Singer-songwriter Aaron Dowdy is a West Virginia native but has made a home here in Durham where he's currently a Ph.D. candidate for literature at Duke. His band Fust is celebrating the release of their new record "" Friday. On it, Dowdy explores different aspects of what life in the South both looks and sounds like.
Dowdy and Fust drummer Avery Sullivan stopped by our Durham studio to chat with music reporter Brian Burns about the stories that inspired some of these songs.
This is an excerpt of an edited transcript of that conversation. You can hear the full interview by clicking the LISTEN button at the top of this post.
Let's get into the title of that a little bit. Tell us the story behind "Big Ugly."
Big Ugly is technically the name of a small unincorporated area in West Virginia off the Guyandotte River. I was starting to write about West Virginia, which is where my family comes from. They're not from the Big Ugly area, but they grew up along the Guyandotte River. When I was researching it, I came across this name, and it immediately stuck with me as a phrase, not exactly as a place, but as a phrase that you might describe something as, or a even a person as. And I think the record, in many ways, explores this tension between a specific place and this kind of conceptual place. There's a layer behind everything, and everything has this meaning that doesn't exactly mean what you expect it to. So, yeah, I thought it was a perfect sort of title for the record.
It's very simple and evocative, like a lot of your writing. Tell us about the cover art.
When I was looking into this record and looking into Big Ugly I found this mural on the internet that this documenter had posted and I was immediately drawn to it. I liked that it was Big Ugly, but also they had this ugly photograph of this beautiful thing. I did some research and found out that it was this huge mural that's at the Big Ugly community center in that area. It was made as a backdrop for a theatrical experiment where the people, the kids in the area, interviewed their elders and created songs and skits based on the stories and that immediately came to stand in for what I thought the record was doing, which was taking this place and taking stories and creating these kind of fictions and turning them into something. Kind of mythologizing your own past and your own people and turning it into a performance. I thought that was really beautiful.
The Record kicks off with "Spangled." That's a word that carries a lot of weight. Tell us a little bit about that song.
"Spangled" was one of the first notes I had when I started writing about this record, or writing lyrics for this record, primarily because it's a word that we all know so well, and we've all said it so many times, and yet, it's one of those words that it's hard to even know what it means. It's kind of this familiar, so familiar that it's defamiliarized. I similarly had this idea of hospitals in the South and in America, you know, especially in rural areas and poor areas, where there's a lot of foreclosures and shutting down hospitals is kind of an epidemic throughout the US. And I thought about the hospital in certain places as these buildings that carry a lot of weight for people. People have very serious experiences in hospital rooms, whether it's birth or death or near death, and when that building goes away, it's like those experiences sort of stay there. And you can stare at the space where the hospital was, and imagine that very important event just kind of floating there.
One other song I want to talk about is "Jody." I think that's a great example of how strong of a storyteller you are. How much of your writing is inspired by your own reality?
It's a great question. I try very hard to distance myself as a writer from my personal life. It makes me not have to recall something too personal every time I sing it live. I like treating characters and stories and situations with a sense of distance and have it not be too much, but I am the writer, so it does leak in. And I think it's interesting you bring up "Jody," because that's maybe the most personal song on the record. It's a song about having a romanticization of a rough form of living as a kid. And I was always someone to romanticize like, you know, getting messed up, or getting tangled up in this kind of badness. And then, I just was thinking about how so many people romanticize a kind of ugly way of life and a dangerous and self destructive set of behaviors, and I still romanticize it, even as I get older, like it's such a part of me. And yet, how can a steady relationship emerge from such rocky grounds?
