A Decade Half-Spent: Fust’s Genevieve

10 years ago, I wanted to watch every Adam Sandler movie. A completionist at heart, I yearned so badly to claim that I’d conquered his entire filmography. So, I watched them all, one by one, piece by piece. At some point, I reached Reign Over Me, a 2007 flick where he plays a PTSD-afflicted man named Charlie whose wife, kids and dog all died in the September 11th attacks. Near the film’s end, there’s a trial sequence where Charlie’s in-laws are tasked with deciding whether or not to commit him to a psychiatric care center after a breakdown and suicide-by-cop attempt. In the courthouse lobby, Charlie confronts his wife’s parents and says a kind of line that, even if the movie really is no good, lingers within you: “I walk down the street, I see her in someone else’s face—clearer than any of the pictures you carry with you.”

I never understood how it felt to live in that quote; I’d never lost someone suddenly only to slowly pick up pieces of them after. It all felt so foreign yet necessary, as if a crucial token of living is measured by our adjacency to absence. Even after my grandparents passed away, I slowly learned to forget what their voices sounded like, how they moved throughout the world. Their mannerisms, just like the junk in their closets and drawers, drifted elsewhere, to a place I was no longer meant to reach nor ever could. My mom dreams about her mom all the time; I’d never done that. Or, I guess, I never remembered doing that.

I will spare you the life story, but for months the first woman I ever loved has come to me in my dreams. We’ve spent more time apart this decade than not, separated not just by circumstance but by outgrowing each other—or, perhaps, not growing into each other at all. There’s some road-bound distance in there, too, as she lives in a state—well, a city—many, many miles away. I do not yearn for our reunion anymore; I have spent far too long learning how to be good at being alone. But in my dreams, we meet in houses we’ve said “I love you” in. In my dreams, we do not touch. We say “I am okay” but in mannerisms without shape or familiarity. Her new boyfriend is there, but only sometimes. He and I get along just fine, though—better than we should. We shake hands and I wake up. I do not know what any of this means.

One afternoon, I caught up with my mom in the kitchen when she came home from work. I explained these dreams to her; she told me I should reach out. “I’m scared to,” I replied. “Why?” she asked. “What if I text her and then she stops coming around?” I admitted. That lingers. She and I don’t talk anymore; we haven’t since I slept with someone else just days after we broke up, save for an exchange of condolences after her grandfather passed away. I don’t have closure, nor am I owed any. I think, back then, I didn’t understand what it meant to lose someone over and over again—some days the grief feels heavier than usual, even long after you’ve moved on. I used to write about her, even after I’d lived enough to come up with better ideas with fresher faces; it was the only way we could have conversations, just the two of us.

Reign Over Me and the band Fust share no cosmetic or thematic connection, at least not beyond the humanistic truth of art that exists somewhere in the margins of loss. Reign Over Me hovers over grief as a finite side-effect of death; Fust, on their 2023 album Genevieve, contend that grief can be temporary, that absence is a one-way mirror, that what we lose can be found again—if not for us, then for someone else we love. “A pain stabbed my heart,” Jack Kerouac wrote 68 years ago, “as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”

When I listen to Genevieve, I often think of one of my favorite movies, Paris, Texas, and its portrayal of hurt through Americana and Reagan-era, miraculous affirmation. Fust do not make music that is explicitly political, but, like Wim Wenders’s magnum opus, their songs exist in a warped, conservative reality where erosion drapes itself over the fruits of living. And both are paintings of migratory affections dressed in small epics and course-altering fictions. Evian billboards are being built; somebody too-far-gone sleeps in an oil leak; lunatics scream apocalyptic prophecies from overpasses; it’s hard to know anyone; strange faces are lit with roadside neon glow; books stack upwards like skyscrapers; rusting automobile carcasses linger in baron prairies; there is someone out there loving the people we love better than us. In the middle of all that, human connection is full of mistakes, alienation and avoidance shadowed by reunion; past lives dawdle in the grain of a 35mm film roll.

Confucius once said, “Wherever you go, there you are.” In the Netflix series Ozark, Uncle Ben reconfigures that quote into something more first-person: “Every place I go, there I am.” On Genevieve, life is more forgiving and the truth becomes a collision of those two ideas: “Every place I go, there you are.” When Confucius said his piece, he was speaking about the banality of the self—that humans are constants, that we are unable to run away from parts of ourselves we no longer wish to accept. “Something in your eyes is keeping me alive and running, and every ounce of hate is keeping me awake and running,” the Fust song “Late Hour” goes. “I hear your voice all the time,” Jane says to Travis in Paris, Texas. “Every man has your voice.”

The origins of Fust date back years, to 2017 when Aaron Dowdy was uploading self-recorded EPs to Bandcamp from various homes in the Carolinas and in New York, namely in Durham but also in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Most of that material wound up on Songs of the Rail, a 28-song collection released a year ago this Sunday. The way I described Fust’s sound then was as a “brand of small exits,” and that is still true in 2025, but I would argue that to listen to Dowdy’s music is to also step inside of a miscellany of risk. There are consequences on his records, in the memories mingling with a means. “Let’s leave and drift and breach the harder things,” goes “Widely Wade”; “You’ve been down and empty, and I’ve been feeling nothing,” Dowdy sings in the “Rolling Prairie” chorus. “I got sick last year, the kind you know that’s always been there.” What a beautiful way to pronounce your own ugliness, to capture a magic that exists without justification.

Dowdy is a craftsman, a once-in-a-lifetime storyteller hailing from the tar-covered racetracks of Bristol, Virginia’s coal country foothills, where the Carter Family used to play. As he told The Big Takeover in 2023, “I think I’m actually part of Carter blood.” When I hear the bellows of “Wildwood Flower” sway, I think of Dowdy; the words Mother Maybelle sings, “How my heart is now wondering, no misery can tell” and “He’s left me no warning, no words of farewell,” feel like century-old composites of a modern-day Fust original. Dowdy has been writing songs since 2003, when he was an 11-year-old kid going to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings play. Now, Dowdy is a Ph.D student in literature at Duke making music with Frank Meadows, John Wallace, Avery Sullivan and Justin Morris, the player behind the Winston-Salem-based band Sluice. His protagonists are constantly in quiet crisis, extending measures of compassion and reassurance. They’re people I know, people you know, sung about in etches of humility, embarrassment, loss and difficulty—pageantry, kinetic language and volume-jumping rock ‘n’ roll.

While they put out a very good album, Evil Joy, in 2021, Fust didn’t come fully into my view until May 2023, all thanks to Dear Life Records’ Michael Cormier-O’Leary. I trust him with my life. If he emails me about a band, I will listen to them. He is why I know who MJ Lenderman and Florry are, and he is why I love both of them so very dearly. Fust were preparing to release Genevieve in June and were looking for a site to premiere their new single “Trouble.” I was largely unfamiliar with the work, but I had heard their earlier song “Violent Jubilee.” Like I said then, Fust play music like our existence is a welcome mat or some fantastical assemblage of Americana and its gothic, Southern architecture. Accessibility is its default. Twang sneaks into Dowdy’s charming voice; his fellow Tar Heels Lenderman and Xandy Chelmis fill the space with big riffs and sugary pedal steel.

“Trouble” may have been my gateway into Fust, but “Violent Jubilee” remains the skeleton key. To hear Dowdy sing “I am ready to receive my hurt” is to unlock a simple gesture of permission. So many lyricists write in an explanatory sense—in a demanding, instructional tone passed off as singer-songwriter whimsy. Aaron Dowdy does no such thing. “I am ready to receive my hurt” is not a declarative statement, it’s a sentiment of allowance, that’s it’s okay to feel what’s coming to you. Genevieve is marked beautifully by one-liners like that, like “Let’s sing that worn song just one more time,” “You’re so gentle when you’ve hurt all day,” “Maybe you’ve got time inside you” and “I’ll find a way to get better for us.” Fust’s template sends me back to a favorite line of mine, sung by Bob Dylan 55 years ago: “Build me a cabin in Utah, marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout, have a bunch of kids who call me ‘pa’—that must be what it’s all about.” Genevieve is a record devilishly coded with broken pride, crack-ups and small life.

When Dowdy sings “The hurt makes you gentle” near the end of “A Clown Like Me,” I am reminded of when Sarah Jaffe lovingly sang the words “All that time wasted, I wish I was a little more delicate” 14 years ago. Sentimentality, if you wield it correctly, can be joyous. Love doesn’t have to hurt so much even if it’s all we’ve got. The people Dowdy eulogizes on Genevieve may have came and went long before he even began writing about them, but the album argues that those relationships, in memory, don’t always need expiration dates. I’ve been to North Carolina a few times, always because of the ocean and always because a woman I loved would be there. The coastline always looks good when a beautiful person leaves their footprints on it. I don’t think Fust’s music sounds like North Carolina. I think it sounds, instead, like the kind of ache I have only ever felt at home, wherever my “home” goes. Perhaps that is one of domestic living’s greatest tricks, that I remember things differently than anyone else even if we lived through them together.

But I do remember driving along the Atlantic-facing road at night with the windows down, as a glowless horizon lingered beyond me and beyond her, when the Isle’s street lamp bulbs were like stars in a for-once-touchable galaxy. I am reminded of her laughter, which was so loud and so full of light that you could see it from the satellites. You could feel the softness of her angora cardigan from up there, too. It was once all very much real, but it’s now all very much a myth that lingers in dreams but dissipates once I am stirred awake by a talkative city she left behind long ago. My kismet is a lifetime of small deaths; I am losing parts of myself and others every day, in conversations I either can’t recall or pray to God I’ll never forget.

But Genevieve makes survival feel lighter. As I’m writing this, the weather in Ohio is careening towards the same temperature Dowdy mentions during the Indigo De Souza-assisted “Town in Decline.” The odometer in my car’s dash is busted just like Dowdy’s is in “Violent Jubilee.” When I listen to Dowdy sing about dragging a river and feeling alive on “Searchers,” I think of not just the Columbus authorities draining Mirror Lake before the Ohio State-Michigan game but of the breakup that was waiting for me back at my apartment across town while the water ran out. Dowdy is referencing John Ford, too, as Wenders did 41 years ago when he made Paris, Texas.

Because everywhere Fust goes, there I am. I cut up a rug to “Trouble” and call my mom after “Open Water” fades out. Life continues to dim, but now softly. Lovers are going the opposite direction in this too-big world, but I do not look backwards once they pass by. I sleep in a wood-paneled room full of windows near the woods, and the walls fade in the attentive sun. We’re five years into this decade and I can’t picture her as she was the last time I knew her. She comes to me in dreams but I am no longer questioning whether she will forever. I can hear ourselves in every syllable Aaron Dowdy lets go of during Genevieve, but I have fallen in love again and again since I last loved her. I no longer stop to wonder if I’ve heard those voices before, because it is easiest when I am only imagining. There are more faces in the street left for me to recognize.

POSTSCRIPT:

On a Friday afternoon in Austin, Texas, I am lingering in the very back of an eager crowd of festival goers with Travis from Truth Club. Fust is playing the Agave Stage at Paste’s block party, ripping through Genevieve and some new ones, like the incredible, still-unreleased “Spangled.” “I’m left looking up at this, at these stars spangled,” Dowdy sings, “wondering who’s the god of that sky and who’s the god of memory.” I am slowly healing from the things I only write about, and I am trying to forget even the most beautiful parts so I can remind myself to watch them happen. “I’m floating forever,” Dowdy declares, as the set comes to close. Maybe he’s healing, too.

I briefly return to the apartment I am crashing in to grab a change of clothes and my toothbrush, and I slump into the living room’s recession and gag on litter box fumes and stare at the gleams of light hanging over my friend’s kitchen sink. Too many minutes pass, so I pull myself off the couch and into an Uber, slouching down the seat and calling my mother to tell her about this beautiful California girl I fell in love with outside a comedy club downtown. I lean my head against the backseat window, pressing my cheek up to the glass as I pass by a campus In-N-Out for the hundredth time. I’m nauseous and tired; SXSW week has never been very kind to me or my spoiling body. Everything is go, go, go, but there is a restaurant waiting for me near the big buildings, and next to that restaurant is the hotel she’s staying in.

I sit with my co-workers and manage to get a Coca-Cola down and yap. It’s my last day in Austin and there is very little left for me to go back home to. I can feel the bags beneath my eyes turning a shade darker. No one asks me if I’m okay; I’m getting close to it, I would have answered. Another year, another successful three days of live music, the party agrees. McLovin from Superbad walks in and grabs a table near us.

I log the detail by texting a friend about it. The Gulf sun is now below the city, which means that it’s time for me to go. I step back into the Texas heat and Kevin Morby shuffles past me while taking a phone call. The roads are blocked off, apartment windows across the way are blacked out, and the nearby sounds of Cheer Up Charlies potently dribble through the venue’s entrance. A band is playing, but I can’t make out which. I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket and see the lock screen flash her words through the stitching of my pants. She calls to me like a lighthouse, shining and new and blushing, and I walk up to the Hotel Indigo’s front door, only to spill into the arms of a passing-through Aaron Dowdy. We hug and say things I can’t remember.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.