For Aaron Dowdy, the frontman for North Carolina’s Fust, choosing “Spangled” as the alt country band’s lead single seemed natural on a number of fronts.
“’Spangled’ felt like a culmination of everything we had done so far, but also a bit of a leap. You hear the whole band in this song weaving together in a way that foregrounds that this is, indeed, a band and not just a songwriting outfit,” Dowdy said. “The harmonies, the various lead lines twisting in and out of each other, the rhythm. It all just feels like the band: comfortable and yet searching, with each element in full embrace. The lyrics are perplexing and yet familiar, the melodies winding yet memorable.
“I think the themes on the song sort of set up the whole record: place, struggle, memory, history; a balance of freedom and repression; the cosmic scope of the smallest detail. It was the first song I wrote for the record and the first song we recorded. It just made sense that it was the first song we would put out.”
Fust brings its Big Ugly tour —named after their “Big Ugly” album, which dropped on March 7 — to Bottlerocket Social Hall in Pittsburgh’s Allentown neighborhood on April 8, with Justin Bennett opening.
The album, recorded with producer Alex Farrar (MJ Lenderman, Squirrel Flower), also features an appearance from Pittsburgh’s Merce Lemon on the track, “What’s His Name.”
In an email interview over the weekend, Dowdy delved deeper into “Big Ugly,” his songwriting style and more:
How did producer Alex Farrar help steer “Big Ugly” to its final product?
There are two Alexes. The first Alex is the one who knows exactly what to do, and who does it without us. Then there is the second Alex, who is a patient and excited collaborator. When we record, we try to just let Alex take the lead — using his technical ability and his ear to discern whether we’ve recorded what we need to record and that it sounds basically finished on the front end. Then there is the aftermath, which is me listening very carefully and removing and tweaking and adding and adorning and changing. He patiently listens with me as we take what he initially got out of us and we shape it together into something more delicate.
So his fingerprints are on it from the moment we strike the first chord to the moment I say it’s done. Alex is the helmsman and it’s impossible to listen to “Big Ugly” without hearing his touch in every little corner of the sound.
How much does environment (like your home scene in North Carolina or the rural West Virginia of your family) influence your songs?
Place is everything: it’s where people are, where drama plays out, where little artifacts from different time periods and contexts mix together, where words are spoken a certain way. You should be able to take a snapshot of a place and draw out the history of the world from that point of view. The places I choose tend to be the ones where I live or lived or visited in a more meaningful way. If I go to where my history is, then the hope is that I can find a greater history there too.
Are you always on the lookout for new material in your everyday life? Does being on the road expose you to even more possibilities?
Yes, I would say so. Especially melodies that I just start singing — I’ll record them on my phone and just try to keep those little melodic phrases. Once I have a good melodic kernel, I can experiment with routing words through it, which sometimes fit but often make the melody contort to form new variations — that’s when a song starts to emerge. I try to keep notes on little phrases and images in my daily life that I’ll turn to when it’s time to route words through a melody I have.
The world is a better writer than me so it does take a certain disposition to treat the general goings-on as themselves writing for potential songs. The road is probably a good producer of this because you’re constantly interacting with a set of differences and accidents you didn’t expect or little images you couldn’t have imagined. I always thought about the road movie as the perfect case here. If you set out to make a road movie, and you are driving around looking for what might be important for the film, you start to see everything as an extension of the movie you want to make. The whole world starts to be auditioning for the film you want to make. So maybe something like that but with little details and interactions: the little details of the world are always auditioning for the song I want to write.
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How would you describe your songwriting? Are you injecting yourself into the songs or is it more of a detached observer?
Maybe somewhere between these two poles. I would say my primary focus is melody and song form. Melody is the thing I am after more than anything else, even if it doesn’t always feel like it with Fust — but I put a lot of time into the way each word is sung. And I spend a lot of time thinking about the form a song can take to make it feel secure: the song structure, the rhythms, the emptinesses. All of that is more important to me than the lyrics.
Lyrics for me are really two things. They are collections of images and phrases, on the one hand, and narrative on the other. There is a balance to strike between not giving too much narrative but also not being too abstract with the collection of images or relying on certain words that I believe carry a lot of meaning to do all the work. I am looking for songs that present a clear picture of a time and place that seems to be teeming with meaning and conflict but that doesn’t always add up to a clear sense of what’s going on. A kind of confusion that makes clarity feel just out of reach. The personal stuff tends to just seep in once the song develops and I have to go searching for how to expand on a narrative situation or on a detail. But I rarely start from the personal.
Is there any genre of music you are into that would be surprising to your normal audience?
I’m not sure what would surprise people. I love the human voice so I listen to a lot of Khayal and Qawwali music. On the flip side, I listen to a lot of harsh noise and metal: always searching for the biggest block of noise to sustain in my ears.