WHAT IN THE NATURAL WORLD
“I’M a YouTube addict,” confesses Jake Xerxes Fussell. The folk singer is sitting at one of the brightly coloured tables at Cocoa Cinnamon, a Mexican coffeeshop that he declares the best in Durham, North Carolina. Nursing a mug of strong coffee, he’s explaining how he finds the old folk tunes that he has been arranging and recording for five years now. He has a nearly encyclopedic grasp of various strains of musical tradition in the southeastern United States, but mainly he finds his material just surfing the web, dialling up YouTube videos, and seeing what sticks with him once he’s off the computer.
“I listen to a lot of old songbooks, and I’ll even go to physical archives and look through collections out of a genuine curiosity about things,” he explains. “But I also let myself go down wormholes on YouTube. Oh, I’ve never heard the Library of Congress’ field recordings from this particular region of Michigan. Oh, I’ve never heard this New England fiddle tune or this batch of lumberjack songs…”
“I LET MYSELF GO DOWN WORMHOLES ON YOUTUBE” JAKE XERXES FUSSELL
Fussell sports an old cap on his head, perched askew, almost like a raised eyebrow, and he’s wearing a T-shirt with a picture of St Eom, a rural mystic who created a folk utopia called Pasaquan, near where Fussell grew up in Georgia. “Occasionally,” he says, “I’ll find a song I can work with. But that happens slowly, just me turning it over in my head. It’s kind of a lazy process, but it’s something I’m constantly doing.”
His so-called lazy approach has produced three albums of vivid, inventive folk music, with Fussell giving new spins to old songs. He’s a spirited guitar player – having studied nearly all his life to synthesise a range of country-blues and folk styles – and he is a hearty singer with a robust, empathic voice. But most of all he’s a
