Audio above, transcription below

Hello, dear listener, and welcome to my closet, where I am nestled up between the sweaters to try to bring you the best possible audio quality to talk to you for just two minutes about a musician that I really am enjoying. His name is Jake Xerxes Fussell and he's from Georgia. There's two things I like about his music. I'm going to try to keep this really brief.

One is I like the way it sounds. Duh. I just think that the music sounds very clean, in the sense that I can hear every note coming out of the guitars, and I can hear and decipher every word that Jake is singing. And something about that is really relaxing to me. So that is it musically.

Lyrically is where it really grabs me. I've been listening for years to Jake, and I found myself wondering: “how does he write this stuff?” Because the language that is used in them is so unique, and each song feels like a story or a snippet of a story. And anyway, so I just got two CDs in the mail, of Jake's. And this is why we buy physical music, people.

So one is What In The Natural World, which is where I first encountered his work. And the second one is When I'm Called, which was released in 2024 by Fat Possum.

I open them up and inside. Underneath each song is this extensive bibliography & citation list. And what I come to learn is that all of the songs across his catalog are lyrically covers of things that he's encountered other places. They're coming from traditional southern spirituals, they're coming from field recordings, they're coming from snippets of things that he's overheard. They're coming from tapestries and pottery and colloquialisms. And so this makes sense as to why the lyrics feel stitched together in the way that they do.

Now that I know that I sort of hear the songs a little differently, and I hear the many voices who have sung this song before Jake has and I can imagine what it meant to them and imagine the different contexts in which these songs have had life. It's giving me this sort of reverence for the past that I feel super infrequently. As a person who did not grow up in a super musical household (I think my dad listened exclusively to Kenny G) this gives me a window into a past that feels alive.

So often when I look at history, it feels black and white. Static. And I feel like Jake is really animating the past by the way that he's interpreting these lyrics.

Anyway, I am well past my two minutes, so I will let you go, but I am stoked to add these CDs to my visor CD holder. Probably replacing some Zach Bryan, if I'm being honest. All right. Thanks for listening/reading. Yeah. Smash that like button. Pound it. Noggin. See you!