With each album, Jake Xerxes Fussell reaches deeper into the dustheap of history, snatching up the tattered remains of long-lost folk tunes and knitting them into lucid arrangements that fully transfigure their source material. Born in Columbus, Georgia and based in Durham, North Carolina, the musician can pick up the most hopelessly frayed thread of a song and follow it to another world. A couplet or two from a centuries-old ballad might form the backbone of a wholly modern arrangement, fleshed out by his plaintive baritone and virtuosic fingerpicking; he can also pull off more faithful renditions of sea shanties and spirituals—songs about lost sailors and burning mills and fishmongers who claim to sell creatures with diamonds in their mouths.
The Old Beloved Path, Fussell’s melancholy and meditative new album, continues this pattern. All but the album’s opener, “No 1,” an airy guitar instrumental written by Fussell, draw from traditional sources. As ever, he pulls from a broad spectrum of material, from a mid-18th century Irish ballad (“Early Early in the Spring”) to more tried-and-true contents of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (“Boll Weevil”). But from these diverse fragments, Fussell has cobbled together one of his most coherent artistic statements to date. Produced by Ben Whiteley (of the Weather Station) and featuring a broad supporting cast that includes Whiteley and his father, Ken, as well as multi-instrumentalists Isa Burke and Dominic Billet, it’s a somber and heartfelt record, layered with nomadic harmonica lines and the bright peels of mandolin and country fiddle.
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Fussell populates this landscape with a parade of itinerant wanderers who are heartsick and hopeful in equal measure. Almost everyone in The Old Beloved Path is either fleeing the wreckage of a former life or eyeing a fresh start around the bend. Alongside the usual pining sailors and boxcar-hopping drifters, even Napoleon is cast as a homesick nomad in the 19th century sea shanty “Boney.” This doomed French Odysseus shuffles from one warzone to another before dying with a whimper in Saint Helena. Fussell, his Homer, recounts the epic in a plangent croon, warm as honey, over an eerily jaunty electric guitar line.
