“Songs have very curious existences… they live lives of their own outside and beyond us.” Those are the words singer, guitarist, and folk music interpreter Jake Xerxes Fussell from a 2017 interview with Folk Radio. His unfussy approach to traditional (and not so traditional folk song) is described as an unfussy lack of nostalgia and preciousness, utterly devoid of folkie cosplay. Those words could equally apply to the music of Lankum or Stick in the Wheel, musicians who may look to the past but whose music is absent of any similar pretence that Fussell also steers away from.
On January 21st, Fussell delivers his fourth album via Paradise of bachelors Good and Green Again. Throughout are a number of traditional songs ranging from Child Ballads to words found on a hooked rug by an anonymous artist from Richmond, Virginia, 1890.
This week, he shared two new songs from that album, “Breast of Glass” and “Frolic,”. Produced by James Elkington (Jeff Tweedy, Michael Chapman, Steve Gunn, etc.), Good and Green Again is described as Fussell’s most conceptually focused and breathtakingly rendered album to date, a transcendent place on a musical map of melancholy, quietude, and foot-stomping joy. Previously released album opener “Love Farewell” (featured on our latest Folk Show here) rings that bell with an elliptical tale of love, yearning, and collective folly. “Breast of Glass” similarly concerns, in its own way, romantic love and leavings: “If I had a breast of glass / Wherein you might behold / Your name in secret I would write / In letters of bright gold / In bright gold.”
“Frolic,” one of the three airy instrumentals on Good and Green Again, punctuates the program, offering respite and light in the form of crisp, shuffling play-party tunes.
We spoke to Fussell back in 2017 around the release of What in the Natural World, an album also built from folk songs and tunes he has collected along the way. That said he doesn’t really consider himself a real folklorist. “I have grown up in a folkloric environment. Because my father was a folklorist from the sixties and both of my parents were involved in that sort of work. My mother was an English teacher, but she took folklore into the classroom because she studied a lot of material culture in the sixties, stuff like basket making and quilting and pottery. Both of my parents were part of this revival of interest in home-made crafts and rural craft work in the late sixties and early seventies. There was a revival of interest in that stuff that drew parallels with the folk music revival around that time. They were tangentially part of that movement.”
Later in the interview, Glenn Kimpton suggests it’s a fine balance, but more importantly, it is a musician and collector who takes pains to look for these old songs and tunes and, in a way, brings them back to life. “Well, you know, I don’t necessarily think of what I do as keeping songs alive,” he frowns after a pause spent scratching his chin. “I don’t think of music as either alive or dead, but I do like to look for things that are a little obscure, or underappreciated and bring those to light in my own way in whatever little arena I have.” If this sounds like a slightly terse answer, then don’t be fooled; the impression is of a musician who is very careful with the artefacts he considers and very modest about his contribution. “People have said that to me about keeping them alive, but songs don’t have lives really, although I do I think they have very curious existences of their own outside and beyond me and us. I don’t know man; I’m going off on a tangent!” He sits back, adjusts the cap again and composes an answer. “I think it’s important to find something that I really like and stick with that. The song has to strike me emotionally before I play it, and for this album, I had a certain amount of songs in mind that I really liked.” As simple as that then.
It’s also been suggested that he allows those songs and tunes to breathe and speak for themselves and for himself; he alternately inhabits them and allows them to inhabit him.
This is one album we’re really looking forward to sharing more on. For Good and Green Again, Elkington and Fussell enlisted engineer Jason Richmond and 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 Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who contributes additional vocals.
If you’ve yet to see Fussell perform live then don’t miss his UK dates in May next year.
Jake Xerxes Fussell – UK and European Tour Dates
Sun. May 1 – Kilkenny, IR @ Kilkenny Roots
Mon. May 2 – Kilkenny, IR @ Kilkenny Roots
Wed. May 4 – Belfast, UK @ Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival
Fri. May 6 – Manchester, UK @ Gulliver’s
Sat. May 7 – London, UK @ Oslo *
Sun. May 8 – Glasgow, UK @ Glad Cafe *
Mon. May 9 – York, UK @ Fulford Arms *
Wed. May 11 – Ultrecht, NL @ Tivoli (Club Nine)
Tue. May 17 – Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso
Pre-Order Good and Green Again
Photo by Tom Rankin