IN 2009, ROBBIE FULKS DECIDED TO MAKE A CHANGE. FOR ALMOST 20 YEARS, THE SINGER/SONGWRITER HAD LED A SERIES OF HARD-HITTING COUNTRY-ROCK BANDS ACROSS AMERICA AND BEYOND, HIS BLISTERING GUITAR CHOPS AND MADCAP LEVITY (THE LATTER FREQUENTLY TESTING, IF NOT VIOLATING, STANDARDS OF TASTE) WINNING HIM A MODEST-SIZED BUT ARDENT FAN BASE.
“I was fatigued from what I’d been doing,” Fulks told me recently via Zoom, sitting in his kitchen in Atwater Village, a Los Angeles neighborhood between Glendale and Burbank. “Me on acoustic guitar, with electric guitar, bass guitar and drums, that was my sound for something like 13 years. I was so tired of it, I was actually thinking of doing something other than music.
“The chapter change for me was 2009, when I figured out a style of performing I liked better.” He stripped down to a duo, largely, at first, with jazz violinist Jenny Scheinman. “I was sitting down and playing acoustic guitar into a microphone, no pickup, and believe it or not, that alone just really rejuvenated me. A quieter style, airier guitar sound, fiddler over there, and not having all this noise around me. It’s not even like there’s been a trajectory. It was a sharp left turn.”
Not long afterward, Fulks, who turns 60 in April, made a second, equally redefining, move. In 2013, commenting on Fulks’s music, ’s Jim Fusilli wrote: “The level of artistry is so complete that it suggests a world in which Fulks isn’t a household name is somehow upside down.” Fulks’s low profile was, in fact, largely of his own doing. He has so many musical passions—such an encyclopedic grasp of pop, folk, country, and their various subgenres—that his first 11 albums (he has released upward of 16), from (1996) to 2010’s (you read that right), were stylistically all over the map. Although he retains a degree of that magpie eclecticism—“if I could do whatever I felt
