With a Custom Bouzouki, Vintage Tenor Guitar, and Layered Studio Work, Watchhouse’s ‘Rituals’ Is Its Most Exploratory Album Yet

On its seventh studio album, Rituals, North Carolina duo Watchhouse—Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz—explores themes of home, presence, time, and the patterns we come to depend on. Co-produced by Marlin and Ryan Gustafson of the Dead Tongues, the album gently expands the band’s sonic palette. It introduces new textures and approaches while holding onto their signature warmth and lyrical clarity.

Formed in 2009 as Mandolin Orange (the duo officially adopted the name Watchhouse in 2021), Marlin and Frantz began as an acoustic project whose sound hewed closer to traditional folk and bluegrass, with Marlin on mandolin and guitar and Frantz on fiddle and guitar. Over time, their touring and recorded lineups have featured a rotating cast of collaborators, but the core of the band has always remained the duo and their intimate harmony singing.

A few weeks before the album’s release, I visited Marlin and Frantz at their home in Chapel Hill. We talked on the back porch, surrounded by bees, birdsong, and a thick coating of yellow pollen—the seasonal price of spring in North Carolina. As we spoke, it became clear that Rituals marked a departure from Watchhouse’s usual methods. The familiar role of acoustic rhythm guitar was, on many tracks, filled instead by a custom-built bouzouki, which became one of the album’s defining sounds. Marlin’s mandolin—often the band’s lead voice—was frequently set aside in favor of a vintage electric tenor guitar he discovered hanging on the wall of a music shop in Telluride, Colorado.

Meanwhile, the band’s long-standing preference for live tracking gave way to an exploratory, layered process—overdubbing, stripping back, and rebuilding songs in search of something more open-ended. Influences from traditional Irish music and instrumental jazz began to filter in, subtly shaping the record’s sense of space and interplay.

After we wrapped our conversation, Marlin handed me the bouzouki we’d spent so much time discussing. I sat down and picked out a few chords and melodies, surprised by how quickly the unfamiliar feel of the instrument pushed me into new territory. It made my hands—and my ears—reconsider habits I didn’t know I had. Like Rituals itself, it offered a different perspective: something familiar made strange, and in that strangeness, something quietly transformative.

The bouzouki seems to be a big character on this record. When you’re writing these songs, do they grow out of specific instruments like the bouzouki?

Marlin: They do, especially on this record, more so than most. I was just getting into the bouzouki right before the pandemic—I had discovered that Paul Brady and Andy Irvine record.

One of the best ever!

Marlin: Yeah. And I was pretty obsessed with it. And from there I was listening to Planxty, and Donal Lunny, and some of the Andy Irvine solo records as well. So then I really wanted a bouzouki, and Emily and I did some duo recordings where I actually borrowed Tim O’Brien’s Nugget, just to see if I even liked the bouzouki. And I loved it! I liked Tim’s in particular, because it’s based on a guitar body, like an archtop guitar. And it has these octave strings on the G and D, so you get these accidental melodies with it, almost like a 12-string [guitar].

So I wanted to find something like that, but there aren’t a whole lot of makers doing that, so I hit up our buddy Gil Draper, who’s a bouzouki builder in Knoxville, Tennessee. I said, “I want a guitar-bodied bouzouki, but I don’t know where to look.” And he said, “Why don’t you look for an old tenor [guitar], and then we can convert it.” So I started scouring the internet, and I found this 1932 Martin archtop tenor. It’s got a round hole, whereas a lot of other Martin archtops had f-holes. So I was like, man, that might be kind of cool to give it a real guitar sound, while still having that arching to support the extra tension of the eight strings. But it had a messed-up neck, so I sent a picture to Gil saying, “Will this work?” And he was like, “Yeah, dude, let’s try it.” So I sent it to him, and he built a new neck for it, and three months later he sent it back to me. I just love it.

The custom bouzouki used on the new album, built with the body of a 1932 Martin tenor archtop guitar, Photo: Isa BurkeThese songs were all kind of written on that instrument. And from there, I’ll introduce another instrument—we were in Telluride and went into Telluride Music, and they had a 1939 Gibson electric tenor that had the original Charlie Christian pickup. I took it off the wall, and it was already tuned like a mandolin. They let me plug into this nice little amp, and I sat in there for like an hour playing tunes. I put it back on the wall, but a few months later I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I finally called them up and it was still there. So I scooped it up. So even though a lot of these songs were written on the bouzouki, that [tenor guitar] ended up being the main instrument that I played on the album.

The tenor is a big character on the album as well.

Frantz: I feel like you played tenor on most of the record, and now especially as we’re starting to work up these tunes [for the live show], I end up playing more of the bouzouki parts, which is cool. It’s kind of the strum-like-a-drummer thing! That instrument is really fun to play as a rhythmic instrument, because I feel it’s a little bit more percussive than a dreadnought guitar. So that’s been really fun for me.

This record has a lot of layering of guitars and stringed instruments, but it doesn’t seem super arranged; it feels really organic. Is that partly because having bouzouki as the first rhythm instrument lets the textures grow in a different way?

Marlin: Totally. I really wanted to play on this record based on Planxty, but also Gil Evans. I was listening to this album The Individualism of Gil Evans a lot, and a lot of those records that he did with Miles Davis, like Sketches of Spain and Birth of the Cool. And I particularly love how on those records there’s a very audible drive and a very audible swing. Those two kind of work against each other and with each other, and I wanted to play with that on this record. I felt like the bouzouki did that. Emily, the way you play guitar, you’ll often have the bass and the backbeat going, whereas on the bouzouki, you’re kind of swinging the backbeat, with less emphasis on the downbeat. That seems to leave this airier sound in the band that leaves space for everything else to be a little more on the beat and driven.

Was a lot of the tracking live?

Frantz: All the rhythm parts were tracked live, but we did a lot more overdubbing than with past records. Part of that was just because we allowed ourselves a lot more time to play with things and add things and take things away and re-record, whereas normally we’ll go in and just make an entire record in four days and do vocals live and everything. 

Marlin: The fellow who helped produce it, Ryan Gustafson—who is so awesome on so many levels, musically and as a human—he would encourage me, like, “Man, if you don’t dig this, we can strip it back, even to just the drums, and rebuild it.” I’ve done that when producing other people’s records, because it’s a little easier when you’re not attached to yourself being on it, but I feel like that’s something I can’t always do on our own records. 

There’s so much texture and interlocking of different instruments in these songs.

Frantz: That’s probably because we did allow ourselves to really pursue it until we felt like we had the right thing, and to take away things that we decided we didn’t like.

Marlin: And a lot of the overdubs were two people overdubbing together, kind of jamming with ourselves. We didn’t always have the intention of getting a specific part.

Tell me about some of the more conventional guitars that showed up on this record.

Frantz: We did use the 12-string some. We have an old ’70s Martin 12-string that we bought for our last record. That’s such a fun instrument. It’s never practical to bring on the road, but it’s always that je ne sais quoi that you need in the studio to make things sparkle. For a regular-regular guitar, I played the [Gibson] J-45.

Marlin: And Josh [Oliver] played his ’38 D-18. 

Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz, Photo: Charlie BossSince you both played a number of parts on the record, did you do a lot of experimenting?

Frantz: Well, Andrew always plays the most things.

Marlin: I always have all these little melodies I want to throw in there, and sometimes it’s just easier to do it yourself than tell someone else what to play.

Do those little melodies tend to come out during the writing or the recording process?

Marlin: A bit of both, but a lot of the melodic stuff was birthed during that process of jamming with ourselves. Like for example, that “Rituals” riff, Josh wrote that when we were messing around with the song. We were going to try a different idea there, but then we all kept hearing that melody and eventually we were like, “Yeah, that’s it—that’s the hook of the song.” And Emily, you have some really choice fiddle moments on the record as well, like on “Shape,” and that layered fiddle thing you did on “Sway.” 

Frantz: Yeah, it was fun. My role in the band has become so much more rhythm guitar–focused over time, but we wanted to make sure that the fiddle had more of a presence on this record.

You can still hear the string-band thing happening, layered in there—and you spotlight that sound on the last track. 

Frantz: That song, “Patterns,” originally had a completely different identity. The recording session was way longer than we’re used to; it was ten days of a lot of drums, bass, and electric tenor, and we eventually hit this wall. We felt like we really needed to just do an acoustic song and remember who we are! 

Marlin: Yeah, it was that one and “Glistening.” I think it was the day before the penultimate day of recording, and I stayed up late and redid the whole arrangement of “Glistening.” I wanted to get that call and response between the vocals, and I came up with a new progression on the bouzouki with the low G droning underneath. I made a little voice memo of it, and then sang the repeats with it to see if it would work, and I showed it to them the next day. We all drank our coffee and huddled around this table and sang it together and figured it out. Me and Emily and Josh and Ryan did that all live—same with “Patterns.” It turned into a bluegrass waltz.

It works great that way! And it hits differently after hearing the rest of the record that came before it.

Frantz: I wondered if it would seem disconnected from all the other things. But I feel like anyone who’s heard our music before would get it.

So now you’re getting ready to start playing these songs live?

Frantz: We started playing a couple of them live last year in our duo shows, which is fun and nice, but doesn’t necessarily feel like a rendition of the album.

Marlin: I would love for the songs to take on a whole new life onstage. For me personally, I get so bogged down with the idea of nailing something when I have to go back and re-create it, that it detracts from the moment. I feel like the freedom of allowing myself to just play the song is probably more engaging than the re-creation of anything on the record.

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.