“Gonna trash the house, in search of what we’re losing / Now what we’re looking for is difficult to say / But it feels good to be a part of a greater kind of looking / Gonna be a searcher for the rest of my days.” So sings Fust‘s Aaron Dowdy on ‘Searchers’, a track from the North Carolina six-piece’s new album Genevieve, out today on Dear Life Records. The statement captures the tensions around which the entire record is built. Construction and destruction intertwined. For this is a picture of marriage which nevertheless features relationships disintegrating. A portrayal of the perennially unsettled attempting to settle down. A reflection on that which has not yet ended, where the drive to realise some future ideal is complicated by the dawning suspicion such a future might not exist as an end in its own right. But, in finding oneself within such a moment, choosing to continue regardless. Deciding the distance of the goal should not dent the original pursuit. Like the worker who perpetually dreams of the coming utopia, the lover who continues loving despite never becoming one with his wife. The saint who devotes their life to prayer with no sure knowledge that God is present and listening, for a saint is no a saint while they are still alive.
The name Genevieve carries a particular image. Take the legendary Genevieve of Brabant, a virtuous wife falsely accused of infidelity and sentenced to death, only to escape and raise her child out in the wilderness of the Ardennes. A chaste, maternal figure who did not waver through years of gross injustice. Or Saint Genevieve, a woman at the other end of the family spectrum, devoted to no man but God Himself. A consecrated virgin taken to asceticism and mortification of the flesh. Two women very different in their lifestyles but linked in their ability to maintain dignity when faced with discomfort or persecution. Perhaps one definition of the feminine. Through a series of vignettes and fictional reflections, Fust craft their album around such imagery, offering a picture of love as a persistent yet uneven thing. Something to be fuelled, protected, practised and ritualised. Modest in its own way and sacrosanct because of it. A painting never quiet finished, an ongoing crisis. A quiet thing performed in the grey hollows of the everyday.
We took the opportunity to speak with Dowdy about Genevieve, touching on everything from the idea of a ‘quiet life’ and latent religiosity to the significance of the cover art and the importance of film, not to mention the team of collaborators who helped bring the record to life.
Can we talk a little about the title? The name Genevieve carries a certain image. Feminine, familial, humble, virtuous. Is Genevieve a real person? And why did you decide to give the album that name?
The name Genevieve doesn’t reference anyone in particular—it’s more trying to conjure that image of marriage and family you’re getting at. Our last record Evil Joy took the point of view of a couple’s crack-up, and so I wanted to try something a bit more agreeable this time. That title referenced an ecstatically selfish feeling whereas this title references someone else’s name, so there is a marked shift in perspective toward someone or something other than yourself at play here. And it might sound strange but Genevieve is, to me at least, a marriage record. It has at its core songs about commitment. But that doesn’t mean it’s free of the kind of darkness I tend to like in songwriting, because the lesson of commitment is that one ultimately commits to the things they dislike in another person: not just to the charms but to the grievances, resentments, to the ego blows that can never be curbed. I got married during the period I wrote the songs that went into this record and I wanted to find a way to write about marriage in my own way. My partner is at this point used to me writing songs that are quite pitiful when it comes to presenting relationships. But I think there’s something really valuable in narrating from the other side of whatever is going on in your life—trying to get at something loving in a roundabout way.
The song ‘Genevieve’ was the first song that to me sounded right, that made me excited for the album. It became the key song for me, not conceptually but as a recording, as the compass for how the rest of the record should sound. Conceptually, it’s probably a strange choice for the title track. Whereas a character like Sarah Lee in ‘Town in Decline’ is a marriage figure in a stable relationship, Genevieve figures a much more complicated kind of relationship. In short, it is a song about two people who have inbuilt into the very nature of their relationship a vow of silence. It’s the same couple, I think, in the album’s last song ‘A Clown Like Me’. I am really struck by such a relationship, considering that the common sense approach suggests that your partner is the one person you’re truly open and honest with, or is I guess ideally such a person. The characters in the title track for whatever reason don’t talk to each other in a way that could sustain them living together: something is unshareable even if a desire to share may exist. There is a dissonance that is exciting to me in a song that uses the name most evocative of marriage and family to describe a relationship that falls apart for lack of communication. Or if not lack of communication, two people who simply cannot for the life of them put into words their commitments.
Genevieve is one of many names strewn throughout the lyrics—none of them real in any direct sense. I think giving character to certain ideas and problems was really helpful for me in writing this record, throughout which there are a number of I guess female archetypes. For instance, in ‘Violent Jubilee’ there is the girl in black who—apart from having a long history in the gothic tradition—is a figure in Appalachian folklore where I am from in southwest Virginia who would visit and requite unfaithful husbands. A figure like that works for me because that song is about having children and there is a certain tension between the woman in black who is pregnant and ‘Angel’ who has no children. It’s this kind of combination I really like to write into songs. Genevieve is an archetypal “wife” I guess but she is also a saint and so a figure absolutely outside of the family. You often see her holding a loaf of bread, which is just lovely, and I’m moved by the kind of poverty that comes with saintliness but also I know it’s a hard thing to sustain in a marriage. So I like that combination. And a small thing that led me finally to decide on it as the title was that she is often called upon as the saint of disasters such as widespread fever and this is a record made in the aftermath of the pandemic.
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There was an interesting relationship with time present on your previous record, Evil Joy. The classic yearning of country music juxtaposed with the anxiety of a finite life, dreams of better days challenged by the sense that the months and years were accelerating—there might not be a future after all. Is it fair to say Genevieve is more settled in its outlook? No less wistful, still full of longing, but maybe making peace with time’s habit of passing? I think the artwork captures the mood perfectly?
The cover is a painting by Sasha Popovici, who also painted the Evil Joy cover. He is really exceptional and known for painting a kind of magical realism, for landscapes that harbor something that doesn’t belong, usually shapes or geometries that somehow cut open or interrupt the grandeur of the view. I obviously really like this tension, but for both covers I asked for something else. With Evil Joy it was a kind of a natural non-place, something like a nowhere Eden where you might spend a night on the lam. That painting fit the themes of that record, the ones you mention: finite life, longing, temporariness, leaving, a kind of normalized malevolence.
With Genevieve, I asked for a domestic scene that is unfinished. We looked at Pissarro a lot, rural scenes of daily life and labor. And I especially wanted a painting that, even if it was incomplete, still showed that it was nonetheless committed to a perspective, to a scene that could be completed or that once was completed but is no longer in full view. I taped up the image and hand-wrote the name as if it belonged to a scrapbook or work journal, as if even this inaccessibility of the implied image is itself a memory or wishful thinking, not something that claims to be anything more. It is this kind of sense of being “settled” I really like: you have an image of domestic life that can’t itself really come to completion and so it is this very inability that you settle for.
And of course unfinishedness has everything to do with time as you describe it: a time suspended, uncertain, in progress, ongoing. We struggled with the cover. I don’t think it was easy for Sasha to paint an unfinished painting without taking the image too far. I love that most about the cover, that Sasha didn’t want it to stop there, that there was a more fully formed future that he wanted for it but which for me would have been wrong. It turned out to be a very still, quiet image that can nonetheless evoke this kind of crisis. And for me this is all very close to the kind of situations whose point of view Fust tries to take up.
As a related question, there’s a certain… I’m hesitant to call it smallness because some of the tracks have an almost sublime weight (I mean, just listen to ‘Violent Jubilee’), but some modesty or grounded quality to the album. It stands out on tracks like ‘Town in Decline’, which takes on a subject matter so often portrayed in a tortured, desperate light and leavens it with an understated, everyday quality. Post-industrial America as a place of getting by and making do. Did you approach the record with these ideas in mind?
Yes, there is a certain attraction to what ‘Rockfort Bay’ names “small life” on this record. This can mean so many things and I probably project too much on to it, but I think it means a life that doesn’t attempt to be historical, that may even be seen as ineffectual. How do you defend having a small life today? What imagery do we have of small life? Is it simply recourse to something like pre-capitalist imagery? The themes I work with in this regard probably come across as something like the division between town and country, especially because there is historically a defense of the latter in music like this. It’s difficult because there is a kind of conservatism that seems to immediately accompany the country that the city and its vanguard get to avoid. But I actually think tending to the imagery of smaller lives and the country themes that feel appropriate to it grants a greater sense, as you say, of the effects of deindustrialization today.
Visual references to the present state of the US economy is nothing new. Beyond the whole of the folk tradition, we can even say that most of the music I really gravitate towards from the 70s and 80s was music determined by a time which we can now identify as the start of this crisis in industrialization. This is some variation on a return-to-the-roots music in this or that way. So thinking about the way a song can express the state of things and also that country imagery becomes important for that, I think, is embedded in the very fabric of this kind of songwriting practice I am hopefully a part of. Beyond that, I am also attracted to literature and films that signal a kind of retreat of both the radical and earthy 60s, the settling down of radicals or hippies, having kids, getting jobs, always trying to keep the pulse even as it is clearly fading away. Small stories about small life in a dying and stagnated country.
‘Town in Decline’ is in many ways a reflection on my hometown and on my parents. I grew up in Bristol, in southwest Virginia, which was never a serious industrial center—kind of a stopover at the foothills of coal country that was built up as a railroad junction. But my father has worked all of my life in the major chemical plant in the area, which is a good provider but he always seemed to me someone also trying to keep the pulse on something more utopian despite the job. My mom taught at the elementary school and through her point of view I came to realize just how poor the area is. It is that kind of industrial context alongside a certain sensitivity to small town dynamics and to the economic difficulty of that region that I think drives certain songs on the record.
Could we talk a little about the track ‘Searchers’? The idea there’s some inherent value or meaning in the act of searching for something, even if the act is performed without quite knowing what you’re looking for. “Drag the river, feel alive tonight,” as the lyrics read. The song seems to encapsulate so much of what the album, and indeed Fust as a project, is all about. Harnessing the tension of an unanswered question as an energizing force. But then of course, there’s an irony to the concept of a search party, because, depending on the circumstance, they might not necessarily want to find what they’re looking for…
Thank you for this—I think you’re right. In all honesty, I am probably more drawn to a certain religious dimension of things than I care to admit. Above all I tend to romanticize collectives, and in particular collective practices. The religious aspect I guess would be a collective plan to pursue that which is for now beyond grasp or which seems to slip away just as you notice it. This kind of thing seems today to be a very secular or quiet act and I wanted to think again about its more communal forms. ‘Searchers’ started as a collection of poetry trying to describe a “search party” in various ways, as a political party or house party but also as something that looks like a regular search party but which isn’t sensationalized, isn’t a media spectacle. Just people out together looking very carefully. And the thought just took shape around the possibility that maybe they weren’t really looking for anything in particular, or didn’t know what they were looking for.
The attempt to turn it into a song started as a thought around what one loses in a given experience, that so much of our life is blocked out or forgotten almost immediately in order to forge ahead. This would mean we have a kind of identity that is composed of these negative attributes, things which never had names, which can’t be remembered based on our or at least my default kind of attention. This also extends to processes that run in the background. Sometimes I wake up and don’t know where I am or what stage of development I am at and it’s so devastating to realize how responsible my own narrative is for keeping everything in play that pertains to me. And so much gets lost to that narrative, but also comes back in flashes. So searching became a way to describe actively looking for those kinds of things.
The way you bring Fust as a project into this is really nice. I think it’s totally right: there’s never a plan to make music, just a project in place with a general horizon that music will be made. Having that structure in place means music could be waiting at any point with no dictate on what it will be. I try to do this with as many things as possible: having a number of “search parties” out whose only precondition is the search itself, be they music projects or writing projects or whatever. These are what undergird the “greater kind of looking” I am talking about in the song. I think I suffer from inattention so having ways to look in place is crucial. It’s an ethic maybe, one that is tied also to having low expectations. If anything is found, that should be exciting. It should also be said that the title references John Ford, so I think there is a sort of effort to conjure the American West here in some way but also to update it. Something like a group of American searchers without an object, without a goal. Seems to me the case, in a way…
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Who or what do you consider to be the biggest influences on your work? Would you say you draw on artforms beyond music?
The simplest answer is that the people in my life are the biggest influence: my friends, especially those who also make music, my family, etc. I’ve been making music for so long without any label or music culture behind it that having a few people interested and who themselves also make things that largely go unnoticed is enough to feel like I am contributing to something. This is something I think a lot of people relate to, and goes into what I was saying earlier about making a kind of music that is proportional to having a “small life.”
In terms of musical influences, I would say Fust really comes out of an attention to lost, forgotten, privately-produced music, particularly songwriting. I am definitely indebted to the big, big hitters like Van Morrison or Gram Parsons or the Basement Tapes extended universe, but I think what I really like are songs that are so clearly homemade by people who are so clearly… unmarketable. A big influence for us on this record, as an example, was ‘All of It’ by Circuit Rider. It’s bewildering, a kind of southern rock slow burner without much of a structure, an inebriated rant of a song that feels like they couldn’t for the life of them be helped to make it sound quite right. And yet, it’s an ideal recording of a band for me, which is what Genevieve was: the first time in my life that a working band went into a studio to record itself, to record songs I wrote.
I am definitely someone who likes to be influenced and wears his influences proudly. Outside of music, I would say I especially rely on cinema for a sense of things. Similarly with music, I like films that reflect a certain homemade quality. Take Jon Jost’s films, for example. He succeeds in his films at capturing an American sensibility that I aspire to with such minimal means. They look and feel impoverished while also providing really small narratives of poverty that he is so sensitive to. He works with a degree of independence that determines the narrative experiment, is full of non-actors, and is committed to regional filmmaking. While his narratives are gestural, they also arrive out of massive historical stakes. For instance, in Bell Diamond a marriage is torn apart due to the husband’s sterility from exposure to agent orange in Vietnam, a story whose backdrop is unemployment in a post-industrial mining town. It’s the perfect combination for me, someone who has a small community of collaborators and wants narratives both quaint and colossal. Jost also writes his own country songs and puts them in his films. I don’t know how exactly but you can tell film and music are somewhat flattened in Jost’s world, like one doesn’t take precedence over the other. And this kind of flattening of forms is something I really take seriously. Finding a song you actually love can be just as rewarding as writing a song. Both feel so rare.
I have to ask about the collaborators on the record. In many ways Genevieve plays like a singular personal creation, but there was a wide cast of talent who helped bring it to life. How do you go about working with others, and how much do they shape the final sound?
I started writing songs twenty years ago this September. Whatever the name or aim of the project, it has always been variations on a bedroom recording project, so largely a solo effort. But I would always bring people in or find ways to involve people in whatever I was doing. Genevieve is the first time I have recorded my music in a studio, and so this is the first time I’ve really resigned to anyone else’s judgment. Going into it, I had in mind something like Dylan’s New Morning, not only because I always thought of it as a marriage record, but because it sounds so haphazard, thrown together, like he himself was in full strange control but couldn’t tell you what the musicians actually played because the whole point was surrendering to their habits. That’s what I wanted ultimately: my songs at the whim of people I’ve come to trust.
So first of all, the band is made up of people who are all in other bands and those bands are all bands I actively listen to and am overwhelmed by. John [Wallace] makes music as Colamo, and he has been my partner in all things music since high school. It’s his distorted intensity on guitar that makes Genevieve feel like a legitimate rock record, which is so exciting for me to hear. Justin [Morris] fronts Sluice and has one of the most gentle senses for music I’ve ever heard. His record Radial Gate just came out this year and it is so masterful. Oli [Child-Lanning] is in Sluice but also fronts the avant-traditional project Weirs, which is a well kept secret that if you know about then you’ll know the careful degree of history he brings to the music he is part of. Avery [Sullivan] drums with Sluice and Indigo de Souza, and the band version of Fust really feels to me like a long collaboration with him: endless conversations about what the point of all of this is but also how important small details are in making music listenable. I think he is a true supporter in all things he is a part of and he definitely feels like the support structure for the band. Frank [Meadows] plays piano in Fust and has been my most consistent and most active collaborator in music over the past decade. He also works at Dear Life, the label that releases our music, and we are where and who we are because of him.
I definitely embraced the studio format and invited as many people to be on the record as possible. It’s ultimately a very North Carolina record. Courtney [Werner] plays fiddle on the record and is in Magic Tuber Stringband, a now legendary folk experiment from Durham. Indigo [De Souza], who is from Marshall, sings on the record and it goes without saying that she is one of the most powerful voices in music today; she is also genuinely such a sensitively kind person and every time I hear her voice on the record I light up. Jake [Lenderman] and Xandy [Chelmis] are part of the MJ Lenderman/Wednesday universe from Asheville and are just exceptional players, it’s ridiculous how talented those guys are. Jake released music on Dear Life as well so it felt like a necessary collaboration. We recorded in Asheville—where I used to live a decade ago—with Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios. I knew Alex from back then but had lost touch and didn’t really know what he was up to. The record sounds the way it does because of him. He also worked with Jake and Indigo, so it was all very easy to bring these collaborations together. Beyond his skill, the best thing about Alex is that he works intuitively: he makes decisions as he goes and so he really is a member of the band in that way, someone who just guides the music home. And I must add that John Winn, a filmmaker from Durham, has been one of my major collaborators. He has directed all of the videos for Fust. I’ve never met anyone who understands the landscape’s relationship to the cinematic image more than him and its an honor to have my music heard through that vision. Lastly, though sadly not from North Carolina, Michael [Cormier-O’Leary] recorded vocals on the record. He has been the biggest supporter of Fust and I really owe him everything. He is one of my favorite songwriters—a true contributor to the great weirdo American songbook—and drums in Friendship, perhaps the smartest band out there today.
Genevieve is out on the 16th June via Dear Life Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.
Album art by Sasha Popovici, photos by Charlie Boss