Fifth album from North Carolina folklorist.
Jake Xerxes Fussell
★★★★
When I’m Called
FAT POSSUM. CD/DL/LP
WITH ITS GRIEVING linnets and murderous sparrows, morbid pagan nursery rhyme Who Killed Cock Robin? is usually an unnerving listen, a litany of faintly sinister avian symbolism from the murkiest past. Jake Xerxes Fussell’s version on When I’m Called, however, comes with a genuine mournfulness (it’s “Poor Robin” here), the crow, the lark and the preacher owl all humanised by the firm sincerity of Fussell’s voice.
No matter whose story the singer and guitarist is telling – bird, schoolchild, lover, traveller – that clarity is sustained throughout When I’m Called, the follow-up to 2022’s Good And Green Again. If his reputation as a song-collector and interpreter makes him the magpie of the Poor Robin procession – the folklorists’ child scouring hedgerow and field-recording for a glint of something silvery – he carefully displays the songs he gathers in his own elegantly crafted settings, respectfully showcasing their lustre.
Ribboned with piano, dobro, synth and string arrangements from producer James Elkington and contributions from Joan Shelley, Robin Holcomb and Blake Mills, When I’m Called is constructed from diverse materials. Feathered with lovely strings, Cuckoo! is a version of a 1930s song written by Benjamin Britten and lyricist Jane Taylor; Andy, meanwhile, is a country diss-track by the artist Maestro Gaxiola, who recorded it in 1986 as a this-town-ain’t-big-enough challenge to an unlikely rival (“You can tell Andy Warhol/The ghostrider’s on his way”). The oddly profound title track, meanwhile, is proper found sound, built around words Fussell saw childishly scrawled on a bit of jettisoned paper: “I
