Vår gode venn Robbie Fulks er en særdeles travelt opptatt mann om dagen. Suksessen i etterkant av Gone Away Backwards har gjort at konsertkalenderen i USA er fylt til randen, og kreativeteten bobler over. Nok til at ny plate er innspilt og ferdig mikset – og den årlige høstturneen i Skandinavia for første gang på mange år er droppet.
Den nye platen har ikke fått utgivelsesdato enda, men ble sendt til mastering i forrige uke.
Robbie sier dette om den nye platen:
Now it’s in the expert hands of masterer Jim DeMain, and definitively out of mine. The thing will be called Upland Stories, in reference to the “upland South,” the setting of most of the album’s songs. Don’t want to crush all eager anticipation with humdrum data, but here’s a little about it. The group of songs stresses words more than any previous album of mine, possibly excepting Couples in Trouble. The music style is a little hard for me to pin down, but at the soft end it’s folk-blues and at the most lushly orchestrated end it’s, I guess, folk-pop. Otherwise, I think much of the record, maybe one-third of it, is very continuous with Gone Away Backward, both in music and lyrics — it’s focused pretty hard on poverty and other deficits in modern American life. Playing and singing along with me are Shad Cobb, Robbie Gjersoe, Jenny Scheinman, Wayne Horvitz, Alex Hall, Todd Phillips, and Fats Kaplin. A heck of a cast, and I think they all brought my work to life with almost incredible intelligence and sensitivity — I’m honored.
Han har tidligere lettet litt på sløret rundt prosessen, da både fansen og plateselskapet – og faktisk aller mest Robbie selv, ventet en plate som ville føles som en fortsettelse av utsøkte Gone Away Backwards.
In fact, I had wanted to follow GAB with a record that was clearly related to it in instrumentation, sound, musical mood, and lyrical voice, because I liked how that record came out, and its reception and sales reinforced my personal valuation. ButGAB 2 is not what was emerging, as I wrote there in my spartan chamber. Most of the songs that were ringing the bell were mournful, reflective, and not of a clear genre designation (although, because of the way they and most other songs sound when I sing them and play them on my guitar, and because they’re non-idealized stories of everyday life, I still stubbornly maintain that “country” is the go-to term). They didn’t strongly suggest country-oriented instrumentalists, and not all of them called for an entirely acoustic setting, to my mind. The melodies had more inflexible shapes — were less blues-derived, more European-derived, I suppose. The chords, and here and there some of the metric stuff, were a bit outside what’s usually acceptable in country.
Vi gir dere beskjed når vi vet noe mer. Mens vi venter ser vi tilbake på Robbies forrige besøk i Norge…
