In the case of that song “Washington,” that's sort of an outlier in that I took the lyrics from a hooked rug that I saw in a book, and then put a melody to it. But at the same time, because some of these songs are kind of melancholy or heavy, it might be nice to have some things on there that don't require that sort of weight. I thought they might lend themselves to the overall mood of the record. So, these instrumentals, they're not throwaway or second rate or anything. It’s a long narrative ballad and I think you kind of owe the listener a little bit of a break. So, on this record, I have like a nine-and-a-half-minute song. If you have a couple of songs that are really narrative-driven, and require some focus, if you want to know what the song’s about, you kind of have to listen on an intellectual level. It's kind of nice to give the listener a break. Especially when I felt like there were some long narrative ballads that were taking up a lot of energy. And in the past, I have included a couple of instrumentals on my records. But with this record, I had had a few instrumentals that I thought with sort of deliberate arrangements could be pretty interesting. Whatever instrumentals I had, they were kind of just little diddly things that I didn't really consider complete unto themselves or anything. But for the most part, I didn't want to put them on records because I didn't feel like they were substantial enough. I shouldn't say kind of, actually, I have been writing my own instrumentals for years. Jake Xerxes Fussell: Well, I've actually always kind of been writing little instrumentals and stuff. This interview transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity. WUNC Music recently caught up with Fussell to discuss the world of traditional music, the recording of the new album, and his approach to musical interpretation. His fourth and latest album, "Good and Green Again," his first with producer James Elkington, features more daring instrumentation, newly-composed instrumentals, and many striking touches from musical collaborators. Jake Xerxes Fussell has released three full albums of traditional material, ranging from country blues to work songs to old fiddle and guitar tunes, much of it arranged for guitar, drums, pedal steel, and fiddle. Subtle variations in lyrics, chords, or instrumentation can arise from different regional dialects, recordings, or the fusing of one song or story with another. The difficulty of discerning how a song is “meant” to be played can leave room for interpretation. Much of American folksong is variations on a theme: narratives fractured or tweaked by different performers, characters or place names changed, picking styles altered, source material molded into something completely different. Jake Xerxes Fussell's fourth and latest album "Good and Green Again" is out January 21.
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