Jake Xerxes Fussell

Over the last decade, Jake Xerxes Fussell’s acclaimed line of work has taken him all around the world and back. Reared in Georgia and now settled in North Carolina, he’s established himself as a devoted listener and contemplative interpreter of a vast array of lovingly sourced folk songs. In tandem to his relationship to Art Rosenbaum, Fussell traces his love of post-war field recordings to his upbringing by song-collecting folklorist parents, whose enthusiasm for their itinerant work surrounded their son in many different musics for as long as he can remember. That early-life intensive had a profound impact on Fussell’s sense of time around music that, too often, gets treated as a museum piece. “When I was getting really deep into traditional music as a teenager, I tended to see it more in a continuum, like, ‘This is all tied into an ongoing world,’” he says. In the ringing warmth on his fifth album, When I’m Called, Fussell honors traditions while carrying them into a new generation’s field of vision, deepening his own understanding of his part in the “ongoing world.” He’s charted his own terrain of growth and change without any hurry toward a destination, and in his guitar-guided meditations, Fussell plucks at the threads that keep humanity knotted together.