Jake Xerxes Fussell: “Listening back to it now, I think it’s an album about travelling”

This is the second record you’ve made with James Elkington. How does that relationship work?

I started working with James on the last record and it was just a really comfortable experience. He’s got a really interesting perspective, and he is such a talented musician – he’s an awesome fingerstyle guitarist, but he also plays pedal steel, dobro, mandola, piano and arranges the strings. He’s like a one-man orchestra. He’s got a great ear for how the records sound, and we’ve just become so comfortable working with each other, it feels like an ideal partnership.

The record is dedicated to the folklorist Art Rosenbaum. What did you learn from him?

Art Rosenbaum was my mentor and a really important person in my life. He died a couple of years ago now. I think I was at the End Of The Road festival in the UK when I heard the news, and it was hard to take. He was a great enthusiast. There were so many sides to him – he was an artist, a musician, a folklorist, a photographer. He was around the Greenwich Village folk scene back in the ’60s and then he moved south to teach at the University Of Georgia. He was a real part of the community – he made so many great field recordings, but it wasn’t like he was an outsider documenting something, he was friends with the musicians, he played with them and hung out. The main source for the last song on the record, “Going To Georgia”, was a field recording he made of the Eller Family of Hiawassee back in the 1980s.

As a folklorist, are you closer on this record to the reverence of Pete Seeger or the surrealism of Harry Smith?

I have to say I am not really a folklorist. My parents were folklorists. I studied folklore at university, but these days I’m more of an interpreter of traditional songs. But I have thought about this, about appropriation and authenticity and all that, and I kind of think it’s too easy to construct straw men. The thing that everybody supposedly knows about Pete Seeger is that he took an axe to Bob Dylan’s electric guitar lead at the Newport folk festival in 1965. But he didn’t do that and he had no interest in doing that! I think there is a contrast between someone like Alan Lomax and Harry Smith. Harry Smith would certainly be the more interesting guy to hang out with at a party, but he doesn’t necessarily have the range of work that Alan Lomax does.

“I did feel bolder”: Jake Xerxes Fussell in 2024

Would you say there is more of the ‘old weird America’ on this record?

That’s interesting. Maybe I did feel bolder about mixing things up a little more this time.

and (below) hismentor,thelate ArtRosenbaum

The album opens with a song written by the outsider cowboy artist Maestro Gaxiola. How did you come across his work?

I lived out in California for a while after college and I got to know the director Les Blank, who’s another great documentor of vernacular culture of all kinds.

He made a great film about the Maestro – King Of The Cowboy Artists in 1995 – and that probably introduced me to his work. I think the song “Andy” is in the film, but the Maestro used to produce these cassettes back in the ’80s which he’d give away. He never sold his work – he believes art is a religion rather than a business, which explains his beef with Warhol. So I’d known the song for a while but never thought about playing it before.

“I am not really a folklorist, more of an interpreter of traditional songs”

The song “When I’m Called” comes from that time in California too. I have a friend, an artist called Chris Sullivan, who is fascinated by found art, which he collects into zines. He became obsessed with these lines from some high-school kid he found in a discarded exercise book, and it became a kind of mantra for him. He would say it over and over again, and somehow the words found their way into my song, and became the album title…

You often say that there’s no theme to your records, but sometimes a theme emerges out of the recording subsequently. Did you have one in mind here?

I certainly wasn’t conscious of a theme at the time, but listening back to it now, I think it’s an album about travelling. There are a lot of songs about being on the road. I think a number of things happened around the recording that made me think about getting older.

I have a son, who’s three now. It’s a beautiful thing having a child, but it does make you think about your mortality, and how much you’re going to be around for them. Especially if you’re on the road playing music all the time.

Is he going to be the third generation of Fussell folklorists?

I don’t know about that, but he is really into music right now.

INTERVIEW:STEPHEN TROUSSE TOMRANKIN;JASONMERRITT GETTYIMAGES