debit card and drive back home.
“I don’t know if nuclear annihilation is what we should be worrying about.”
It’s thundering from what sounds like all directions. We both manage to scale a tree Ashley frequents. Where the branch splits lays a small wooden plank acting as a makeshift seat. “I wrote a couple of songs from For the Season up here,” Ashley says, and that’s believable. The branch we’re perched on overlooks a pond covered with moss, giving it a vibrant green glow. The sky has darkened to an eerie slate color. There’s a flash of brown in the brush, and Ashley reveals that his mom’s seen wild boars out here. Our conversation turns to Leonard Cohen.
“I like sad. His songs tell a story, not in a straightforward way, but with imagery and words. With [Medicine Fuck Dream], that was the first thing I ever did on my own, so it was more personal. It was what had been going on at the time and the songs I was writing.”
We sit in silence until a rustling nearby catches our ears.
“It’s the wild boars,” he nods.
The liquor store is in another county down another nondescript road. It’s essentially a house with a liquor sign out front, and the clerk looks genuinely surprised to see people, frightened even. The quiet is refreshing in Kosse. At a blinking red light, we make a full stop, even though there’s no traffic coming. Willie Nelson’s Stardust warbles from the tape player.
“Oh it’s a long, long while from May
to December,
But the days grow short when you
reach September.”
“There’s definitely a lot of Pink Floyd, some Velvet Underground,” admits Ashley of his music, which, because of its lo-fi style and vintage equipment, sounds old. “That first Pink Floyd record is great. I love 13th Floor Elevators; them and the Electric Prunes were some of the first psych records I bought. A lot of the parts on the first 13th Floor Elevators record were really intricate and complex. But sounding like them [or Red Krayola] was never my intent. It just sounds good when a publicist writes it on a one-sheet.”
The Ram barrels into a field so we can try to catch a glimpse of the night sky. As we approach, a white horse runs alongside the truck, illuminated by the headlights. In the moonlight, the animal looks truly majestic, disappearing quickly into infinite darkness. It’s too cloudy to see any stars. Anything could be hiding in this field.
“Sometimes I sit out here and smoke and look at the stars, but I always start thinking about aliens, too,” he says.
Back on the porch, we listen to Blind Willie McTell, a blues musician from the Forties. Blind Willie Johnson was born down the road in Marlin; Lightning Hopkins grew up north of Kosse in Centerville.
“It’s amazing, that sound, the way it was recorded – that’s all him on there,” says Ashley, shaking his head. “I love a lot of blues from the Thirties and Forties. … Everyone loves those death songs. It’s like the action movie of songs: ‘I’m gonna die, but I don’t care.'”
We listen to a few Brazilian artists Ashley’s been into lately. We listen to Martin Denny, the “high priest of exotica.” Then we listen to a few songs Ashley’s been working on. It sounds beautiful and haunted at once, especially since it’s 10pm on a Saturday and Kosse is a ghost town. 
Greg Ashley does the solo trip Friday, Oct. 6 at Emo’s.
This article appears in October 6 • 2006.