By Corbie Hill

Photo by Dylan Babb

“Once you get to a point of stability and happiness, when you’re sober and you’re clean, that’s when you start to get really boring,” says Dup Crosson. The songwriter behind Asheville’s Saint Solitude has observed plenty of artists losing their edge with age and comfort. Tom Waits and Nick Cave, who Crosson says have become more interesting with time, are his only exceptions.

So maybe Crosson’s a little self-conscious about how well things are going. In mid-2010, this Maine native was set to move to Massachusetts. He’s always been restless, but he also felt out of place in Asheville, where he’s lived since 2003. He ascribed his unease to various elements of the local scene, the town, the South, you name it. But as Crosson dismissed his backing band and set a departure date, he met a girl…and changed his mind. On his first record, 2009’s Journal of Retreat, he sang, “Is this the first of many years alone?” On the new By Some Great Storm he proudly belts out, “But then I fell in love.”

Today, Crosson admits that Asheville was never the problem; this whole thing was in his head. And he’s glad he stayed. “I think a big part of this new record was finding myself comfortable, reflecting on that, and not letting myself fall into laziness,” he says. “I’m 26. So, when you’re at that point you have to pinch yourself, remind yourself that you’re awake. Otherwise you can fall into doing the same thing every time.”

Crosson’s been at this since age 11, when he started playing drums. At 15, he picked up guitar and started writing songs. ”I wrote a lot in high school,” he says. “I would write a song a day sometimes.”

This fell off when he started at UNC-Asheville. In retrospect, Crosson believes he was depressed at the time. The bleak, disaffected “Car Crash Headlines” on Journal of Retreat is the only song he wrote during this year and a half. But then, at 21, he went to Sweden for four months.

“That was the first time I didn’t have any drums or guitar. All I had was a key to a room with a piano,” he recalls. “That got me on piano for a while, but all it really did was get me excited about writing songs again.” Crosson’s virtually monastic recording process may have started here. It’s a romantic idea — escaping into an artist’s hermitage to write and record — and for years Crosson has done everything himself, including playing almost every instrument on both records.

After Sweden, Saint Solitude gradually evolved into a high-volume solo project, with live-looped keys and guitar. Crosson toured like this, his little Saturn packed with amps and instruments, before deciding he needed a backing band. With the one-man show, Crosson didn’t feel he could pull off the big rock songs he loves.

Journal was very much an indie-rock record. Its club-size tunes and inward focus reflected his solo years. But several tracks from Great Storm are stadium-huge. Crosson, a Smashing Pumpkins fanatic, is letting that influence show for the first time. “Lifted,” a soaring 90s rock anthem, closes on a fuzzed-out riff that would have been right at home on Siamese Dream. And “Arielle the Ghost” and “Oh Memory” reveal Crosson’s college fascination with British melodrama-rockers Muse.

“I feel like it’s taken me all these years to find where I want to be with this project,” he says. For the first time, the live incarnation is a full-on, two-guitar rock band. Crosson can focus on singing and songwriting while someone else worries about lead lines. And, most importantly, there’s nowhere else he wants to be.