Jacob Hilton, better known by his stage name of Travid Halton, is a man with incredibly keen hindsight. His 2024 debut LP Obsessions at times sound more like someone set an intense therapy session to song. The album centered around Hilton’s obsessive compulsive disorder and the ways he’s had to navigate it. It was a brutal, but beautiful way to start his music career in Houston.
On May 1 he released Gunner’s Daughter, a combination of new EP and epilogue for Obsessions. The four-track album is a strange combination of songs that has the same aching Americana sound that defined Obsessions, including a Who’s Who of Houston music as his backing band like Geoffrey Muller of The Suffers and Ellen Story of The Broken Spokes.
This time, though, he’s almost completely abandoned the bit of country and pop that Obsessions had for something more ethereal.
“A lot of this material was written about the same time, but was so different that it needed to be its own thing,” Hilton said during a phone interview. “When we were nearing the finish line for Obsessions, I thought it would be fun to do it in a classical, four-part movement. It’s an almost seasonal concept album, starting with winter.”
Gunner’s Daughter opens with the incredible “Together They Wove,” a Tolkien-esque poem over piano and guitar that was structurally based on Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece.” The guitar line stays rigid and static while the piano dances in between the lyrics, mimicking the poem’s subjects of two lovers literally growing together.
It’s a melancholy piece with hymnal aspiration similar to what Nick Cave did with a broken heart on Ghosteen. Hilton has a special interest in the Icelandic Eddas and mythology of the north. Those texts were also a favorite of Professor Tolkien, which explains why so much of Gunner’s Daughter sounds like an Elvish open mic. Hilton worked on a dairy farm in Iceland and did some archaeology on Öland just off the coast of Sweden before returning to Houston.
“I was so in love with that place and that period of my life,” he said. “I spent several years preparing to end up there, then three years there, and I’ve never really stopped looking back. My life is great now, but I don’t stop wondering what could have been.”
Two of the tracks on Gunner’s Daughter are instrumentals, including a reprise of “Fold” from Obsessions. They serve as brief palate cleansers between the epic “Together They Wove” and the more conventional “When Winter Returns,” a sad ode to a mythological Icelandic woman. While the first instrumental, “Happy New Year” is little more than a melodic sketch, “Fold: Reprise” is an stirring, dramatic end to the record bolstered by energetic cello from Aimee Norris. Together, they put a punctuation mark on the Obessions/Gunner’s Daughter narrative.
“I really wanted to revisit that piece but lyrically it was already spent,” said Hilton. “It’s about grief and letting go.”
Hilton has not fully made his name here in Houston just yet. By his own admission, he’s spent so much of himself crafting these first two releases that there hasn’t really been enough of him left over to start playing live. Now that’s he gotten his songs out there, he plans to change that.
But even if he never does, this one-and-a-half album is very promising. It’s not revolutionary. There’s not much future sight in its haunting tracks, but for articulating a messy past of beauty and pain it can’t be beat.
Gunner’s Daughter is available now on streaming, CD, vinyl, and cassette through Travid Halton’s Bandcamp. Album release party is Saturday, May 17, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the home of audio engineer Case Mundy, 5423 Hialeah. Free.
