Musicians like Jake Xerxes Fussell are nearly as rare nowadays as the material he performs. “All songs are traditional & in the public domain,” reads the sole composition credit on Out of Sight, Fussell’s often-transcendent third album. Put another way: Each of these nine songs survived the great folk-pop copyright round-up of the 1950s and ’60s (and beyond), when publishers hunted down and claimed untold numbers of “traditional” melodies as their own. Fussell, as well as contemporaries like House and Land, Marisa Anderson, and others, are folk’s equivalent of organic farmers, reclaiming the genre from clever songwriters and pop mutators alike and expressing their voices by different parameters. Calling something “traditional” can be misleading—as House and Land’s Sarah Louise recently pointed out—but Out of Sight is a powerful reminder of music’s many vital, noncommercial pathways.
More than a mere interpreter, Fussell is a folkie in the preservationist, pre-Bob Dylan sense—learning from field recordings, folklorists’ transcriptions, archives, other musicians, and even YouTube videos, notating his sources, and reanimating the music through rites of joyous antiquarianism. Arrangements like “Jubilee” and “The River St. Johns” honor the past through transformation rather than reinvention, placing Fussell closer to the ideals of the reverent ’50s folk revivalists than their radical ’60s counterparts. Most often playing a clean electric guitar rather than the expected acoustic, a subtle and effective twist, Fussell’s touch is light and dreamy. While the tempo and density might scan as “chill,” the music is so elegant as to resist stereotyping. It’s relaxing in the way that pondering a Zen koan is relaxing, and sweet in the way that the wounded, honey-voiced blues of Mississippi John Hurt are sweet.
At its best, Out of Sight is timeless, both contemporary and not, its logic and concerns relatable, its arrangements neither rigidly authentic nor conspicuously modern. While this strategy might yield middlebrow twang in lesser hands, Fussell steps into the space naturally. On his earlier solo recordings, he created an ambience with only his guitar and voice; this album is his first to feature a band on all tracks. Drums make any patch of folk melody sound “new,” but can be a challenge to pull off without diminishing the music’s atemporal mysteries. On “The Rainbow Willow,” especially, Fussell’s next-level mellowness seems to emanate through the surrounding players, particularly pedal steel guitarist Nathan Golub and drummer Nathan Bowles (himself an acclaimed modern folk revivifier). When the rhythm section falls into this mode, they find that ambience, too—a warm and collective musical charisma that defines the sound of Out of Sight.