More Talent in One Joint of His Little Finger....

Robbie Fulks and I last spoke two years ago. Last week, I decided it was time to check in with one of America's most extravagantly gifted acoustic musicians

Portrait of the artist, 2021

Robbie Fulks and I were speaking in April 2023, on the eve of the release of Bluegrass Vacation, Fulks’s 16th album. For the first decade-and-a-half of his career, Fulks toured the USA and beyond at the head of a country/rock quartet. “Me on acoustic guitar with electric guitar, bass guitar and drums,” he told me. “That was my sound for something like 13 years. I was fatigued from what I’d been doing. I was so tired of it, I was actually thinking of doing something other than music.”

“The chapter change was 2009,” he continued, “when I figured out a style of performing I liked better.” He stripped down to acoustic shows with smaller groups, at first a duo with jazz violinist Jenny Scheinman. “I was sitting down and playing acoustic guitar into a microphone, no pickup, and believe it or not, that alone just really rejuvenated me. A quieter style, airier guitar sound, fiddler over there, and not having all this noise behind me. It’s not even like there’s been a trajectory. It was a sharp left turn.”

Nor did Fulks stop there. He had always been known for an unbridled eclecticism. “He has so many musical passions,” I wrote, “such an encyclopedic grasp of pop, folk, country and their subgenres, that his earlier-career albums were stylistically all over the map.” Reining in his compulsive genre-hopping, Fulks achieved something that once seemed beyond him: focus. It’s doubtful that he would have chosen 20 years ago to align himself with one genre, but that’s just what he did when we spoke.

“Country is at the core of what I am,” he said. “It’s the music that resonates with me the strongest and that my audience expects and wants.” Having defined himself, he made sure to give himself plenty of elbow room. “I would give the broadest definition of country,” he said. “Doc Watson and Mississippi John Hurt. Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, Webb Pierce. Honky-tonk, bluegrass, Western swing: it’s all country. Bobby Charles from Louisiana writing ‘Small Town Talk’ in Woodstock with the Band’s Rick Danko. Country is a musical culture, not a specific sound. Delbert McClinton. Lonnie Mack. Arthur Alexander—he was country soul.”

The younger Fulks was known, too, for his madcap levity, a relentless need to test, if not violate, the limits of taste. If he continues to hold nothing sacred, the songs he’s writing now “are as emotionally generous as they are musically spare,” I wrote in 2023. “If yesterday’s quintessential Fulks song was the gallows-humor country-rocker ‘She Took a Lot of Pills (And Died)’, today’s is ‘Fare Thee Well, Carolina Gals,’ an elegiac fiddle-and-guitar ‘memory song,’ as Fulks introduces it at shows, about his boyhood days in North Carolina.”

Cutting a bluegrass album (Bluegrass Vacation is Fulks’s first extended exploration of the genre) had long been on his mind. “Bluegrass has kind of snowballed for me,” he said, “where maybe 10 or 11 years ago, I was working with [bassist] Mike Bub and [fiddler] Shad Cobb, and then I met more people, and at a certain point, it was like, ‘Hell, I’ve got Sierra Hull [see ATM, 3/11/25] on my contacts list, and [Hull’s husband, multi-instrumentalist] Justin Moses, and all these others, and I’ve got to do this.”

A few days ago, in order to bring myself up to speed on Fulks’s doings since Bluegrass Vacation’s release, I emailed him a wide-ranging batch of questions. I received prompt, thorough and characteristically articulate answers. The Q and A starts here. (Note: the conversation that Fulks and I had in April 2023 was an interview for a profile I wrote about him for the June 2023 issue of Stereophile Magazine.)

“Molly and the Old Man” is a reflection on the power of memory and tradition. Prior to Bluegrass Vacation, my two favorite Robbie Fulks songs were “Fare Thee Well, Carolina Gals” and “Needed,” both from Fulks’s Grammy-nominated 2016 album Upland Stories. With Bluegrass Vacation, I acquired two more favorites, “Angels Carry Me” and “Molly and the Old Man.” Four YouTubes is a lot of music for one article, so I’m posting three and urging reader/listeners to seek out the wonderful “Needed,” a parent’s complex expression of love for a grown child.

ATM: How much time since Bluegrass Vacation came out have you spent on the road? How many shows have you played? How much longer do you plan to tour?

RF: Doing shows is mainly how I make money, so it just goes on and on and has been for most of the last 35 years. A record coming out adds 25 or 30 shows to a year and a year is 90 or 100 shows.

ATM: Tell me several of the configurations of players you’ve worked with on the Bluegrass Vacation tour. Have you done solo shows as well?

When the record came out, I did two outings with different quartets (Todd Phillips or Larry Kohut on bass; Shad Cobb or Christian Sedelmyer on fiddle, and Scott Simontacchi on fiddle and mandolin). After that, Jenny Scheinman, [guitarist] Robbie Gjersoe, [bassists] Beau Sample, Missy Raines, Mark Schatz, and [mandolinists] Jesse Cobb and Tristan Scroggins were among the players I did shows with. In late 2023, I enjoyed a run with Slaid Cleaves so much that I wanted to repeat that model—solo sets with a peer, a little together interplay mixed in—so I did that, with some variation, in 2024: Bill Kirchen, Mary Gauthier, Jason Eady, Patty Larkin, Scott Miller, and Darrell Scott. They’re friends with similar reach to me but somewhat different audiences. I loved every night of that, even the nights when people who were there for the other artist got angry with me for singing or saying something that offended them. I love the poorly educated and the snowflakes!

ATM: Is Steve Albini the person who’s had the strongest impact on how you approach making records? [Albini was a gifted, iconoclastic engineer/producer/ musician who worked closely with Fulks for many years. He produced Nirvana’s In Utero (a 15-million-seller worldwide), as well as albums by P.J. Harvey, the Pixies and others. Albini scorned the term “producer,” preferring to call himself an engineer. He died of a heart attack at age 61 in May, 2024.] ¹

RF: That’s a long story because Steve had a deep and fascinating mind, and our relationship began in 1987, which is longer ago than it used to be. Yes, the strongest impact, since I met him fairly early on, and after the early 1990s he engineered probably half my recordings. There was an Amish suspicion of new technology with Steve. Meaning that he wasn’t programatically opposed, but more a last-resort adopter, waiting until something proved itself useful. Analog gear, Massenburg compressors, prewar German microphones — all that stuff had proved itself. Automated mixing, digital software, piece-by-piece tracking of isolated instruments, and other post-Sgt. Pepper innovations he was more suspicious of. Other engineers I’ve worked with tend to nod firmly toward the analog and the old, and share Steve’s predilections, but none were so happy to carry them to an extreme edge as Steve. Extremes, as a rule, didn’t alarm him, but invigorated him.

He was very deferential toward musicians, and also toward the leader or party footing the bill. He considered himself a hired hand, toiling largely in the machine realm. That idea lodged in me, and on all my records I’ve chosen engineers who enjoy mostly sticking in their lane, and I in mine, though naturally with open back-and-forth in ideas and mutual criticism.

And Steve’s preference for live on-the-floor performance really clicked with me. When you’re on stage (which I am about 25 times more often than in a studio), you hear yourself and others in real time, through both acoustic and electric outputs, and you sing as you play. In a studio, you tend to be some distance from others if not literally isolated, sometimes singing long after you play, and usually listening to it all through headphones. Totally different scenarios, and in the second, there are high barriers to simulating natural performance. Steve commonsensically tried to make Scenario 2 as close to Scenario 1 as possible, an ideal I’ve tried to carry forward, too. It feels more like music, doing it as you are used to doing it, and if you’re careful and lucky, it sounds like real music as well.

ATM: Do you see yourself continuing on the same trajectory with respect to live music that you’ve been on for the last decade-plus: performing acoustically, either solo or with one or two partners? What is it that you find most gratifying about it?

RF: Solo is my least favorite format, because the travel gets lonely, but I think it provides good value for an audience, because I pull it off better than a lot of people. Duo is my favorite, because the listening is easy and fun with such an exact point of focus, and the interplay of “parts” tends to be easygoing, with not much concern about where one need be silent. Of course quartets and larger groups are rewarding because of the shared sense of mission, and all the racket you’re making. You’re right that I strongly prefer acoustic, with the specific meaning of playing stringed instruments into microphones and usually without a drumset. (Though I do need to hear drums from time to time. My next record is like a fucking drum clinic!)

As far as gratifying goes, one thing is that since I don’t play with the same people all the time, but instead pick and choose from an ever-changing group of about 15, I often get to see someone I like and admire after a long absence, like six months to two years. Their lives and thoughts are new, so much changes in a year, and so the road conversations are always great.

Fulks and his frequent accompanist/collaborator Jenny Scheinman playing Fulks’s “Fare Thee Well, Carolina Gals” at the Chicago club The Hideout, where Fulks, then a Chicagoan, had a seven-year residency in the 2010s.

ATM: Have you taken your book project any further since we spoke in 2023? I forgot what it’s about: remind me.

RF: It’s about why there are songs, and I haven’t worked on it over the last year, just preoccupied with other stuff.

ATM: You’ve published a songbook. Is it just your songs? How many? I can’t find it on Amazon. Where can people get it?

RF: It’s just a homemade thing I’m selling at shows and on my site. It’s 40 of my songs, most chosen by requests off social media, with lyrics, chords, charts, and some highfalutin’ commentary.

ATM: I think my interpretation of “Angels Carry Me,” a song I love, has been wrong all along. This is basically what I wrote about it in 2023: “It starts with a kid growing up in the middle of nowhere, listening, transfixed, to big-time singers on the radio, imagining a life of fame and no farm work, ‘and that’s how I became a star-struck fool and a stranger to my old man.’ Escape the farm he does, for the West Coast and the big time: ‘That’s me at the wheel and me on the radio/Sailin’ down the 101.’ His clodhopper-wearing father pays him a visit and is curtly told off: ‘Don’t come around me and my friends up here….I go by my second name now.’ Blinded by success, the narrator fails to recognize that he’s built his fame on nothing but songs about home: the woodpile, the creek, the neighbor girl “whose true intentions I never could quite read”, ie. the roots that he despises. The chastened protagonist realizes, ‘Only a fool thinks he can leave just by driving away.’” Have I misinterpreted the song?

RF: No, that feels spot-on to me, except perhaps “blinded by success” — I don’t think that the narrator needs to be either blinded or very successful for the story to cohere. I mean, it’s mostly my story, with a few inventions, and I haven’t been rock-star successful…though “blind” might be apt, at least according to certain people I’m married to…. Thanks for putting earnest thought into that song, it’s one of my favorites!

Performing solo is Fulks’s least favorite format, he says, but this is a splendid, affecting performance of “Angels Carry Me” from 2023. Note well, especially in the second half, the casually virtuosic guitar work.

ATM: Have you written any new songs you’re happy with?

RF: Last year I wrote lots, and many of them are on the next record, which comes out in the fall. The music styles range widely, rock/pop and country blues and hillbilly banjo and love ballads, with plenty of drums and keyboards. The themes are on the heavy side. The passage of time, national cultures, love, God, disappointment and death, social mobility, etc.

ATM: How’s your son’s band doing? [Fulks’s son Preston plays drums in Momma, a Brooklyn-based rock band with three albums out and a fourth soon to appear.]

RF: They’re doing fine. The new single, “Bottle Blonde,” is already out. They’re playing the Jimmy Kimmel show on March 25th.

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FULKS’S CHOICE: When an artist has written hundreds of songs, it seems a logical request that he list 15 or so that, as Fulks put it, “don’t embarrass me.” Would he consider this list “The Essential Robbie Fulks”? “Sure,” he said. “It’s fine if you want to say that.” Here they are, from the most recent to the earliest, with the albums on which they appear. Remember, one or two as-yet-unreleased gems may soon arrive.

—“Angels Carry Me,” Bluegrass Vacation (Compass, 2023)

—“Molly and the Old Man,” Bluegrass Vacation (Compass, 2023)

—“I Just Lived A Country Song,” Wild! Wild! Wild! with Linda Gail Lewis (Bloodshot, 2018)

—“Seventies Jesus,” Revenge of the Doberman (53-song digital release at robbiefulks.com (2018)

—“Fare Thee Well Carolina Gals,” Upland Stories (Bloodshot, 2016)

—“America Is A Hard Religion,” Upland Stories (Bloodshot, 2016)

—“Sarah Jane,” Upland Stories (Bloodshot, 2016)

—“Long I Ride,” Gone Away Backward (Bloodshot, 2013)

—“The Many Disguises of God,” Gone Away Backward (Bloodshot, 2013)

—“That’s Where I’m From,” Gone Away Backward (Bloodshot, 2013)

—“Charles Thomas Samuels,” 50-vc Doberman Sampler (Boondoggle, 2013)

—“Georgia Hard,” Georgia Hard (Yep Roc, 2005)

—“Let’s Kill Saturday Night,” Let’s Kill Saturday Night (Geffen, 1998)

— “Tears Only Run One Way,” Country Love Songs (Bloodshot, 1996)

—“She Took A Lot of Pills and Died,” Country Love Songs (Bloodshot, 1996)

1. Here is a link to Steve Albini’s New York Times obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/arts/music/steve-albini-dead.html