When I'm Called, by Jake Xerxes Fussell

When I'm Called

by Jake Xerxes Fussell

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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
140g black vinyl.

Artwork by Kevin McNamee-Tweed
Lettering & design by Julienne Alexander
Layout & Design by Max Taeuschel

Includes digital pre-order of When I'm Called. You get 1 track now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.

shipping out on or around July 12, 2024

Purchasable with gift card

$24 USD or more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Artwork by Kevin McNamee-Tweed
Lettering & design by Julienne Alexander
Layout & Design by Max Taeuschel

Includes digital pre-order of When I'm Called. You get 1 track now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.

shipping out on or around July 12, 2024

Purchasable with gift card

$14 USD or more
Streaming + Download

Pre-order of When I'm Called. You get 1 track now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.

Purchasable with gift card

releases July 12, 2024

$7 USD or more

1.	Andy
2.	Cuckoo!
3.	Leaving Here, Don't Know Where I'm Going
4.	Feeing Day
5.	When I'm Called
6.	One Morning In May
7.	Gone To Hilo
8.	Who Killed Poor Robin?
9.	Going To Georgia 05:04	lyrics	buy track
The grave will decay you And turn you to dust And there ain’t a one in ten thousand men That a woman can trust They’ll hug you, they’ll kiss you And tell you more lies Than the crossties in the railway Or the stars in the skies The stars in the skies Come all you young ladies Take warning by me And never place your affections On a green growing tree They’ll hug you, they’ll kiss you They’ll tell you more lies Than the crossties in the railway Or the stars in the skies The stars in the skies I’m going to Georgia I’m going to roam I’m going to Georgia For to make it my home To make it my home

about

Over the last decade, North Carolina’s Jake Xerxes Fussell has established himself as a devoted listener and contemplative interpreter of a vast array of lovingly sourced folk songs. On his fifth album, When I’m Called—his first LP for Fat Possum—Fussell returns to a well of music that holds lifelong sentimental meaning, contemplating the passage of time and the procession of life’s unexpected offerings.

Recognized for his compelling transliterations of traditional music, Fussell took an atypical approach to the material on When I’m Called, often constructing the music from the ground up, before considering what existing source material could be applied to the song. The core of the title track to When I’m Called is a passage that tumbled into Fussell’s life, picked up from a roadside scrap of paper that seemed to bear a child’s penitent writings. He borrowed his album’s sprightly opener, “Andy” from the eclectic multimedia artist Maestro Gaxiola, who penned it in the mid-1980s as an ode to his quixotic pseudo-rivalry with the pop-art icon Andy Warhol. He jumps next into “Cuckoo!”, a strings-swept update of a composition credited to the English composer Benjamin Britten and Jane Taylor, author of “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star.” The remainder of When I’m Called, like so many of Fussell’s favorite numbers, have extensive and winding traditional pedigrees.

James Elkington returned to the producer’s chair, offering guidance on arrangements after working with Fussell on 2022’s Good and Green Again. As Elkington helped flesh out the recordings with piano, pedal steel, dobro, more guitar, and light synth touches, Fussell again found himself ingratiated to Elkington’s eclectic and finely attuned sensibilities. “He's very open to a lot of weird ideas,” Fussell explains. “I feel like the conversations with him can be really free and open.”

With friends like Blake Mills, Joan Shelley, Robin Holcomb, and James Elkington lending their talents to the LP, Fussell’s latest archival dive expands upon his unassuming style, anchored by his friendly warble and even-tempered guitar. When I’m Called is Fussell’s richest work to date, and with a slate of warm instrumental textures abetting his glowing guitar, Fussell follows a growing artistic edge as he pursues broad questions of belonging.

Though his affection for ballads spans mountainous Appalachian tunes to sea shanties and everything in between, Fussell has found himself particularly close to field recordings made in the 1960s and ’70s by painter, musician, and folklorist Art Rosenbaum—one of Fussell’s beloved late mentors, who died in September 2022. He sources “Feeing Day,” which gets a brassy halo, to one of Rosenbaum’s 1971 captures in Scotland.

The lightly rolling “Leaving Here, Don’t Know Where I’m Going” and its unwitting companion, “Going to Georgia,” are part of Fussell’s multidisciplinary inheritance from Rosenbaum; threaded together with the gentle ripple of “Gone to Hilo,” the LP finds its thematic backbone in its trio of traveling songs. Rosenbaum’s field recordings of “Who Killed Poor Robin?” and “One Morning in May” were among the numerous versions that informed Fussell’s contemporary takes. In tandem with his relationship to Rosenbaum, Fussell traces his love of post-war field recordings to his upbringing in Georgia by song-collecting folklorist parents, whose enthusiasm for their itinerant work surrounded their son in many different musics for as long as he can remember.

That early-life intensive had a profound impact on Fussell’s sense of time around music that, too often, gets treated as a museum piece. “When I was getting really deep into traditional music as a teenager, I tended to see it more in a continuum, like, ‘This is all tied into an ongoing world,’” he says. In the ringing warmth of When I’m Called, Fussell honors traditions while carrying them into a new generation’s field of vision, deepening his own understanding of his part in the “ongoing world.” He’s charted his own terrain of growth and change without any hurry toward a destination, and in his guitar-guided meditations, Fussell plucks at the threads that keep humanity knotted together.

credits

releases July 12, 2024

Jake Xerxes Fussell - guitars, vocals
James Elkington - guitar, piano, dobro, synth, organ, pedal steel, mandola, harmonica, string arrangements
Ben Whiteley - upright & electric bass
Joe Westerlund - drums, percussion
Blake Mills - guitars, "Cuckoo," "Gone to Hilo," and "Going to Georgia"
Robin Holcomb - vocals, "Gone to Hilo"
Joan Shelley - vocals, "Cuckoo"
Anna Jacobson - horns
Jean Cook - strings

Produced by James Elkington
Recorded by Jason Richmond
Fidelitorium Recordings, Kernersville, NC

Mixed by Tucker Martine
Flora Recording and Playback, Portland, OR

Mastered by Josh Bonati
Bonati Mastering, Brooklyn, NY

license

about

Jake Xerxes Fussell Durham, North Carolina

"Fussell is creating his own legacy within the long lineage of traditional folk musicians and storytellers that have come before him."
– NY Times

"So elegant … relaxing in the way that pondering a Zen koan is relaxing, and sweet in the way that the wounded, honey-voiced blues of Miss. John Hurt are sweet."
– Pitchfork

"Music that resides at the seams of Appalachia and the cosmos."
– NPR ... more

shows

May 16

The Evening Muse

Charlotte, NC
May 17

The Outpost

Knoxville, TN
May 19

Saturn

Birmingham, AL
Jun 21

Natural Chimneys Park

Mount Solon, VA
Jun 21

The Spot on Kirk

Roanoke, VA
Jun 22

Richmond Music Hall

Richmond, VA
Jun 25

Metro Baltimore

Baltimore, MD
Jun 27

Le Poisson Rouge

New York (NYC), NY
Jul 16

Casbah

San Diego, CA
Jul 17

Barnsdall Gallery Theatre

Los Angeles (LA), CA
Jul 20

The Chapel

San Francisco, CA
Jul 21

The Starlet Room

Sacramento, CA
Jul 25

Tractor Tavern

Seattle, WA
Jul 27

Wise Hall

Vancouver, BC
Aug 28

The Workman's Club

Dublin, Ireland
Aug 30

Lafayette

London, UK
Aug 31

Lewes Con Club

Lewes, UK
Sep 2

Brudenell Social Club

Leeds, UK
Sep 4

The Deaf Institute

Manchester, UK
Sep 6

Salle Bleue, Théâtre l'Archipel

Paris, France
Sep 7

Le Botanique

Brussels, Belgium
Sep 8

Kantine Walhalla, Theater Walhalla

Rotterdam, Netherlands

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