Jake Xerxes Fussell - "When I'm Called" (2024)

Charles on a great new album

Jake Xerxes Fussell sometimes seems less musician than magician. On his remarkable series of albums, the singer and guitarist explores and remixes songs from folk traditions in the United States in ways that both honor their origins and sound entirely new. Pairing this “traditional” material with new arrangements and tonal atmospheres, Fussell somehow exists both within the recuperative tradition of various folk revivals and the cozy workshops of the sonic auteur. The new When I’m Called, his debut for Fat Possum Records, is another great Fussell collection. An album of grace and mystery, its songs bend and curl in unexpected directions around the listener, all centered by a singer whose compelling voice both welcomes you in and keeps some secrets.

Fussell’s most obvious and significant artistic accomplishment is how deftly he navigates across and along the musical histories from which he draws. Using the careful curatorial and crate-digging practices he learned from his folklorist/artist parents and honed during his time in the University of Mississippi’s Southern Studies program, Fussell spotlights songs that have caught his ear along the way. Fussell’s read all the books, too, and his interviews show an ongoing engagement with new ideas in history, pop-cultural studies, folklore, and ethnomusicology. But don’t worry: This isn’t homework, nor does it sag under the weight of the knowledge that Fussell brings to each creative decision.

Of course, Fussell’s far from the first white man to find inspiration in the songs of workers, sailors, songsters, and storytellers. And he would be the first to say that his work is neither more important nor innovative than those earlier artists. But what makes Fussell’s records so fascinating – and, unfortunately, still exceptional – is how deftly he avoids the twin perils of the re-creationist impulse. He never, ever lapses into appropriationist mimicry, a refusal of the minstrel tradition that paradoxically reveals Fussell’s awareness of his own implication in it. But he also avoids turning these songs into stodgy museum exhibits and thus stripping these sentimental, violent, sexy, funny songs of the vitality that gave them their original purchase in the communities from which they emerged. He reshapes their musical structures, with both care and curiosity, and allows spare, expert singing and playing to illuminate new ways of hearing them.

Connectedly, even as Fussell remixes the legacies, he’s not deconstructing them either. In particular, he seems to have no patience for “old, weird America” distancing. There’s plenty that’s enigmatic in these recordings, but it never feels like Fussell is reaching towards some exoticized or exaggerated fantasia of the past. In fact, this understanding of connectivity has long been central to his process. “When I was getting really deep into traditional music as a teenager,” he says in material accompanying the release, “I tended to see it more in a continuum, like, ‘This is all tied into an ongoing world.’” On When I’m Called, like his previous albums, worlds don’t collide so much as combine.

Sometimes, that combination is quite literal, as Fussell cuts and pastes multiple sources and ideas with his own distinct musical sensibility. Some are deep cuts from the field-recording archive, and some come from less expected sources. The title track, for example, is built from a lyric that Fussell found on a scrap of paper by the side of the road. A bit of found-art folklorism that sounds too good to be true (except it is), “When I’m Called” is propelled by a subtle polyrhythm between Fussell's electric guitar and Joe Westerlund’s graceful drums. Fussell and his bandmates work with an urgency of movement that befits the song’s simultaneous restlessness and refusal.

An even better example of this alchemy is opener “Andy.” The lyrics come from words by iconoclastic artist Gerald “The Maestro” Gaxiola, which he wrote following the death of the pop art king, of whom Gaxiola was deeply critical. Part celebration of the moment, part promise to take Andy’s spot, part odd tribute, Fussell pairs these lyrics with a finger-picked guitar figure reminiscent of Mississippi John Hurt and other blues players, a foundation that amplifies the plainspoken ambivalence in Gaxiola’s words. The artistic analogy goes deeper: Especially as the first track, “Andy” shows that - even with the warmth of the performances - Fussell’s work is as much abstraction as representation.

This abstraction is perhaps most present in Fussell’s musical approach, which – despite its seemingly familiar acoustic foundations – holds surprises in both instrumentation and arrangement. Nearly every track on When I’m Called is a slow burn, with arrangements that open slowly across each verse and instruments that reveal a new layer (or maybe dimension) with their entrance. “Feeing Day” finds James Elkington’s harmonium laying the path for Anna Jacobsen’s elegant French horn. “When I’m Called” pulses with a synth-and-woodwind drone in the background that reminded me of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire.” On “One Morning in May,” Fussell offers a particularly striking juxtaposition. The arrangement is perhaps the album’s most reminiscent of Anglo-Irish ballads, with Fussell’s ringing 12-string guitar as finger-picked chime and occasional double for his vocal. But the song gets beautifully strange with Elkington’s santoor and recorders entering as both disruptive forces and constitutive elements to a new sonic idea of what such a ballad could be and sound like.

At the center of all this, always, is Fussell’s voice. His sweet and resonant baritone nestles inside those blooming arrangements, bounding out or receding into the background at key moments. His friendly intimacy animates tracks like “Who Killed Poor Robin?,” one of those surreal stories that bridges the gap between children’s rhyme and murder ballad, where Fussell reports the news over a furiously percussive arrangement that only finds drums coming in as an afterthought on the final verse. Or “One Morning in May,” his blend of tenderness and grit befits the song’s warnings about no-good men as the instruments swirl around him. “Cuckoo!,” on which he duets with regular collaborator Joan Shelley, builds this Benjamin Britten & Jane Taylor song into something approaching chamber pop, thanks both to the addition of subtle strings and especially to Fussell’s delicate performance. In one nice touch, he ends each verse on an unexpected, unresolved chord, sending it “away” somewhere else just as the lyric suggests he should.

“Away” is a regular setting in these songs. When I’m Called is filled with journeys, some already taken and some yet to come, some logged by the travelers themselves and some recalled by people left behind. It’s clearly stated in “Leaving Here, Don’t Know Where I’m Going,” where the simplicity of the verses – with those lovely, limited syllables that characterize the blues haiku – only grows deeper as Fussell’s guitar and Hunter Diamond’s haunting woodwinds wrap around the wanderer. “This song is from the ‘lonesome road’ family of songs, which there have probably been about as many variations of as there have been people to sing them,” Fussell describes, and he even adds a verse from a different song (“Alabama Water,” discovered by Fussell in an archival recording at Berea College) to the yearning mash-up.

That urge for going is inverted in the lament “Gone to Hilo,” within which Fussell observes a poignant ambiguity. “It’s important to remember that a lot of the songs we call sea chanties might have only functioned as such for a short period of time before escaping (or becoming culturally irrelevant to) their original contexts,” Fussell explains in album materials. “Even in its original work song context, the song abstracts time and place,” noting that it’s not clear if the singer meant Ilo, Peru or Hilo, Hawai’i in the title image. (Of course, James Elkington’s pedal steel brings Hawaiian music into the mix.) There’s that abstraction again, this time in the song’s slippery geography and refusal to be cast in time-stamped amber.

The closing track, “Going to Georgia,” is a perfect example and fitting summation. It’s another warning about no-good men, with the singer this time noting that we tell more lies than there are railroad ties or “stars in the sky,” linking two of the canon’s key and most relatable images (of both place and travel) in how neither can compare to men’s duplicity. The answer for the protagonist this time is to ramble, as they promise to “roam” off to Georgia and “make it my home.” This thematic opening door is matched by the song that expands into the album’s most robust arrangement. Guitarist Blake Mills and string player Jean Cook combine with Elkington, who now adds feedback to his grab bag of subtle sonic disruptors. And Fussell walks through the door, with a brief wordless falsetto that floats away as the album closes.

That “abstraction of time and place” that Fussell notes when describing “Gone to Hilo” is a good indicator of what makes When I’m Called, like his other albums, such a rich listening experience. Its songs both evince their origins and exist outside of any one location or moment. Jake Xerxes Fussell is far from the only artist who works such magic – in fact, I’d reckon that all my favorite “folk”-conversant musicians are defined by it – but I remain struck by how beautifully he presents the small, lovely gems that make up his recordings. The wonderful When I’m Called is a perfect soundtrack for the new, weird America, as well as a good reminder that every echo is both a signal of time passing and a unique reminder that the sound keeps traveling.

(Photo by Kate Medley)

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