With two new Grammy nominations under his belt, one of America’s finest singer-songwriters, Robbie Fulks, returns to Natalie’s Coal-Fired Pizza on Sunday, January 15 (tickets and more info found in the link).
Fulks grew up in North Carolina, still fodder in some of his best songs, proving correct the Flannery O’Connor quote about surviving childhood. After a spell in NYC, about which he wrote one of the finest songs about being dissolute downtown, “Down in Her Arms,” he relocated to Chicago and – while balancing it with some time as a frustrated staff writer in Nashville – fell in with the bluegrass and folk scenes around Old Town School of Folk Music and, peripherally, Second City. In his new hometown, Fulks along with a handful of other acts helped set the tone for Bloodshot Records at the vanguard of alt-country (whatever that is, as they used to say). His early songs balanced carefully crafted cannon blasts of vitriol like “Let’s Live Together,” “Fuck This Town,” “Cigarette State” and “She Took a Lot of Pills and Died” with sweeter, more traditional material like “The Buck Starts Here,” “I Push Right Over,” and “Rock Bottom Pop. 1.”
Building on and expanding his early reputation as a smart-assed second coming of Roger Miller, over the years Fulks refined his gift into one of popular music’s greatest writers of character. Fulks understands that often the moment of transformation consists of breaking down and sifting through the debris. As he said to Salon’s Eric Danton, “I came across this quotation from Arthur Schopenhauer, who said the first 40 years of your life are text, and the last 30 are commentary…I think a lot of it is that things go away. When I visit the places where old things happened to me, where I was growing up, the land is there, but not as you remember it. And the people by and large aren’t there, or if they are, they look like they’re rotting away, and actual events may as well never have happened, because they exist only in this sort of mindscape, which is also biological and temporary, apparently.”
He’s a master at characters caught up in and torn by recollection. The homeless narrator in “I’ll Trade You Money for Wine” sighs “Pockets of change don’t drive my worry down, diamonds don’t make me shine. It’s a short life and a long time underground” in a melody that recalls coal mining ballads and goes back to the British folk tradition. “Long I Ride” soars on a bluegrass progression as the lyric zooms in from a travelogue to a character’s profound loneliness back in the city deciding “Oh, the road it goes but one way and the only goal in sight is to make a bit more in the daytime than I drink down at night. It’s long I ride for the little I gain.” “Never Come Home” works a slow-burn almost torch song with Robbie Gjersoe’s guitar and Wayne Horvitz’s keys casting long shadows behind lines like “Now she’s looking at me through their eyes and I see the thoughts she hides in vain. All my years among the silken tongued, the fallen, have made this cancer in my brain.”
The three-dimensionality of Fulks’ songs comes from not letting anyone off the hook. Fulks understands the lies we need to tell ourselves to get by, and he also knows how false they ring in the ears of the person we’re saying them to. “Needed” gets its heartbreak from the yearn in its melody and the universal truth that humans need to feel needed by other people. “When you’re needed, some rise to meet it and some of us run.” “Fare Thee Well, Carolina Gals,” winks at the arrogance of youth with “I remember Katie, then Rosalee, I was pressing my luck when I tried for three. Some may sink from a shameful deed, me I do it gladly.” The exhale of the character stepping out of his town is tempered with a wistfulness and a fiddle that rings like a suddenly warm breeze on a cool fall day rustling leaves not sure if they’re dead or dying as we find the character still not quite on the straight and narrow. “If a cruel word escapes my mind, don’t worry, baby, it’s just the wine. On second thought, it’s not the wine; it’s just me talking. We men pour out our problems like we think they’re unique; they cheer when a baby starts to speak, they ought to give him a prize for stopping.”
Robbie Fulks’ sharp skills of observation fused with a gift for a melody both infectious and surprising led to a fervent fanbase. The peripatetic nature of his curiosity meant some of his best records like Couples in Trouble and his flirtation with major labels Let’s Kill Saturday Night never broke out on the scale their quality deserved (it’s worth noting both of those created tentpoles of his show that have stood up to a dizzying array of arrangements). His ability to isolate the most important part of a scenario, to cut into a human heart and hold it up to the light for four minutes reached new levels on his last two records, 2010’s Gone Away Backward and last year’s acclaimed Upland Stories which hit best of lists from Rolling Stone to NPR to No Depression is nominated for Grammys for Best Folk Album and Best American Roots Song for its James Agee homage “Alabama At Night.”
With a high lonesome voice that could break a heart at the end of the bar, excellent guitar picking and a stage presence that could shut up even the unruliest bunch of drunks (this writer speaks from experience), no one forgot Robbie Fulks having seen him live or heard one of his records. One of my favorite concert memories of all time involved Fulks, at Little Brothers, following local heroes The Sovines, requested song title suggestions from the audience and – with the full band along for the ride – improvised a number called “Let’s Blame All Our Problems On the Weak.” At the 10th annual Twangfest Festival in St Louis, I watched Fulks weave a set of devastating originals around two perfectly executed covers played with the same unshakable commitment: Johnny Cash’s “Cry, Cry, Cry” and Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” (he later recorded a full album of Jackson covers, Happy). In his residency at The Hideout in Chicago, I’ve watched him play jazz with violinist Jenny Scheinman, sing harmonies to Steve Dawson on the Son Volt classic “Tear-Stained Eye,” and burn through Bill Fox’s off-kilter pop and a Meters funk instrumental with one of the tightest rock bands you’ll see anywhere.
On recent Natalie’s trips, Fulks had backing from Todd Phillips (David Grisman Quintet), Shad Cobb (Steve Earle, Nanci Griffith, The Devil Makes Three), Pete Finney (Bonnie Prince Billy, Justin Townes Earle), and Gerald Dowd (Chris Mills, Nora O’Connor) among others. A consummate showman with some of the best players working today in service of some of the best songs you’re likely to hear all in maybe Columbus’ finest listening room.
Natalie’s Coal-Fired Pizza is located at 5601 N. High St., Worthington, OH 43085. More information at nataliescoalfiredpizza.com.