JAKE XERXES FUSSELL:OUT OF SIGHT (PoB-042)

“His burly, winking voice is made for storytelling.” — NPR Music

“Jake Xerxes Fussell is a national treasure.” — Aquarium Drunkard

“Achingly beautiful. He has an uncanny ability to illuminate the present by propping up a window against the past.” — Uncut

Today, Jake Xerxes Fussell is pleased to announce his third album, Out of Sight, out June 7th, alongside the album’s first single, “The River St. Johns,” which premiered earlier this morning on NPR Music’s All Songs Considered. NPR writes that “Fussell creates music that resides at the seams of Appalachia and the cosmos.” Apt words.  

Jake describes the song and its source this way:

“The River St. Johns’ comes straight from one of Stetson Kennedy’s Florida WPA recordings of a gentleman named Harden Stuckey doing his interpretation of a fishmonger’s cry, which he recalls from a childhood memory. What compelling imagery there: “I’ve got fresh fish this morning, ladies / They are gilded with gold, and you may find a diamond in their mouths.” I can’t help but believe him.”

Pre-order Out of Sight

$9.00 – $29.00

Or support via:  Bandcamp  (LP/CD/MP3) |  Other Options (physical/digital/international)

Jake plays the Brooklyn Folk Festival on April 5.

Listen to “The River St. Johns”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaJCnhbVM64&list=PLGLGDT-9ZI4JnicPgrPWrvMqFRGUPF-w4&index=1]

Album Info

On his third and most finely wrought album yet, guitarist, singer, and master interpreter Fussell is joined for the first time by a full band featuring Nathan Bowles (drums), Casey Toll (bass), Nathan Golub (pedal steel), Libby Rodenbough (violin, vocals), and James Anthony Wallace (piano, organ). An utterly transporting selection of traditional narrative folksongs addressing the troubles and delights of love, work, and wine (i.e., the things that matter), collected from a myriad of obscure sources and deftly metamorphosed, Out of Sight contains, among other moving curiosities, a fishmonger’s cry that sounds like an astral lament (“The River St. Johns”); a cotton mill tune that humorously explores the unknown terrain of death and memory (“Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues”); and a fishermen’s shanty/gospel song equally concerned with terrestrial boozing and heavenly transcendence (“Drinking of the Wine”).

Pre-order Details

Contingent on manufacturing schedules, we will ship your pre-ordered album approximately a week in advance of the June 07, 2019 worldwide release date. All pre-orders include an immediate 320k MP3 download of lead single “The River St. Johns,” as heard on NPR Music’s All Songs Considered.

For digital-only preorders, please visit Bandcamp (which also offers uncompressed, high-resolution audio files) or your favorite digital marketplace.

Read Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Essay on Fussell

In our house we’ve listened to more Jake Fussell than any other individual artist over the past year, with the possible exception of Laurie Spiegel. We’ve had the opportunity to witness several intimate performances of Fussell’s (to my mind, he creates a new standard for the value of up-close musical experience) here in Louisville. As long as Jake Fussell is making records and playing shows, there is ample cause for optimism in this world.

Fussell’s repertoire, and the manner in which he creates, constructs and presents it, displays such a beautiful and complex relationship to time and currency. He’s able to listen to and understand the presence of an old recording, of crusty dusty written-out pieces of music and memories of musical encounters. And then he overlays his own now-ness on those pre-existing presences so that the lives of older musical forces, in effect, link arms with Fussell’s in-progress trajectory and skip down the brick road, picking up desperate and willing compatriots along the way. Meaning: Jake lives in music as a true time-artist, using the qualities of time itself as irreplaceable elements of content.

When Jake sings a sad song, he presents it in such a way that makes me want to say “Hey, but everything’s okay because you’re Jake Xerxes Fussell!” Hopefully it’s okay by him that I wouldn’t accept full-fledged nihilism from him even if he were standing naked on the ledge of a tall building with “this World is Shit” written on his shaved chest in, well, shit. His deal with his songs is too strong and blatantly valuable.

— Bonnie “Prince” Billy

Acknowledgements for Jake

Jake Fussell understands a couple of things about old songs: they weren’t always old, and they changed as they went from hand to hand or sometimes country to country. They shouldn’t be trapped in an imaginary past, but should be refreshed and reinvented. Now, on his third album, he’s subtly shading his music with more instruments. It’s still uncluttered. Still melancholy. Still threaded through with that elegant, deceptively simple guitar—its tone like no other. This is a journey you need to share.

– Colin Escott, author of Hank Williams: The Biography

Fussell has a deep respect and affinity for the Southern folk vernacular, though he also maintains his childlike awe for it. [What in the Natural World] marks a move into more existential questions … vignettes of Southern life, with an open-hearted groove that would please scholars and little kids alike—Fussell’s burly, winking voice is made for storytelling.

– Laura Snapes, NPR Music

9/10 (Full-page Discovered review.) Achingly beautiful… a record that yields a procession of hidden treasures. There’s an almost carefree swing to much of Fussell’s music, the easy authority of his silvery guitar work matched by an invitingly cordial voice that makes these arcane songs shine. Like Ry Cooder, Fussell has an uncanny ability to illuminate the present by propping up a window against the past. Whatever the raw material’s vintage, the protagonist’s pursuit of abstract notion—freedom, empowerment, danger, fulfillment—is every inch as pertinent today.

– Rob Hughes, Uncut

While some have called Fussell’s music “atmospheric,” the descriptor misses his historical grounding; on the flipside, any implication of “root” overlooks the ease and freeness of his sound. The image of a river, featured on both of his albums’ covers, is well suited—the history of each song selection, like tributaries, flow into the main waterway, feeding a powerful current of evolution and exchange. And here is Jake Xerxes Fussell, floating down that river, strumming away. 

– Jack Rosenberg, The Oxford American

It’s difficult to imagine another contemporary interpreter delivering a tale of desperation and sadness with such tenderness, warmth, and grace. The room he leaves for the song to breathe allows it to flourish into its own fully-formed, nuanced world – one as familiar today as during the time of its origin. Here, Fussell taps into those roots and in turn carries the pathos across an entire century, creating something wholly his own. No small feat and just one of the many exhibits that display a truth as absolute as the suffering in this song: Jake Xerxes Fussell is a national treasure.

– Chad Depasquale, Aquarium Drunkard

#44 Album of 2017. At once scholarly and swinging, a roistering investigation of the traditions of the Southeastern states. Easygoing virtuosity—co-conspirators included Nathan Salsburg and Nathan Bowles—and an idiosyncratic character ensured, too, that everything felt much more like a party than an historical enactment.

– Uncut

Jake isn’t just a rare bird, he’s the professor you always wished you had, the friend you never get tired of epic hangs with, the human jukebox, the guitar player and singer who makes any band that he’s in better. He’s a southern scholar and gentleman in the tradition of Jim Dickinson, George Mitchell, and Les Blank. He’s a Dave Van Ronk for SEC country. 

– William Tyler

How wonderful that a record company has finally recorded an album by Jake Fussell. He is one helluva bluesman: my favorite of his generation, in fact; and, in my opinion, the best young traditional blues artist performing today.

– George Mitchell