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Robbie Fulks finds life is hard, 'Georgia Hard'
By Brian Baker, May 2005
From the beginning of his career, Robbie Fulks has typified the go-your-own-way ethic of the insurgent country genre, defining it through his recordings and performances even as he sought to distance himself from anything remotely resembling an organized movement.

His short-lived and generally unsatisfying major label experience with Geffen was book ended by two tenures with Bloodshot, all of which showcased Fulks' take-no-prisoners brand of traditional country, roots rock and his own unique spin on all of it.


The latest chapter in Fulks' contentious career is perhaps the most ironic. The man who famously wrote "F*** This Town" about his Nashville experiences has just released "Georgia Hard," his debut for Yep Roc and one of the most authentic and traditional country album he's done to date.

After listening to tons of country music from the '70s over the past couple of years, Fulks decided it was high time to translate the love and respect he felt for some of the era's great musical craftsmen into his own work.

Fulks had previously managed to show his love of his forefathers' work in sufficiently tangible forms, with the 2002 release of his obscure country covers album "13 Hillbilly Greats" and last year's phenomenal tribute to Johnny Paycheck, "Touch My Heart," on which Fulks produced and performed.

At least some of the inspiration for "Georgia Hard" came from his work on "Touch My Heart."

Enlisting a house band that consisted of guitarist Redd Volkaert, bassist Dennis Crouch, pedal steeler Lloyd Green, pianist Joe Terry, fiddler/mandolinist Hank Singer and drummer Gerald Dowd, and then peppering their performances with vocals from George Jones, Dallas Wayne, Neko Case, Gail Davies, Jim Lauderdale, Bobby Bare Sr. and Jr., Hank Williams III and Dave Alvin among others, Fulks created a perfect contemporary tribute to Paycheck and, by extension, to a particular period in country music's history.

Although the atmosphere on "Touch My Heart" at least tangentially inspired Fulks to turn that same flame up under his own work, he was already headed in that direction to begin with.

"I was really in the mood for writing a set of country songs, with the kind of chronological bent that these songs have on them, which is maybe the period of country between 1965 and 1980 or so," says Fulks from his south-of-Chicago home.

"Maybe even up to that little window of time in the late '80s when I was first getting into country when I was a kid, and there was like that integrity explosion with Dwight Yoakam and Marty Stuart and those guys. It'd been years since I'd written a bunch of country songs because I'd done some hybrid pop/country/folk records, and I just felt like doing it. That's not a good answer, I know, but there was no particular manifesto. I just felt like it."

The most significant effect that the "Touch My Heart" sessions had on Fulks was when it came time to think about the structure of the songs he had written for his album.

"I would say it had a big impact on the way that I arranged them and storyboarded them and went into the studio with them," says Fulks. "I used all those players from that record in combination with my road band, and the experience of working on that record was really special and kind of significant for me. It's always so eye-opening to be in a room with first rate performers. Like Lloyd Green was so instrumental in creating some of the original music that I try to emulate in my work."

"And those guys, when they get together, they're like a living organism that's composed of five different heads. You can write out a chart and put it in front of them, but at times it's almost meaningless what's on the page. They've got such big ears, and they all tuned into the exact same sound and in that case the same era we were playing for, and it just springs to life in front of you."

"Then you realize you can hire the best players or work it as hard as you can with talent, but it's not talent. It's something that genetic. That really came home for me making that record, and I don't know how to say it influenced this record except to say that I just love listening to those guys play, and I couldn't wait to write songs to put those guys in. I was really happy with the way it turned out. I wish more people would have bought it."

Although Fulks could attribute inspiration to any number of artists, there are a few that he relies on consistently, and they show up once again in the fabric of "Georgia Hard."

"Well, Roger Miller is an ongoing impact in my life," says Fulks. "The more I listen to country, I find all sorts of people that I didn't know about before. It's a bottomless well in one respect, but in another it seems that you can't equal Roger in a lot of ways. He just had it all going on, as a writer, a musician, a singer and just as a really broad talent that was able to translate his particular odd muse to big masses of demographically diverse people."

"But other than Roger, I was listening to Gene Watson and Don Williams and - horrors - Ronnie Milsap. There's a whole idiom of country that I always felt was a little bit cheesy in the past, but I think I came to appreciate more in the middle years of my life. It's still kind of cheesy, but you can appreciate how things can simultaneously be cheesy and sincere and valuable. And Ronnie Milsap, where previously I thought he was Velveeta, turns out to be parmesan oregiano. I'm really sorry I told him to go f*** himself in that earlier song. It's a shame."

"Georgia Hard" is clearly the first album in Fulks' catalog to be so completely steeped in country tradition, from the bluegrass shimmer of "Where There's a Road" to the Eddie Rabbitt lope of "It's Always Raining Somewhere" to the Charlie Rich-tinged "Leave It to a Loser" to the hilarious novelty of "I'm Gonna Take You Home (And Make You Like Me)," Fulks is working in a pure country atmosphere that he had previously only utilized as a component of his total sound. Although he hesitates slightly in admitting it, Fulks says he was definitely channeling certain artists specifically on certain songs on "Georgia Hard."

"I probably shouldn't say this because in a way it sort of reduces people's experiences in listening to it," prefaces Fulks, "but it really is true that in the first song on the record ('Where There's a Road'), I was specifically thinking of New Grass Revival, like the 'Friday Night in America' era. Those guys were always idols of mine. That doesn't really typify the album so much."

"I think 'Leave It To a Loser' has that sort of Dottie West/Chet Atkins/Nashville String Machine mid-'60s era kind of deal. There are other little reference points in there. That totally offbeat song in there, 'Doin' Right,' has kind of a Doctor Hook vibe to it. But as many deliberate choices as there were, there were twice as many accidental things that seeped in just because of what I was consuming at the time."

For as many genres as he has drawn upon over the course of his 10-year recording career, Fulks believes his muse has been consistent in his songwriting. To that end, Fulks feels that the songs on "Georgia Hard," while written to emulate a particular era in country music, still exhibit his own unique songwriting stamp.

"I would say that my writing tends to be based less and less on other songs, I mean I hope that it is, as I get older, " he says. "I think that I grow less and less nervous about putting my own voice and my own experience and a weird turn of phrase that might suit me, but not suit another singer and things like that into songs as I get older."

"Instead of doing what we were just talking about and sitting down and trying to write a Delmore Brothers style song, I try to write something that's more me. You really have to be egocentric in a way to say, 'I'm going to write in the Delmore Brothers style, but I'm going to bring my own unique vantage point to it and innovate on the Delmore Brothers,' where you're innovating on something that's perfect in the first place. It takes a kind of pomposity and a delusional perspective just to sit down and do it, but I think it's almost necessary to be a little delusional or else you're just doing dim second hand copies of what's already been done. I am the New Coke of country music."

Given the hybridized nature of his output to date, Fulks wanted to explore a less diluted form of country music with "Georgia Hard," and his most recent recordings, coupled with his affiliation with the Grand Ole Opry, convinced him that now was the time for his pure country record.

"I felt like I'd done the idea of synthesizing different kinds of music with country," says Fulks. "I did two records more or less in a row, which were interrupted by two other records which were put together on the side. One was 'Let's Kill Saturday Night' and the other was 'Couples in Trouble,' and they both sprang from a similar idea."

"After I'd worked on the writing of those two, from 1997 to 2001, I was really ready to dive hardcore into country music. One thing that happened was I started playing on the Grand Ole Opry every once in awhile. And the first time I did it, I was talking to people in the audience after the show and they were talking about 'We've never heard you before...what records should we buy?' and I realized there wasn't a single record out of the six that I had that I could sell them. A couple of them didn't really bear on their understanding of country music and the other ones had like big cuss words all over them. And I thought, 'Man, it'd be nice if I could come here and sell something to the 3,500 people in this audience.'"

Not surprisingly, Fulks has created an album in "Georgia Hard" that would have been a hit in the heyday of the period he's honoring, but will likely not generate too much radio outside of his already established college radio base, considering what appeals to country radio programmers today.

Fulks' other regular gig, a monthly live performance/interview show on XM Satellite Radio recorded at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music, may represent the best platform artists like him to gain exposure in the current atmosphere of restrictive playlists.

"It's like the wild, wild west, and I'm really convinced that satellite radio is just going to bust through in a couple of years. It's an idea whose time has been wanting to come for so long," says Fulks. "I'm a big proponent of the idea that all the interesting work in country and probably other forms of music too, is from the outside and maybe less appreciated by a mass audience. If I can say on my deathbed that I did anything at all to help publicize and promote the other 99 percent, the good part of country music, then I'll be a happy guy."

Although it's natural for an artist to feel closer to the current crop of songs, Fulks finds himself looking at his earliest work with a great deal of affection, while simultaneously recognizing "Georgia Hard" as a career highlight.

"Over the years, I've grown closer to the first batch of songs on my first record, partly because they were so innocent, and it was a good time in my life," says Fulks. "I didn't have the ability to think about songs the way that I do now. I was just taking a wild dare when I wrote a song. So, some of those have stood up for me."

"But I think the new songs, in the execution and performance, just beats my old records by a mile. I think I go into each new record with hopefully more educated, more perceptive ears than the last record. I'm always trying to learn better how to strengthen a song and a performance."

Sounds like I need to pick up this album. Been a fan of RF since "Let's Kill Saturday Night" came out. Best thing about this guy is every album is something completely different; "Couples in Trouble" was probably the least "country" album I've ever heard from a "country" artist, but it's GREAT. He puts on a PHENOMONAL live show as well.

From PopMatters.com:
http://popmatters.com/music/interviews/ ... 0513.shtml

More Than Wallpaper: A Conversation with Robbie Fulks

A conversation with the country songwriter who listens to more Michael Jackson than Nashville.

by Zeth Lundy

There's no "alt" to Robbie Fulks's country, but nonetheless, he was embraced by the alt-country crowd as one of its own upon the release of his first two albums for Bloodshot Records, Country Love Songs (1996) and the slightly superior South Mouth (1997). Their eerily accurate inhabitations of '50s honky-tonk were the makings of a true traditionalist, not an integration revivalist, and Fulks proved himself to be a songwriter of great intensity and humor alike: "Barely Human" and "Cold Statesville Ground" chill to the proverbial bone, while "I Told Her Lies" and "***** This Town" are milk-snortin'-out-the-nose music.

Mainstream notoriety was not so easy. Geffen Records brought Fulks aboard its soon-to-be-sunk-in-corporate-mergers ship in 1998; Let's Kill Saturday Night, the strong, steel-hoofed result, was buried thanks to the impeccable idiocy befitting the most starched of corporate suits. Since the 2001 release of his most adventurous and rewarding album Couples in Trouble, Fulks has kept a low public profile, surfacing last year to produce Touch My Heart, a tribute to Johnny Paycheck. But despite a slowing of his otherwise prolific output, he's been keeping himself busy as ever. Most recently, he put his efforts into recording his seventh official release, the fantastic Georgia Hard (Yep Roc), which marks a return to his country roots after a few years of experimentation.

Georgia Hard doesn't perpetuate Fulks's usual '50s-obsessed modus operandi; instead, it moves up two decades and goes for the jugular of more pop-inclined country, an echo of Nashville's last bastion of quality before the walls were breached by sentimental profiteers. On first listen it's a bit jarring, like running into a co-worker at a public place, but once you've gotten over that, you realize it's exactly the kind of record only Fulks could make, stacked with rambling anthems ("Where There's a Road"), murder ballads ("If They Could Only See Me Now"), self-deprecating weepers ("Leave It to a Loser"), and, of course, the requisite rotten valentine to phonies ("Countrier Than Thou"). PopMatters recently caught up with the congenial Fulks over the phone, on the eve of Georgia Hard's release.

PopMatters: Your last few records of new original material experimented with different genres. Any particular reason why you chose to make another country record now?

Robbie Fulks: It was just kinda what I was listening to, and I really missed writing country songs. I hadn't really sat down and written a set of them for a record since ... I don't know, 1997 probably? So it had been a couple years and I felt I could do it a lot better at this point. I was really eager to take another stab at it.

PM: It's also a different breed of country music this time.

RF:Yeah, what I was listening to was kinda different. I felt like I'd exhausted the '50s honky-tonk, not just for my own purposes, but I wasn't listening to it as much as I was ten years previously. I was listening to more ... I don't know, cheesier stuff like Conway Twitty and Don Williams -- not all of it cheesy, but some of it. It seemed like a fun challenge to jump into that more "adult" school of country. It also seemed to be where my life was, or is right now: I'm out in the 'burbs, I've got a family, I'm an older guy, and I have a mortgage. That style of country just seemed to suit me better than the rave-up style.

PM: Backtracking a little bit to Let's Kill Saturday Night and Couples in Trouble: How do you feel about those now that you've got a couple of years' perspective? They're very different than anything else in your catalog.

RF: Those two records are different?

PM: Yeah, I think so. The style ... Let's Kill Saturday Night has a lot of rock 'n' roll in it --

RF: Well, I think it's proper to pair those two records, 'cause the chain does kinda skip over, in a way chronologically, the Very Best [of Robbie Fulks] and the covers record [13 Hillbilly Giants]. The Very Best record was odds-and-ends, recorded over a lot of different years and the Hillbilly Giants record was what it was. It was supposed to be a website-only release, despite the fact that Bloodshot put it out later. It sorta kept us going on the road for a year and raised some extra money to finish off Couples. It's not that I regret putting out those two records, but they do kinda interrupt the timeline a little bit. I think Let's Kill Saturday Night and Couples in Trouble are a more closely related pair if you consider them without the other two in the middle. Couples in Trouble is, I think, a more polished and successful version of what I was trying to pull off in [Let's Kill Saturday Night]. It takes a lot of different styles and fuses them more successfully. I think I had more time and more knowledge to get it right -- better -- on the green record than on the brown record.

PM: Was it challenging for you to write in different styles for those two records? Songs like "Caroline" or "She Must Think That I Like Poetry"?

RF: Well, I would say that half the songs on [Let's Kill Saturday Night] were written as long as eight or nine years before I made it. Maybe half of them were written in the year leading up to the record. Couples in Trouble was more purely conceived as a record, and was sorta written as a set of songs, even down to the key of one song going into the key of the next song, the crossfades, and stuff like that was a lot more deliberately storyboarded and overseen than the other record.

PM: Wow, I've never even noticed that.

RF: Oh, it's the kind of thing probably nobody but me would notice. [laughs] You just like to think that somebody somewhere is gonna say, "Oh yeah, that goes from A down to A-flat, and the mood kinda depresses a little bit too when that happens".

PM: You use more wordplay and humor when you're writing country songs than not -- is that an instinctive thing when you're writing country tunes?

RF: Well, I think the lineage of funny country songs is a lot more clear and better defined to me than other styles I work in. If I did calypso, then there might be a chance to write funny calypso songs, but I just can't think of a lot of funny ... like on Couples in Trouble there's that old-timey song, a No Depression-sounding song ["In Bristol Town One Bright Day"]? It would just be weird to graph a humorous sensibility onto those styles. Whereas a country two-beat, you know, you can immediately think of a dozen groups: "Oh yeah, that sounds like the Carlisles, or a funny Louvin Brothers song, or whatever". I guess I can hear it, the precedence, better in my head.

PM: Sometimes when you use humor, it comes across as a way to make something sad even sadder. Is that the intended effect that you have?

RF: I'm not sure exactly of an example of what you're talking about, but if you're writing a sad song, it probably helps to use the whole spectrum of emotion to make it seem more true-to-life. So maybe that includes comedy too, I don't know.

PM: Do you enjoy the theatricality involved in performing?

RF: Oh yeah, I love it. We just did this video for the new record ... I just looked at the rough edit today and it's weird, I've never done a video before. I do love the theatricality of performing, but I wasn't sure how to work singing in close-up for this video. There were takes when I was just making goofy eyes, doing weird s*** that didn't come off at all, and other takes where I'm just doing it straight and it looked a lot better. I guess all that is to say that it's just kind of an ingrained thing for me by now when I'm performing in front of people. I'm sure that a lot of stuff comes off goofier than I'm feeling at the time [laughs] ... I was just mortified to see some of the things I was doing, just pronouncing a word or the eyes roll up in the head or the lips go up in a sneer. It's emotionally inappropriate, you know? But it's just part of my vocabulary of gestures by now, I guess.

PM: And singing from different perspectives as well, is that something that draws you to songwriting?

RF: Yeah. Some writers ... like, I just did Danny Barnes's bio, and on his new record -- I think really on all his records -- he sorta claims to just take a large perspective: this song's about this character, and this is poetry that concerns this guy on the bus and he feels like this ... I don't know, I think that's a weird point of view. I'm sure he's sincere when he says that, but I just can't imagine writing like that. I think probably everything I've written has a bit of me in it, but I would say that none of it is a diary. You do have to have perspective and look on it as a piece of "work" [laughs] when you're doing it, just try to look at it objectively. In that sense, none of it's me, but all of it's kinda me. I would assume it's the same for almost anybody that writes songs, except for Danny Barnes. [laughs]

PM: When you're writing, do you look at it as a job that needs to get done? Or are you more emotionally invested in it? I saw this interview with Bob Dylan on 60 Minutes a couple weeks ago, I don't know if you saw it --

RF: No.

PM: He made this bizarre comment about how his songs from the mid-'60s were "magically written" -- I think those were the words he used -- and that he didn't know how he had written them, they just kinda came out of him, you know what I mean? You seem like you probably take a much more ... pragmatic approach than that.

RF: Well, sort of ... you don't know exactly where it comes from, or really what makes one set of eight bars successful and the other one not, even though technically all the pieces may be in place. It is a magical thing -- for me, it's more magical in the moment when you first are hit with the hook or the basis of the song. I really have no idea how to get to that point. I wish I did, but a lot of times I just sit alone in a room, strumming on a guitar and trying to hook into something beyond me for a day -- two, three, four days -- until something just strikes.

PM: It's funny that you say that, because, especially on Georgia Hard, the songs just seem like their construction is so airtight.

RF: Well, I would say that after that phase, if you can call it that, that I do spend anywhere from a couple more days to a couple more months just looking at it as skeptically as possible. Once you're at the point where you have a verse and a chorus, and you're in working on the second verse (or whatever it is), at that point you're going back every day over what you did the day before and trying to look at it critically. I find myself taking out as much stuff as I add after a certain point. There's definitely tons of self-censorship involved for me.

PM: Do you keep the audience's reaction in mind at all?

RF: No, not really.

PM: One of the reasons I really like "If They Could Only See Me Now" is how the understanding of that phrase shifts over the period of the song ... that's kinda what led me to that question. Is that something you think about ahead of time, that you want someone listening to it to think it's about this one thing and then it turns into something else?

RF: Oh yeah, that's definitely a device, you know ... I think that's an example of the song where you start with a phrase and you think, "Yeah, I could do a narrative and there's a murder in it and I could keep coming back to that phrase." And you sorta get the ending in mind even before you really start working on any of the particular lines. You get the shape of the story in mind. I think, again, as with humor, it's just such a strong country music idea. I'm forgetting the name of it now, this Ferlin Husky song about the guy who drives his wife out to an overlook, and then pushes her off in the car and kills her. s***, I should remember it, because it's sort of related to that song. [pauses] Oh, "You Pushed Me Too Far". It's kinda played for comedy in that song, but you yourself can imagine the whole chain of verses based on that hook. And at the end he kinda goes, "But this time you pushed me too -- FAAAAaaarrr" [voice trailing off]. It goes into echo, and that's the end of the song. Oh, and then at the end of "FAAAaaarrr", he goes, [Vincent Price-esque laugh].

PM: What is it about human follies, or waywardness, or heartbreak that attracts you to them as subjects?

RF: Happy and joy and ha-ha and sunshine are just boring, really. Dottie West has that "I was raised on good ol' country sunshine" song, and I'm sure that's an interesting song and everything, but I think that stuff is just so tricky to pull off without sounding like a Coke commercial.

PM: Where do you see yourself in the current climate of country music? Are you in there at all?

RF: Oh God, I have no idea, that's probably for you to say. I don't really buy that much new country stuff ... I bought Patty Loveless's last couple of records and I thought they were really good. This new Lee Ann Womack is pretty good. They really haven't gotten back on the rails, as far as I'm concerned, since they jumped the rails in the late '80s. That's the point of view of a middle-aged curmudgeon, probably, but ... When I was younger and I'd get a Randy Travis record or Dwight Yoakam record, or Marty Stuart or Foster & Lloyd, the stuff just seemed young and kinda kick-ass and fresh, like the musicians weren't writing with an audience in mind. There was more of a spirit of adventure in the music. I just don't hear that nearly as much in the new stuff that's aimed at the radio. There's all sorts of stuff, obviously, a lot of it in Nashville that is around the margins, either older or weirder or that comes out on independent labels. There's a lot of great country-related stuff, but as far as the radio stuff, I just don't know.

PM: Do you think there's any one thing that caused that downward spiral?

RF: Well, whatever's successful is what everybody impersonates. First it was the Garth Brooks model, and then I think Shania was probably the next person to come out and sell over 10 million records, and that sorta set the standard for a while. And the Dixie Chicks -- actually, I like some of the Dixie Chicks' music a lot. You can probably guess what I like, because we probably both have slightly elitist tastes in music. It's just too imitative once these models get established and everything has to sound like Garth Brooks for the next five years. It's a good way to run a business; it's just really boring for somebody that's interested in music as more than wallpaper.

PM: Do you have any kind of professional relationship with Nashville currently?

RF: No, if you mean publishing, management, lawyers, then no. I just really have friends down there. I like it there a lot -- it's a great working environment, there are so many great players there, great studios and production houses. I have friends that work at labels there, but I don't have any business ties there.

PM: What about the Secret Country performances that you host?

RF: The third Sunday of every month, it's a live show at the Old Town School [in Chicago, IL]. It's turned into a produced package for XM that airs about a month after that (they air it three times a week during the last week of the month). I curate and host the series; each show is a double bill of acts that are, like we were talking about, the more interesting acts on the outside of country music, on the fringes. So far we've had Rosie Flores, Bill Kirchen, Phil Lee, BR549, Buddy Miller, Al Anderson. Coming up we've got Bobby Bare Jr., Johnny Dowd, Redd Volkaert...hopefully for the fall (nothing solid, but hopefully) Bill Frisell, Neko Case, and if I get really lucky, Connie Smith, but I haven't talked to her yet.

PM: Wow, that sounds great.

RF: Oh yeah, it's just the highlight of my month. I love putting the shows together, and I get to play with some of the people that come through or put together a band for them, maybe just sing alongside them -- that's thrilling. Satellite radio is such an open format right now; for me, it was just calling up the program director and saying I had this idea, and they were like, "sure, send it in". It was so easy, probably because nobody listens to it, but I think it's just common sense that it's going to keep growing exponentially over the next couple of years, because the alternative to satellite radio is so barren and irrelevant.

PM: How did your relationship with Yep Roc come about?

RF: They've been really fantastic so far, and I'm just waiting for the record to come out so I can become bitterly disappointed at them or something. [laughs] I'm just really, really happy and enthusiastic about being with them. Glenn [Dicker], the guy who runs [Yep Roc], sent me an email about this Michael Jackson record that I had in the pipeline two years ago (I've sort of stalled on it since then). Anyway, I had the record finished and was kinda shopping it around; he sent me a note saying he might like to distribute it through Redeye's distribution arm. That didn't come to be, but we kept in touch after that. When [Georgia Hard] was done, I sent him a note to see if he was interested in hearing it, and he was. He's just really, really flexible, kind of in that way that Bloodshot is, like the kid that just opened his record label in his basement down the street. But the more you find out about the label, you find out how resourceful and large it is. They have 24-25 people working in there, just on the record label side of their office, and the other side is this big warehouse where they have more people working. Everybody has a young attitude and is really accessible ... I hate to use a cliché, but it's a big, positive attitude, which is kinda hard to run across in the record business. It's such a brutalizing business.

PM: Yeah, it seems like a lot of people have been running to that label lately, like its roster has tripled in size in the last few months.

RF: Well my first question to him when I met him in the flesh was, "Where does all your money come from?" Because they get all these acts -- and some of them aren't coming cheap -- and then you see these full-color ads in Spin and ritzy magazines. I never did find out the answer to that question! [laughs] But I'm not complaining about it; they paid me a very fair advance, I'm there for two records ... hopefully more if those two records work out.

PM: Speaking of the Michael Jackson covers record, is that going to be indefinitely delayed?

RF: I know Glenn's not interested in releasing it, so it won't be my next record. I do want to get it out sometime, even if it's just digital downloads online, 'cause it's done and it's good and it was a big investment for me. But as long as [Jackson]'s a figure of ridicule and some menace to the world as this alleged child rapist, then it's probably not a good idea to put out a tribute to him.

PM: Which songs did you do for that?

RF: Some of the better-known ones would probably be "Billie Jean", "Ben", "Don't Stop 'Till You Get Enough" ... we even did one from his last record, Invincible, which we did kind of as a tone poem, kind of like John Zorn, a noisy approach to that song. Musically it's all over the map, from bluegrass to that.

PM: What was the impetus for that record?

RF: It's a boring story, but there's this cultural center downtown in Chicago where I arranged a set of his songs for guitar and mandolin. And then just because "Billie Jean" was such an easy song to work up with the band, this simple idea of how to reinterpret the song based on a repeating motif in E-minor. We started doing it at shows, and the reaction was always really strong -- people liked it better than anything I wrote. It was an interesting reaction, because you sing the first line ("She was more like a beauty queen from a movie scene") and people go, "Ha ha ha ha". And you go into the song, and maybe there's another little titter as the audience realizes you're actually going to go through with this crap. Then you present the song really seriously, in this different moody arrangement -- and it's a good song, that's the thing about his songs. He's got so many good songs, just apart from being such a kick-ass singer and a really talented guy. The songs really stand up to different treatments. By the end of this song, people are kinda hooked on it ... and it is kind of a spooky set of lyrics when you play them spookily. It seemed to get a guaranteed reaction. That was the basis for it: the idea that maybe you can take these songs that everybody thinks are jokes, for some reason ... people think Michael Jackson's some kind of a joke, and I'm not sure why. It's just all part of our cultural baggage; we don't think about it that much. If you sort of cast it all in a new light, maybe it can be interesting music.

From Durham, NC's Independent Weekly:
http://indyweek.com/durham/current/musicspot.html

Easy to be hard

Robbie Fulks soaks in the seventies

By Rick Cornell

In addition to being a bona fide singing, picking, writing and band-leading quadruple threat, Robbie Fulks deserves the lofty title of entertainer. Based on those credentials, and taking into account the era of country music that he celebrates so skillfully on his new Georgia Hard, if this were 1973 it'd be easy to imagine Fulks hosting his own weekly variety show. Or at least getting a Christmas special on which he, dressed in a nice cardigan, serves up Roger Miller's "Old Toy Trains" and a country-flavored "Winter Wonderland" in front of a crackling fire.

By design the songs on Georgia Hard, all Fulks originals, conjure thoughts and images of that gone-but-not-forgotten period of country music, a time of not only variety shows and Roger Miller but also creeping suburban malaise and songs as full of genuine human drama as they were nimble wordplay. (Lest we be accused of rose-colored revisionism, it's worth noting that country music in the '70s was far from perfect.) "To me, country music traditionally has something that it's done very well: tell universal stories of common travails and joys and all the other mundane things along the way," says Fulks on the phone from his Chicago home. "But I think country music has abandoned that, and I think hip hop covers that more than any other modern popular music. Country has turned into this kind of feel-good wallpaper over the last 10 or 15 years."

In an attempt to strip the walls and reveal that universality, Fulks, who spent his high school years in central North Carolina, has turned the musical dial back a good 25 or 30 years. "With the '70s mode that I'm using on this record, it did twist me in those more personal directions," he explains. "When it was the '70s, I was at my most impressionable. I was a kid learning about music."

The result is a collection of songs about real people struggling with real problems. The bar-set "You Don't Want What I Have" presents a truthful twist on the grass is always greener theme, and "Doin' Right (For All the Wrong Reasons)" features a husband with ulterior motives for staying true to his wife. Meanwhile, the protagonist of "All You Can Cheat" struggles with his adulterous addiction. But Fulks also knows how to balance moods. There's a body count (a deserting father and a cheating spouse both meet their maker), but there are also light moments courtesy of "Goodbye, Cruel Girl" and Georgia Hard's lively and accusatory centerpiece "Countrier Than Thou." Fulks' work on last year's Johnny Paycheck tribute album Touch My Heart--he produced, contributed a duet with Gail Davies, and oversaw a house band that was the very definition of distinguished vets" (pedal steel legend Lloyd Green and guitarist Redd Volkaert among others)--was clearly an inspiration, and he jumped at the chance to work with the same core group of musicians on his record. "The music that comes out is natural and kind of genetic, in the sense that it's not chart reading; it's just kind of 'lived' music," says Fulks. "For me, it was an uplifting and eye-opening experience, and I couldn't wait to go write songs and cast those guys, so to speak, in the songs." Thus, Green's pedal steel and Hank Singer's fiddle co-star all over Georgia Hard alongside Fulks' nifty acoustic guitar work, and there are cameos from the likes of keyboardist Joe Terry, banjoist Alison Brown and mandolinist Sam Bush.

Georgia Hard is a pure country record, but anybody who has followed Fulks' career across six previous albums or seen his live show knows that templates get smashed from record to record, sometimes even from show to show. He writes pop songs on par with Marshall Crenshaw and Matthew Sweet, and he can move from a honky-tonking original to a cover of Michael Jackson or Emerson, Lake and Palmer without breaking stride. (An album of Jackson songs remains on the shelf due to Jackson's notoriety.) He'll even belt an irony-free version of Cher's "Believe" that will weaken your knees. The guy's an entertainer.

Robbie Fulks plays The Pour House in Raleigh on Sunday, June 5. The music starts at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10.