Thor Harris strikes a different chord

Drummer Thor Harris' house, which he built himself, appears torn from the pages of a twisted fairy tale.

"Thor" is scrawled on a makeshift gate that opens into a yard patrolled by two friendly dogs, Chaka and Francine, and six cats. The house, partly hidden from the street by trees, was constructed mostly with found wood and other materials. The property is covered inside and out with art in various stages. There is the finished — paintings, sculptures and carvings — and the unfinished — oversized planks of wood.

A surreal tile skull tops a tree; a hand-carved spiral staircase, which Harris built without nails, stands in the center of the house and its polka-dotted pillars, stained-glass windows, miniature noose and a great stack of drums.

Tombstones, one broken and another discarded because of an error ("our dear love one"), flank the front steps — an odd touch, but one that is strangely fitting for someone who has channeled so much creativity in the face of darkness.

Dark past gives way to a new passion

Anyone who regularly goes to shows in Austin has seen Harris around. With his flowing, heavy-metal haircut and tank top, jeans and tennis shoes, the drummer for Shearwater and the newly reformed Swans has been a fixture of the music scene for more than 20 years.

Harris, 45, grew up in La Porte, outside Houston, and began playing piano at a young age before switching to percussion, which he played in the school orchestra. After high school, he attended the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles, a place that nurtured both his desire to play music and a taste for the strange.

"I would hang out with other drummers in these practice rooms, just showing each other things that we knew, and it was in the heart of really weird Hollywood, with super freaked-out street people and washed-up weird actors," Harris says.

Although Harris moved to Austin to finish his degree at the University of Texas, he dropped out and focused on performing. This is when Michael became Thor. Harris slung sandwiches at Thundercloud Subs, where the manager decided there were too many Michaels on staff and dubbed him Thor for his long blond hair.

In 1987, Harris founded new wave band Stick People with Craig Ross (whose long list of production credits includes Spoon and Patty Griffin) and Malford Milligan, who went on to sing with Storyville and Blue Monday.

The band enjoyed some fast success, signing a publishing deal with Sony, but, like so many other tales of music deals gone sour, it didn't play out as hoped and the band broke up.

"It was probably one of the worst things that ever happened to us; they gave us $25,000 and wanted us to write hit songs," Harris says. "Unlike today's indie labels, the Sony people were more than willing to tell us, 'We want you to write more songs like this,' if we had one song they liked a lot."

That experience prompted Harris to leave Austin for San Francisco in 1992.

Almost immediately upon arriving, Harris fell into a deep bout of depression, an experience he relates in a graphic novella, "An Ocean of Despair," published in 2009 by Austin's Monofonus Press. Depicting Harris as a skeleton, the book visualizes the level of isolation he experienced in vivid detail.

"I was going to murder the little blond-hair boy from Bayside Terrace," he writes of his decision to commit suicide.

His situation went from bad to worse when he took refuge in East Texas with his older sister, who had helped raise him after his father died when he was 10. A doctor prescribed a dangerous combination of antidepressants that led to a grand mal seizure.

After that, he found a different psychiatrist near Austin, who put him on a low dose of a different antidepressant. Gradually, he found his way back, managing his depression and taking solace in oil painting. "It was the one thing on which I could concentrate and focus."

The wall in the workshop in the rear of Harris' house is lined with saws and other hand-powered tools. When he's not on tour, he's back there woodworking, without the help of electricity. Harris has been building instruments, including a hammer dulcimer he uses onstage with Shearwater and rope-tuned drums (which were common in the 19th century but have mostly been replaced by drums tuned with tension rods) since he was 13.