Robbie Fulks - Gone Away Backward

MP3 album download included

"Four Stars" — Mojo

"His lyrics, with their sharp character-drawing, are literature." — The New York Times

"So good, he's scary." — Chicago Tribune

Recorded and mixed by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago, Gone Away Backward finds Robbie Fulks re-evaluating his roots and lamenting the decline of the small-town and rural America in which he was raised. After 20 years on the road, in 2008 Fulks began performing in unplugged, small-group settings. Regular sessions at the Barbes in Brooklyn and an ongoing residency at Chicago's Hideout gave him wider freedom to experiment and improvise, and offered intimacy and challenge with a wide variety of musicians. He learned a few hundred new songs and, in the process, developed fresh angles on his own narrative voice. Excited and freshly focused, he began writing music for a new project.

At the center of Gone Away Backward is Fulks's gold-dusted vocals and prodigious guitar picking, at times spirited and brisk ("Pacific Slope"), elsewhere spare and sentimental (as on the heartbreakingly gorgeous ballad "That's Where I'm From"). The album is rooted deeply in the interplay between Fulks and a brilliant cast of Appalachian-style slingers: Robbie Gjersoe, Jenny Scheinman, Mike Bub, and Ron Spears, collectively playing banjo, mandolin, fiddle, upright bass, and adding airtight and warm vocal harmonies (just bathe your ears in "Sometimes the Grass is Really Greener").

There is a dynamic humility allowing each song's anecdotal tale to unfold and construct, built upon the barren honesty of acoustic instrumentation and voice. These are songs drawn out of the rolling hills, harvested from fields with "dirt hard as gravel", and remembered on the shores of dying rivers.

 

 

 

Side 1

Long I Ride

Guess I Got It Wrong

When You Get To The Bottom

Rose of the Summer

Pacific Slope

That’s Where I’m From

Side 2

I’ll Trade You Money For Wine

Where I Fell

Sometimes the Grass Is Really Greener

The Many Disguises of God

Snake Chapman’s Tune

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