INTERVIEW: Haunted Like Human Proudly Rep Queer and Trans Appalachia

Haunted Like Human conjures haunting harmonies and mysterious vistas in their carefully crafted folk music. Dale Chapman (they/them) and Cody Clark (he/him) are novelistic in their approach to writing, but it's the lush soundscapes that make the duo's music captivating. With their new single "Lazarus" out today, Chapman and Clark tell us more about their process and their proud Southern heritage.

Who are some of your musical influences?

Dale: I’m often very inspired by whichever new record I’ve fallen into lately. I love finding a spark of something wonderful in a turn of phrase or image that I never would have seen from that artist's point of view. But the artists that have most consistent met me where I am and stirred something in me lyrically would be Gregory Alan Isakov, The Lumineers, and, oddly enough, Florence + the Machine. 

Cody: I’ve been influenced most by older folk storytellers and fingerpickers like Stan Rogers, Townes Van Zandt, and the Dubliners, as well as more modern acts like The Devil Makes Three, Gregory Alan Isakov, and John Paul White.

Explain the title of your album.

Since the core of our songwriting is always based in storytelling, we’ve historically woven that storytelling element into our album titles. The first song we ever wrote together ending up being the title track to our first record, Ghost Stories. After that came the EP Folklore, followed by our last album, Tall Tales & Fables. Once we had recorded Tall Tales & Fables, we were kicking around ideas of what could possibly come next for future albums, since this is a naming convention that we’re so attached to. American Mythology kind of stopped us both and made us ponder, and it sat with us for years as the earliest pieces of this record came together.

In the end, these ideas of everything that creates the mythos of America really informed the writing. You’ve got broad strokes,like Manifest Destiny and the way the West was won and all these eras of political turmoil, as well as these micro moments and feelings that are harder to put a finger on. What does it sound like to stand at the edge of the Great Plains and feel swallowed by the enormity of it, and how to we put a drop of that into a song? What does it look like to fall in love in a little Appalachian holler? We certainly wouldn’t classify it as a concept album, but there is a lot of concept in the album when you end up working backward from a title like that. 

 How do you feel your coming out journey plays into your music?

Dale: When we wrote and recorded our first record, I still thought I was straight! It was while we were writing our 2018 EP that I was beginning to question and dig online to try to find words for all of the things that I was experiencing. As I was coming to new conclusions about myself, I told myself that it was fine and that I could be relatively chill and quiet about it, and it never needed to be in the music. It felt like being a queer artist was reserved for pop artists, for some reason.

But in writing for our last record Tall Tales & Fables, there was one song that was gnawing at me based on a friend of mine that I grew up with about the queer experience in the South and homophobia (“Whistling Tree”), and I knew I couldn’t just keep it all bottled up. I was out socially, but with that song coming out as a single for the record, it finally pushed me to come out publicly in a way I’d been avoiding but really wanted. And it’s been such a joy to be out and live that through our music.

This new record is brimming with it. All but one of the songs use she/her to talk about the love interest, where there is one. There’s one song that I got to use they/them for myself, which I was impressed I managed to work into a song really naturally. But moreover, as we run around the country playing shows, I get to represent - clearly, and intentionally, and into the mic - the voices of queer and trans people from the South and Appalachia, and that is an immense honor. 

-How do you kill the long hours in the van?

Cody: It might be surprising how little music we listen to in the van. We certainly do at times, but usually driving from gig to gig we’re looking for something else. In the early days we spent a lot of time diving down Wikipedia rabbit holes in search of the answers to the random questions that pop into our heads while staring out at the endless expanse of highway in front of us like“How big do snakes get?” These days we listen to a lot of podcasts. Common podcast topics for us include unexplained mysteries, cults, conspiracy theories, and aliens. 

Have you ever been given something remarkable by a fan?

Yes! We did a pretty small house show once where a fan sat the whole time and sketched us, and then additionally wrote “you do cool things with your hands when you sing” and did a little study of Dale’s hands in the corner. That one is framed on the mantle. We’ve also had a fan do a beautiful cross stitch of our logo. She actually brought us two versions, one with sparkly thread and one with plain, and she wanted us to pick which one we’d like for ourselves and she’d keep the other. She was clearly going to enjoy the sparkly one more, and the other one now lives above one of the door frames at the house. 

American Mythology will be released independently on October 17, 2025.

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