I'm making a record!

By Robbie on July 12, 2011

It's way premature to start gabbing about it, really, but in case anyone wonders what projects are up the old pipeline, or is doubting whether the Yahweh of Yodelling really has any more juice left, let me assure you that I am far from rusticating and doddering and otherwise embodying the thousand verbs that comically invoke senescence, here at the family manse. On the contrary, a period of mellow autumnal fruitfulness is in full swing. Not that a cocoon has shrouded my person hitherto -- my more awake devotees will recall that I ventured coyly into the marketplace only last year with a release called Happy, and, 13 months prior, unloosed a hornet's-nest of 0's and 1's in the guise of a sumptuous digital sculpture, 50-Vc. Doberman. But if you qualify the one by describing it as a covers record, and the other as a website offering, and the one before that just by the way as a live record, and the seven before that as a series of warm-ups and feints now fading in the public memory, then I've actually never made a record, and so you can imagine my glee at finally getting to work on one. The home-stretch of the writing of the thing is now engulfing my afternoon hours. In late September the pen is interred and in November I and a small band of trustees begin to dance around my pages to try to animate them with the mysterious spark of life.

I'll be dropping updates and comments about this as it proceeds over the next...who knows, probably year. I'm sure everyone knows that the process of taking a created work from brain to performance to fixed image and then to market is oft-faltering, collaborative, asymptotic, and expensive. But hey, Tony Rome wasn't released in a day! And with luck my record will be just as hard-hitting and posterity-bound as that 1967 Sinatra vehicle. It will be a small-group acoustic record, and, without having quite heard it, I'd venture to say that it'll hint strongly at bluegrass here and there, and maybe just about be bluegrass a couple times, but exactly bluegrass shall it rarely be. Maybe "old country, if a person with Robbie Fulks's life experience and mental limitations were to write it, played on unelectrified instruments" would be the zippy phrase on the record bin. Is that clear enough? Need I say more? Why don't I just make it and you describe it.

In fact you know the style I'm getting at if you've seen me play a few times over the last two years. You'll also have heard the players on my next one, and probably the very songs. The record will be seeded with a bit of 50-Vc. Doberman (I'm pretty sure I warned at the the time that I might recycle some of the songs for future non-digital efforts, so no complaints please!) though in fresh renditions.

At the risk of sounding like a pitchman, I strongly believe that the only way to go about making a record -- the only way to maintain the needed mix of fear, enthusiasm, and vigor -- is in the spirit that it's your first as well as your last. At my age and commercial stature the second of these is more than a wispy, hypothetical prospect. Recovering that first-time-out innocence and will to conquer would seem to be the neater trick. One of my nicest compliments was from the steel player and A&R man Steve Fishell, who told me after hearing my song "Where There's A Road," "That doesn't sound like the performance of someone who's been doing records for ten years." That's just what you want -- somehow to sound your age but not to, either. I want songs that reflect my observations and frame of mind honestly (among other things), that achieve meaningful refinements on stories and techniques I've had a previous go at, that can serve as outlets for outside music that is currently exciting me, that are in sync with my metabolism, that aren't apt to irritate someone who knows the sketchiest details about me such as birthplace and age (no first-person songs about horny feelings for teenagers, no nostalgia-for-Swaziland songs). I want all this yet I also want my recordings to have, somehow, the same unconsidered urgency as a horny young Swazilander's. On the face of it, this is a much more intimidating set of self-imposed guidelines than the ones that steer your first couple efforts -- basically just two: "Let's make something that sounds like the music I like" and "Let's kick some fuckin' ass!" But it works itself out by feel and rather incidentally -- not by specifically focussed effort but the old catechism of ingrained, rigorous self-doubt.

For the creator trailing a longish resume, he who has written, say, a few hundred songs, or six books, there seems no avoiding re-encountering old materials. You're stuck with your genetic and environmental fund, your values, and your imagination, such as it is. Your best hope is that experience will have sharpened you since your last time at the lathe, and that these tools and the altered angles of age will cause something leaner and adequately original to leap off the bench. Two problems natter recurrently at my psyche and keep me returning to the workshop with the something-to-prove gusto of the amateur. One is that I hear old records of mine by accident now and then, and if nothing else makes you plug your ears and run quick as a wink off to the toolshed, that will. The other, a happier problem, is that the task of learning and thereby producing music is infinite. Every time I start thinking I've got a good grip on composing an ideal progression or playing an earthshaking solo, I hear something that suggests an entirely different way. And so a lot of the music I've heard and a few of the people I've met over these last few years will be reflected in the music on my next effort -- in how it's written, cast, arranged, and performed in-studio.

I shouldn't forget to mention my small, light McAlister mahogany guitar or my Chuck Lee banjo, either. These instruments, artistic achievements themselves, help make the daily getting up and at it at least as much like playing as working. There's a dozen or so stringed instruments at my place these days, but these two are the superstars. I expect them to shine on this next recorded outing, and I work with them each day for as many hours as I can carve out so that they might.