Jake Xerxes Fussell (Photo by Tom Rankin)

Singer, guitarist, and folk music interpreter Jake Xerxes Fussell releases his forthcoming album, Good and Green Again, on Jan. 21 via Paradise of Bachelors. He then performs at Pie Shop in DC on Sunday, Jan. 23.

Produced by James Elkington (Jeff Tweedy, Michael Chapman, Steve Gunn, etc.), Good and Green Again is Fussell’s most conceptually focused and breathtakingly rendered album to date, a transcendent place on a musical map of melancholy, quietude, and foot-stomping joy.

Following previously released album opener “Love Farewell,” “Breast of Glass” features beautiful, sparse horn arrangements written by Fussell and Elkington and performed by Anna Jacobson.

Stream “Breast of Glass” by Jake Xerxes Fussell on YouTube:

Fussell has distinguished himself as one of his generation’s preeminent interpreters of traditional (and not so traditional) “folk” songs, a practice which he approaches with a refreshingly unfussy lack of nostalgia and preciousness. By recontextualizing ancient vernacular songs and sources of the American South, he allows them to breathe and speak for themselves and for himself; he alternately inhabits them and allows them to inhabit him.

In all his work, Fussell humanizes his material with his own profound curatorial and interpretive gifts, unmooring stories and melodies from their specific eras and origins and setting them adrift in our own waterways. The robust burr of his voice, which periodically melts and catches at a particularly tender turn of phrase, and the swung rhythmic undertow of exquisite, seemingly effortless guitar-playing pull new valences of meaning from ostensibly antique songs and subjects.

Buy your tickets online now!

Jake Xerxes Fussell
W/ Sam Moss
Pie Shop
Sunday, Jan. 23
Doors @ 7:30pm
$15/$20
All ages