Robbie Fulks, Master of Alt-Country, Finally Plants Both Feet in the World of Acoustic Pickers With ‘Bluegrass Vacation’

To say that Robbie Fulks has been one of the best singer-songwriters in American roots music over the last quarter-century would be correct, and maybe a little reductive, too; he’s one of the best writers in America, period. It might be tempting to append the word “unsung,” since Fulks’ regular touring since the late ’90s has usually found him playing sub-SoFi rooms — like Hotel Cafe, where he’ll be appearing May 20. But his reputation as one of American’s modern masters precedes him in many places where it counts, whether it’s the two Grammy nominations he’s picked up in folk and roots categories, or his renown for acoustic shredding landing him on the cover of guitar magazines, or just the company of the players that are drawn to him.

Fulks has long been pegged — not inaccurately — as an essential alt-country guy, having emerged out of the Chicago rocking-roots scene with his first album for Bloodshot in 1996, the ironically titled “Country Love Songs,” which included songs that are still nightly requests in his set like “She Took a Lot of Pills (and Died)” and the Buck Owens homage “The Buck Starts Here.” But in his most recent albums he leaned harder into a more austere folk tradition and now, on his just-released debut for Compass Records, Fulks has planted both feet squarely in bluegrass, for the moment. Or re-planted: It’s the genre he grew up on as a kid, however few guys turning 60 who once recorded rock ‘n’ roll for Geffen can say that.

His fresh detour, “Bluegrass Vacation,” features such highly regarded musicians as Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Sierra Hull, John Cowan, Chris Eldridge, Tim O’Brien, Stuart Duncan, Dennis Crouch, Ronnie McCoury, David Grier, Todd Phillips, Missy Raines and, not least of all, Compass founder Alison Brown. Fulks, who moved to the L.A. area just prior to the pandemic, talked with PvNew near his home in Atwater Village.

“Bluegrass” is not the description you’d use for any of your 15 or so previous albums, right?

Right, although there’s been a bluegrass tune on a couple of them. The last couple, “Upland Stories” (from 2016) and “Gone Away Backward” (2013), if you listen to ‘em, you wouldn’t be surprised if the guy made a bluegrass record, I think.

So what was the journey that culminated in you doing a record that was full-scale bluegrass?

I made a chapter change in about 2009 or 2010, when I stopped doing this drums-and-loud thing on the road that was always sort of the same quartet, taking it everywhere and beating it out. That was mostly what I was doing for 13 years before I started doing this playing-acoustic-instruments-with-microphones thing that I’m doing now. Along the way, I started playing more with hot-shot players, like (bassist) Todd Phillips, who used to work with Tony Rice; another is Shad Cobb, a hotshot fiddler; and a great banjoist, Mike Bub, who played with the Del McCoury Band. Getting to work with these people, I feel like I just sort of gradually became better known in that little world.

At the same time, when somebody covered my music, most of the time it’d be a bluegrass act. Sam Bush covered me and John Cowan covered me, and a couple smaller bluegrass bands, so I started noticing that, OK, I’m a little bit better known as a songwriter to those people. And my first job in full-time music was with a bluegrass band, back in the ‘80s. So why exactly in 2020 I started working on this… it seemed propitious.

I mean, some of these guys that I really wanted to snag and collaborate with instrumentally on the record, like Sam and Todd and Jerry Douglas, I mean, they’re not young, right? So it’s a good reason not to wait 10 years to do it. And, besides that, I just felt like I’m starting to know all these people, and I can like invite them and they’ll say yes! I couldn’t have done that six, seven, eight years ago. It’s just really exciting. Of all the people in music, these are maybe the people I admire most, the people that are that prodigious in that realm of music. Maybe that and jazz, both. It’s very humbling and flattering to be able to make music with them.

And you grew up immersed in bluegrass, which even a lot of your fans may not know until they hear the song you wrote on the album about attending festivals as a kid in the early ‘70s, “Longhair Bluegrass.” It was only then that I realized that that was a first thing for you, more than country music.

Definitely. I didn’t latch onto country until I was in my twenties, but my folks listened to bluegrass. Doc Watson might be my earliest memory, hearing him on my dad’s big reel-to-reel tape recorder. And then they would take me to occasional festivals and, yeah, I was aware of that before country.

In that song “Longhair Bluegrass,” you do a good job of evoking a unique point in time about 50 years ago where hippies and old-timers were mixing it up at festivals, getting along, coming from such different places, and it kind of worked.

Yeah, that’s my perspective. I think it’s probably accurate. When was the “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” record? ’72? [That highly influential, intergenerational album by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band brought in elder guests like Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, “Mother” Maybelle Carter and Jimmy Martin.] And then, the first New Grass Revival record [from a progressive band with members including Sam Bush and, later, John Cowan and Béla Fleck) was ‘72 — which followed the Bluegrass Alliance, which was an earlier sort of ahead-of-its time thing. Yeah, the first half of the ‘70s, it was booming for sure.

The anecdote that I often refer to is that Sam Bush won some fiddle festival competition in the early ‘70s, or maybe even late ‘60s when he was a teenager. And when he won it, they had a hall of the photographs and names of the people, and they’d only put his name with a black frame for the photo, because he had long hair and it wasn’t appropriate. That was illustrative not just of the sort of bigotry of the time of the older set, the gatekeepers of music in the day, but also that they couldn’t keep guys like that out — because they played so fucking well. The way to get into that group was to play fast and clean and fabulously. And these young guys, a lot of them did all those things. They couldn’t expel them, even though they might have wanted to.

Did you always maintain that interest in bluegrass even when you were doing other styles of music like country and rock?

I think that when I was 30, I was ready to get out of it and do something different — I had an idea that there were hipper things to do, back around 1990 or something. There was a time when I wanted to branch out and probably thought, “That’s something I did when I was like a kid. Now it’s time to move on.” But I can play guitar kind of fast, and so that always seemed like something to show people, even in a show that wasn’t bluegrass — just to step on the volume pedal and take a fast solo in a song or two and show off a little So it was never gone completely.

Looking back on your catalog, it sort of feels like it kind of went from pretty straightforward traditional country to rock and then back to country — and then more toward a kind of folk with traces of bluegrass mixed in there.

Some of that was driven by what the labels were and what they wanted, and maybe a little bit of strategic sense of what I should be doing now, given what I did on the last record. But some of it was also driven by: This is where my interests are right now. With the “Georgia Hard” record in 2005, I was getting really into ‘70s country, and I dared to think that I could maybe try to write a Bill Anderson-ish song or something like that and go for that sort of suburban school of country from that time period that I was really digging as a listener.

You’ve been known for writing some pretty funny material, to say the least. People still come to your shows knowing they will laugh, a lot. But the last couple of albums grew a bit more solemn, it seemed like. This album isn’t like a full-scale reversal in tone, but it does have a comical cover. Does it shift back the other way a bit, in lightness?

“Gone Away Backward” wouldn’t necessarily have been as downbeat as it was, but there were five or six songs that we recorded that didn’t make the cut, and the inclusion of those might have tilted it in a different way than it ended up being. But a bluegrass album was, I think, always gonna have an emphasis on uptempo. I mean, banjo, three-finger banjo, you want to hear that moving along — the drive of the thing. You don’t want to hear a bluegrass album where two-thirds of the songs are ballads. That doesn’t make any sense.

When I interviewed Molly Tuttle recently, she said that it had been difficult for her, as a writer, to merge her bluegrass style and her singer-songwriter style. She always thought she would just always have to make two different kinds of albums. It was hard for her to write contemporary-sounding lyrics for music that sounded that traditional. But on her latest album, she felt like she had solved that for herself, a little bit. In your writing, do you find that you write differently if you’re aiming it toward a bluegrass sound?

It’s intimidating to try to write a Bill Monroe-style song. And maybe there’s a question about authenticity that you’re getting at with Molly that’s in there too. Although, you know, if I wrote a song like “Goodbye Old Pal” or “I’m Going Back to Old Kentucky” (both vintage songs by Bill Monroe), that I could probably pull it off, especially at my present age, compared to Molly. But it’s hard to write that simply and make those songs sent kind of off the cuff.

But there’s another thing I came across lately… When Nolan Porterfield wrote about Jimmy Rogers [in the 2007 book “Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler”], he said these songs weren’t so much composed as compiled. Like, Jimmie would take, like, memes that were in the air as lyrics. His sister-in-law would also be scouring the countryside, A.P. Carter-style, for folk songs that weren’t copyrighted, and she would send ideas and lyrics to him. So some of these songs of Jimmie’s sound like four different songs mashed together into one weird two-minute song that’s a little collage. And I love that. I love that feel of some of these old-time lyrics that either come from the oral culture or were pseudo-composed by guys like Jimmie and A.P. Carter, where, if you have a four-verse song, there’s no particular reason why the second verse comes second, or the fourth verse comes fourth. It’s like they kind of wander in that William S. Burroughs, up-in-the-air, cut-and-paste style a little bit.

Anyway, so I wrote a couple like that for this record, maybe. I think old-time music is a little bit like that. The first song on the record (“One Glass of Whiskey”) and last song on the record (“Old-Time Music is Here to Stay”) are kind of light on their feet and meandering, and have a little bit of a traditional feel to the lyrics. There’s another one on there, a waltz called ”Lonely and Hardly Alive.” It’s like a Jimmy Martin-style, fast, three-quarter despair song. So a couple of these are written with a model in mind, like from 60 years ago or something, but then others aren’t. I guess I kept burying the angle on it, so it didn’t end up sounding either too revivalist or too “songwriter,” either one.

In some of your songs, old or new, you drift toward narrators — or maybe it’s your own perspective — who kind of have one foot in the country and one foot in town.

That’s interesting, because bluegrass is so often thought of as a backwards kind of a thing. But I don’t quite think of it that way. When I think of these older records that I heard as a kid by Jim and Jesse and the Osborne Brothers and the Country Gentlemen, I’m thinking about fine-tooled, in-studio performances that have a commercial market in mind. It’s way different from string bands of the ‘20s or ‘30s, for instance. It’s crafted and it’s very skillful, and to me in a kind of urban way. I mean, those guys were cutting records in Nashville, which wasn’t a Podunk town in the ‘60s. The Country Gentlemen of course were working out of Washington, D.C. and had a collegiate audience that they were playing for. And it’s even truer of that ‘70s thing we were talking about — it’s just not rednecky.

The first song on the album, “One Glass of Whiskey,” has some details about your experience living here in L.A., right?

Yeah, totally. The last couple records, I’ve been a lot freer about putting personal details into the songs. As you get older. you have more personal details to pull from, so that works out. It seems interesting to live in L.A. and be looking at horses every morning (living near an equestrian center) —that’s wild.

You were so associated with Chicago. When you would come and play L.A., you would make some remarks that didn’t make it seem like you were completely smitten with the place. How’d you end up in California, and what do you think now?

My wife is a voice actress, and it made sense for her. I was up for changing the scene, getting out of Chicago and trying someplace else. And if you follow my stupid, contrarian line of thinking, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it here — and was therefore more eager to come here and see like how terrible it might be. But I loved it. Within weeks I was like: I think I wanna stay here and probably die here. I think like a New York guy traditionally, and loved living there when I was young. But over the years, going back there just to work, it was like “Get me outta here” at the end of two days. It’s too frantic for my older metabolism, or something.

I’ve always kind of like had an idea that I didn’t like it, but partly based on stereotypes and partly, say, coming in to LAX, and then driving from there to McCabe’s — it’s not a scenic route. But friends that were here said these old, funky neighborhoods of L.A. are awesome. … I’m living over there in the equestrian area of Atwater. I wake up in the morning, grab oranges off the tree, squeeze juice and watch horses canter across the field with the river just past and a mountain beyond the river. That’s not what people are picturing about L.A. but it’s great. And then walking a couple blocks to get to here and sip lattes with the hoi polloi, it’s great… Does “hoi polloi” mean the elite or the masses? I always forget.

It’s the masses.

I’m sorry. I mean the aristocrats!

Rightly or wrongly, L.A. is not the first place that stereotypically you think of if you are thinking, “Let’s get some mandolin players together.”

Before I came here, a couple friends told me it was kind of a dead zone for bluegrass. But when the pandemic happened, this engineer friend that lives down by Silver Lake, Sheldon Gomberg, started hosting these backyard gatherings with mandolin players, fiddlers, guitarists — Sean (Watkins) was there — every other week for the better part of a year, while you couldn’t go places or do things, and it was fantastic. I don’t think I’d jammed with stranger in the backyard since I was 17 or something, and it was one of those late-life rejuvenations that you get sometimes.

As you think back on hippies and old-times coming together to celebrate bluegrass during the counterculture years… how do you think divides like that shake out now?

I found out this morning that the “Longhair Bluegrass” song was added on the bluegrass station on SiriusXM, which was a little surprising, because it talks about dope and it bashes religion briefly in a line. On the one hand, that scene is so long ago, it’s like, come on, get over it — have a sense of humor about it. But on the other hand, the station manager that just left, Kyle Cantrell, I think would not probably have been amenable to adding that song. And it just made me wonder if it was just a fluke that it was added, or if it really is an index of something a little broader. (The record company) were worried about that song … not worried, but they just didn’t wanna lead with it, and they weren’t sure how well the people at Bluegrass Junction would take to the record — the whole end of that song, specifically. “Well, maybe somebody late at night might play that song.” But no, it’s like, people are gonna hear it on that station. My lyrics can be needling, a little bit, and I’m curious to see if that’s played at 3 in the afternoon, drive time, for the bluegrass fans, coming out of a Jimmy Martin song to that. That’d be fun.

Do you feel like it’s kind of a one-off for you to go this deeply into bluegrass for an album, or is indicative of you sticking with this vein?

I think the word “vacation” was a bit of a hedge. Right? I think there probably won’t be another one after this, but if it sells real well, then I would consider doing another one. I had fun doing it. But, I don’t know, two in a row would imply that this is a definite shift in direction. I’ve always wanted to be free to swing my arms and not be boxed in by these styles and categories.

But you feel like your guitar playing style will always be bluegrass somehow?

Oh, totally. I can’t get it out of there.

You said recently in a post or blog that you are reconciling yourself to the idea that you “play for a lot of old people now.” But even though it’s not remotely the same style as yours, as you struck at all by how many people are into a bluegrass-based young people like Billy Strings or Molly?

I get the feeling that there are young people who think bluegrass is cool. But, I mean, they’re young people that think that old people are cool. And I was one of those people when I was young. It was like, I definitely wanted to listen to old people making music. That’s definitely still around, right? But I do think maybe it’s a tiny amount of people who hear that just think it’s cool without any associations or preconceptions — that they just like the sound of it. It’s maybe a very small section of young people who have inherited some thing in their brain or something from their ancestors where they still respond.

It’s wild. I mean, it’s hard for me to imagine that these instruments themselves could be gone in 50 years. But it’s definitely possible. Talking to my youngest kid the other day, I said, “Do you think of performances at all, when you hear music? Like, if you hear a hit song you like, do you picture people performing it, or is that even important?” And he said, “No.” He said, “If it’s a guy sitting at home alone inventing the music on his computer, I like that better. I admire that person more, as sort of a genius of music.” So that was really interesting to hear. And you know, you can parse that idea, when you hear it, and make sense out of it — why somebody would admire that jack-of-all-trades person with a computer. It is definitely a high level of intelligence to make that music fly. But I cannot get behind it, the way I can get behind a group collaborating in performance.

Fulks’ tour dates: