Jake Xerxes Fussell plays "Gone To Hilo" off his new album

Check out "Gone To Hilo" off Jake Xerxes Fussell's latest album When I'm Called out now. 

Jake Xerxes Fussell – When I'm Called

Over the last decade, North Carolina’s Jake Xerxes Fussell has established himself as a devoted listener and contemplative interpreter of a vast array of lovingly sourced folk songs. On his fifth album, When I’m Called—his first LP for Fat Possum—Fussell returns to a well of music that holds lifelong sentimental meaning, contemplating the passage of time and the procession of life’s unexpected offerings. 

Recognized for his compelling transliterations of traditional music, Fussell took an atypical approach to the material on When I’m Called, often constructing the music from the ground up, before considering what existing source material could be applied to the song. The core of the title track to When I’m Called is a passage that tumbled into Fussell’s life, picked up from a roadside scrap of paper that seemed to bear a child’s penitent writings. He borrowed his album’s sprightly opener, “Andy” from the eclectic multimedia artist Maestro Gaxiola, who penned it in the mid-1980s as an ode to his quixotic pseudo-rivalry with the pop-art icon Andy Warhol. He jumps next into “Cuckoo!”, a strings-swept update of a composition credited to the English composer Benjamin Britten and Jane Taylor, author of “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star.” The remainder of When I’m Called, like so many of Fussell’s favorite numbers, have extensive and winding traditional pedigrees. 

James Elkington returned to the producer’s chair, offering guidance on arrangements after working with Fussell on 2022’s Good and Green Again. As Elkington helped flesh out the recordings with piano, pedal steel, dobro, more guitar, and light synth touches, Fussell again found himself ingratiated to Elkington’s eclectic and finely attuned sensibilities. “He's very open to a lot of weird ideas,” Fussell explains. “I feel like the conversations with him can be really free and open.” 

With friends like Blake Mills, Joan Shelley, Robin Holcomb, and James Elkington lending their talents to the LP, Fussell’s latest archival dive expands upon his unassuming style, anchored by his friendly warble and even-tempered guitar. When I’m Called is Fussell’s richest work to date, and with a slate of warm instrumental textures abetting his glowing guitar, Fussell follows a growing artistic edge as he pursues broad questions of belonging. 

Though his affection for ballads spans mountainous Appalachian tunes to sea shanties and everything in between, Fussell has found himself particularly close to field recordings made in the 1960s and ’70s by painter, musician, and folklorist Art Rosenbaum—one of Fussell’s beloved late mentors, who died in September 2022. He sources “Feeing Day,” which gets a brassy halo, to one of Rosenbaum’s 1971 captures in Scotland. 

The lightly rolling “Leaving Here, Don’t Know Where I’m Going” and its unwitting companion, “Going to Georgia,” are part of Fussell’s multidisciplinary inheritance from Rosenbaum; threaded together with the gentle ripple of “Gone to Hilo,” the LP finds its thematic backbone in its trio of traveling songs. Rosenbaum’s field recordings of “Who Killed Poor Robin?” and “One Morning in May” were among the numerous versions that informed Fussell’s contemporary takes. In tandem with his relationship to Rosenbaum, Fussell traces his love of post-war field recordings to his upbringing in Georgia by song-collecting folklorist parents, whose enthusiasm for their itinerant work surrounded their son in many different musics for as long as he can remember. 

That early-life intensive had a profound impact on Fussell’s sense of time around music that, too often, gets treated as a museum piece. “When I was getting really deep into traditional music as a teenager, I tended to see it more in a continuum, like, ‘This is all tied into an ongoing world,’” he says. In the ringing warmth of When I’m Called, Fussell honors traditions while carrying them into a new generation’s field of vision, deepening his own understanding of his part in the “ongoing world.” He’s charted his own terrain of growth and change without any hurry toward a destination, and in his guitar-guided meditations, Fussell plucks at the threads that keep humanity knotted together. 

Get a copy of When I'm Called via Bandcamp right here. Watch Jake's performance of "Gone to Hilo" following the "When I'm Called" below. 

Midweek Mixdown: Jake Xerxes Fussell spins travelling tunes

You can listen to Jake's recent NTS Radio show featuring his favourite travelling tunes right here.  

You can get tickets for Jake Xerxes Fussell's upcoming gigs – including a Toronto show with Burs at Longboat Hall tonight (Tuesday, October 15) – right here. 

Jake Xerxes Fussell previews new album When I'm Called with "Going to Georgia"

Jake Xerxes Fussell is releasing his much-anticipated fifth album "When I'm Called" via Fat Possum on July 12th. 

Here's the scoop...

Over the last decade, North Carolina’s Jake Xerxes Fussell has established himself as a devoted listener and contemplative interpreter of a vast array of lovingly sourced folk songs. On his fifth album, When I’m Called—his first LP for Fat Possum—Fussell returns to a well of music that holds lifelong sentimental meaning, contemplating the passage of time and the procession of life’s unexpected offerings. 

Recognized for his compelling transliterations of traditional music, Fussell took an atypical approach to the material on When I’m Called, often constructing the music from the ground up, before considering what existing source material could be applied to the song. The core of the title track to When I’m Called is a passage that tumbled into Fussell’s life, picked up from a roadside scrap of paper that seemed to bear a child’s penitent writings. He borrowed his album’s sprightly opener, “Andy” from the eclectic multimedia artist Maestro Gaxiola, who penned it in the mid-1980s as an ode to his quixotic pseudo-rivalry with the pop-art icon Andy Warhol. He jumps next into “Cuckoo!”, a strings-swept update of a composition credited to the English composer Benjamin Britten and Jane Taylor, author of “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star.” The remainder of When I’m Called, like so many of Fussell’s favorite numbers, have extensive and winding traditional pedigrees. 

James Elkington returned to the producer’s chair, offering guidance on arrangements after working with Fussell on 2022’s Good and Green Again. As Elkington helped flesh out the recordings with piano, pedal steel, dobro, more guitar, and light synth touches, Fussell again found himself ingratiated to Elkington’s eclectic and finely attuned sensibilities. “He's very open to a lot of weird ideas,” Fussell explains. “I feel like the conversations with him can be really free and open.” 

With friends like Blake Mills, Joan Shelley, Robin Holcomb, and James Elkington lending their talents to the LP, Fussell’s latest archival dive expands upon his unassuming style, anchored by his friendly warble and even-tempered guitar. When I’m Called is Fussell’s richest work to date, and with a slate of warm instrumental textures abetting his glowing guitar, Fussell follows a growing artistic edge as he pursues broad questions of belonging. 

Though his affection for ballads spans mountainous Appalachian tunes to sea shanties and everything in between, Fussell has found himself particularly close to field recordings made in the 1960s and ’70s by painter, musician, and folklorist Art Rosenbaum—one of Fussell’s beloved late mentors, who died in September 2022. He sources “Feeing Day,” which gets a brassy halo, to one of Rosenbaum’s 1971 captures in Scotland. 

The lightly rolling “Leaving Here, Don’t Know Where I’m Going” and its unwitting companion, “Going to Georgia,” are part of Fussell’s multidisciplinary inheritance from Rosenbaum; threaded together with the gentle ripple of “Gone to Hilo,” the LP finds its thematic backbone in its trio of traveling songs. Rosenbaum’s field recordings of “Who Killed Poor Robin?” and “One Morning in May” were among the numerous versions that informed Fussell’s contemporary takes. In tandem with his relationship to Rosenbaum, Fussell traces his love of post-war field recordings to his upbringing in Georgia by song-collecting folklorist parents, whose enthusiasm for their itinerant work surrounded their son in many different musics for as long as he can remember. 

That early-life intensive had a profound impact on Fussell’s sense of time around music that, too often, gets treated as a museum piece. “When I was getting really deep into traditional music as a teenager, I tended to see it more in a continuum, like, ‘This is all tied into an ongoing world,’” he says. In the ringing warmth of When I’m Called, Fussell honors traditions while carrying them into a new generation’s field of vision, deepening his own understanding of his part in the “ongoing world.” He’s charted his own terrain of growth and change without any hurry toward a destination, and in his guitar-guided meditations, Fussell plucks at the threads that keep humanity knotted together. 

You can pre-order a copy of the new Jake Xerxes Fussell album "When I'm Called" via Fat Possum right here or your platform of choice right here. Check out "Going To Georgia" below. 

Jake Xerxes Fussell, Rosali @ Monarch Tavern, Wednesday

Don't miss North Carolina picker Jake Xerxes Fussell playing a rare Toronto show at the Monarch Tavern on Wednesday at 7 pm. 

Here's the scoop...

Jake Xerxes Fussell is a singer and guitarist based in Durham, NC. His latest album Good and Green Again was released by Paradise Of Bachelors to critical acclaim in January of 2022. The album was produced by British-born, Chicago-based songwriter/guitarist James Elkington (Richard Thompson, Steve Gunn, Joan Shelley, Freakons) and featured some formidable musicians, including Casey Toll on upright bass, Libby Rodenbough on strings, Joe Westerlund on drums, Joseph Decosimo on fiddle, and others. Bonnie “Prince” Billy contributed additional vocals. 

Read Uncut's "Album of The Month" review here, or better still, check out the performances below and grab a ticket for Jake's show with fellow NC singer/songwriter Rosali (listen to her recent Merge single "Stuck Inside A Cloud" below) at Monarch Tavern on November 15 right here. 

 

Jake Xerxes Fussell focuses on his own songs for Good and Green Again

Jake Xerxes Fussell's fourth album, Good and Green Again, is a promising step forward for the Durham, NC guitar picker. 

Here's the scoop...

One of the most striking and strangely moving moments on Jake Xerxes Fussell’s gorgeous Good and Green Again—an album, his fourth and most recent, replete with such dazzling moments—arrives at its very end, with the brief words to the final song “Washington.” “General Washington/Noblest of men/His house, his horse, his cherry tree, and him,” Fussell sings, after a hushed introductory passage in which his trademark percussively fingerpicked Telecaster converses lacily with James Elkington’s parlor piano. That’s the entire lyrical content of the song, which proceeds to float away on orchestral clouds of French horn, trumpet, and strings, until it simply stops, suddenly evaporating, vanishing with no fade or trace, no resolution to its sorrowful minor-key chord progression, just silence and stillness and stark presidential absence. It feels like the end of a film, or the cold departure of a ghost, and is unlike anything else Jake has recorded. 

The song provides an apt metaphor for the record as a whole and for Fussell’s artistic process itself. He appropriated the text from an early 20th century hooked rug by an anonymous Virginian artist depicting exactly what its red-stitched all-caps headline text and caption declares: Mount Vernon, a horse, a cherry tree, and the big man himself, cartoonishly grimacing (or is it wryly grinning? there’s not much mouth, just a red-thread wrinkle). George sits cross-legged in foppish leggings and slippers on a blue bestarred chair, with a perfect arch of snow-white wig haloed around his noble head. The rendering of this folk-art artifact ignores perspective and punctuation: every object in the lineup is the same size, and the list of the General’s stuff includes no commas or line breaks, a kind of accidental concrete poem that democratizes the supposedly great democratizer, reducing him to the same prosaic level as his diminutive crib, his prancing pony, and his tart cherries (maybe he is grimacing after all). The image may have been intended as a tribute, maybe even a reverent one—if we forget the fact that it’s a rug, and that we’re meant to walk all over it—but it hits as satire in its contemporary context, like a textile version of one of those all-caps cat caption memes. (I CAN HAZ CHERRIES?) The “noblest of men” looks a bit pathetic here, a little childish with his big-boy toys, a little goofy and alone—a little like how the rest of us often feel. 

(Now, Jake is certainly no apologist for George Washington, nor for the myriad atrocities of American history, but he recognizes the deep wells of American song are filled from headwaters both fresh and vile. Within its ambiguities, “Washington” is, for Fussell, a placid protest song that elevates an artist and her rug above a general in his splendor. It’s a fragment of the broken ways we speak about history and power, a satirical shard sent to pierce and deflate our pernicious, endlessly regurgitated national mythologies. As such, it’s a deeply sad song. It’s not the only one here.) 

Fussell carefully considers such contradictions in his studious choice of songs. He’s distinguished himself as one of his generation’s preeminent interpreters of traditional (and not so traditional) “folk” songs, a practice which he approaches with a refreshingly unfussy lack of nostalgia and preciousness, utterly devoid of folkie cosplay. By recontextualizing ancient vernacular songs and sources of the American South, he allows them to breathe and speak for themselves and for himself; he alternately inhabits them and allows them to inhabit him. His mesmerizing performances reveal the beauty of calling things by their true names, of coaxing old texts and recordings gently through the telescope of time, thereby transmuting them, through his own ineffable alchemy, into something approachably intimate and immediately relevant, something both his and ours. 

In all his work Jake humanizes his material with his own profound curatorial and interpretive gifts, unmooring stories and melodies from their specific eras and origins and setting them adrift in our own waterways. The robust burr of his voice, which periodically melts and catches at a particularly tender turn of phrase, and the swung rhythmic undertow of exquisite, seemingly effortless guitar-playing—here he plays more acoustic than ever before—pull new valences of meaning from ostensibly antique songs and subjects. What’s different about “Washington” is that it’s one of four original compositions on the album—the others are the three instrumentals—a career first for Fussell, who has heretofore been content to remain a vitreous vessel for existing, often anonymous, songs. 

On Good and Green Again, Jake not only ventures beyond his established mastery of songcatching and songmaking into songwriting, but likewise navigates fresh sonic and compositional landscapes, going green with lusher, more atmospheric and ambitious arrangements. The result is the most conceptually focused, breathtakingly rendered, and enigmatically poignant record of his wondrous catalog. It’s also his most deliberately premeditated album, representing his fruitful return to a producer partnership after two self-produced projects, What in the Natural World (2017) and Out of Sight (2019) (William Tyler produced his friend’s self-titled 2015 debut.) This time James Elkington produced and played a panoply of instruments, bringing to Jake’s arcane song choices his own peerless sense of harmony and orchestration, balance and dramatic tension, honed from collaborations with artists such as Michael Chapman, Steve Gunn, Joan Shelley, Richard Thompson, and Jeff Tweedy. Jake knew after a 2018 Midwestern tour together that he wanted to work with Jim, appreciating his open ears, unorthodox influences, and flexibility in following instincts. 

The pair enlisted a group of formidable players hailing from Durham, North Carolina (where Fussell lives) and elsewhere, including regular bandmembers Casey Toll (Mt. Moriah, Nathan Bowles) on upright bass, Libby Rodenbough (Mipso) on strings, and Nathan Golub on pedal steel. They were joined by welcome newcomers Joe Westerlund (Megafaun, Califone) on drums, Joseph Decosimo on fiddle, Anna Jacobson on brass, and veteran collaborator and avowed Fussell fan Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who contributes additional vocals. 

Together this crew is uncannily able to pinpoint that magical place on Jake’s musical map where melancholy, quietude, and head-nodding, foot-stomping joy commingle and transcend—places like, on previous albums, “Raggy Levy,” “Jump for Joy,” and “The River St. Johns.” Album opener “Love Farewell” (featuring some beautiful singing by Bonnie “Prince” Billy) rings that bell with an elliptical tale of the folly of war, set to the world’s most heartbreaking goodbye march for a lover left behind. “Carriebelle” and “Breast of Glass” each similarly concerns, in its own way, romantic love and leavings. All three songs highlight Jacobson’s diaphanous, understated brass parts, tying them together in a true lover’s knot. “Rolling Mills Are Burning Down,” with its distant keening strings and capacious sense of space, observes and mourns the loss of work and community in the wake of elemental disaster. Nine-minute tour de force “The Golden Willow Tree,” the sole explicitly narrative song herein, is a hypnotic, minimalist rendering of a tragic maritime ballad about scuttling an enemy ship in exchange for wealth and glory—and a captain’s inevitable betrayal. It’s a rejoinder to “Love Farewell”’s naïve cheer in the face of imminent violence. 

If overall Good and Green Again sounds a little sadder and slower than Fussell’s past records, well, maybe we’re all a little sadder and slower these days. A smoldering mood of regret and loss pervades, a distinct vibe of vanitas. But three airy instrumentals, all Fussell originals—“Frolic,” “What Did the Hen Duck Say to the Drake?,” and “In Florida”—punctuate the program, offering respite and light in the form of crisp, shuffling play-party tunes, each in turn somewhat more hopeful and exuberant than the last. Their resemblance to lullabies is, perhaps, not coincidental. Fussell and his partner welcomed their first child into the world during the making of Good and Green Again. These lovely songs bear that promise in letters of bright gold. 

Get Jake Xerxes Fussell's new album Good and Green Again right here. Listen to "The Golden Willow Tree" and "Rolling Mills Are Burning Down" below. Watch Jake play a Tiny Desk (Home) Concert for NPR right here. 

Jake Xerxes Fussell vs. Lonesome Ace Stringband

Durham, NC's Jake Xerxes Fussell and Toronto's Lonesome Ace Stringband each owe a bit to Roscoe Holcomb's take of "Hills of Mexico"

Sez Jake Xerxes Fussell...

“Hills of Mexico” is one of many narrative ballads where the singer-narrator is approached by a stranger in transit with a business proposition that turns out to be not so great for singer-narrator. Many of the European ballads of this kind deal with highwaymen and their exploits, mostly in the 17th and 18th centuries. In this particular (19th century) instance the proposition entails going to Mexico to work the cattle drive. Many regional variants from this family, alternately known as “The Trail of the Buffalo,” have been sung in a variety of musical contexts and communities. My version borrows heavily from Roscoe Holcomb’s narrative, which is mysterious in that it omits the Mexico part itself almost entirely. 

Thanks to Kevin McNamee-Tweed for the artwork: “Steamboat,” 2018, Glazed ceramic, 9.25” x 7”. 

— Jake Xerxes Fussell

www.paradiseofbachelors.com/jake-xerxes-fussell 

https://lonesomeace.com

Watch Jake Xerxes Fussell perform songs from his Out Of Sight album

Jake Xerxes Fussell's Out Of Sight album was released by Paradise of Bachelors in June, 2019. Get it right here. 

Hear Jake Xerxes Fussell's "The River St. Johns"

"The River St. Johns" is off Jake's forthcoming Out Of Sight album out June 7th on Paradise of Bachelors.