Fust: The Best of What’s Next

The Durham band has unveiled the second single from their forthcoming record, Big Ugly. Read our exclusive profile and listen to “Bleached” below.

Fust: The Best of What’s Next
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In the oft-forgotten, no-man’s-land territory of West Virginia is where Aaron Dowdy’s family came from—on his dad’s side, through a multiplicity of generations. Dowdy’s grandmother was born in Pineville, a small forest town hugging the Guyandotte River near the coal mines of Beckley, and, a few years ago, he started taking trips with her, visiting the southern part of the state and seeing her old haunts. “I started to really think about it as a variation on the life I’m living in the South and what she came from,” Dowdy says.

Though Dowdy grew up across the way in Virginia, he spent a lot of time near quasi-Heaven, a central place for his family’s narrative. His great-great-grandmother was a writer who wrote about West Virginia, and he’s since inherited her books, especially a history of Wyoming County, where Pineville is the county seat. Sometimes, I feel so Appalachian that I begin seeing Appalachia everywhere I go; Dowdy’s music is often a good measurement of the kind of birthright so many of us exist within. “I’ve signed my name to the Guyandotte River,” he sings, “and I will remain ‘till this lonesome mind sends me down her in a pine box.”

Dowdy doesn’t consider himself a historian, though I’d reckon most songwriters of his kind are exactly that by creative default. But he prefers the term “visitor.” When he was researching the Guyandotte River and the surrounding areas in Wyoming and Lincoln Counties, he was plowing through the history of the Hatfields and McCoys, because his family had ties with the former. Doing so, he happened upon an inlet named Big Ugly. It’s not quite an oxymoron, but it’s not exactly handsome, either. But, it’s undoubtedly evocative and a term of endearment.

Dowdy tells me he is always searching for twisted terms that “make something extremely positive and beautiful yet consist of something gnarly or uncomfortable.” Take a look at the first Fust album, Evil Joy: those words shouldn’t mix, just like you’re not supposed to call somebody “Big Ugly.” “And yet,” Dowdy says, “there’s this guy who lives up the creek on the Guyandotte and he’s this big, ugly dude. So everyone calls him ‘Big Ugly.’ And there’s something sweet and also unpleasant about it.” It was like Dowdy won the lottery after spending so long saving up just to buy a scratch-off from the counter. The third Fust album found its namesake: Big Ugly.

Bob Dylan once said, “You could listen to Woody Guthrie songs and actually learn how to live.” And I always liked that phrase, because, to me, it speaks to the transcendence of art and how it can move the needle even when some of us think it can’t. I mean, that is a Fust record. Just look at these songs, like “Gateleg,” “Jody” and the title track, how they weep so wisely as a bow pulls across a fiddle’s strings, or as a guitar lick sings a chorus of its own after Dowdy’s vocal erodes into fable. “Oh, I love this town—it shows me my lonesome’s written in the stars” and “You seem lighter, like when you were younger” wrench tenderly into testaments; “The mystery of will I have mystery with you” moves inextricably like a sparkler leaving contrails of light in summer air. Utah Phillips once said: “I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world.” I can reach down into a Big Ugly and take out what I need to get through this world, too.

Considering Big Ugly and its lexical cataloging of ancestral experiences and historical empathies, there are small miracles out there, wherever you and I are, just aching to be noticed. The conversations are enjoyable even if you step into the middle of them; the distances between West Virginia and the Carolinas shrinks in the pale light of your fascinations. Dowdy offers sage advice: “If you go someplace and you have an interest, turn it into something that is meaning-making for you.”

Those trips Dowdy took with his grandmother turned into a project. “I wanted to know more. I wanted to collect her things, I wanted to see what she saw from my own point of view,” he says. “It just so happened that, by the time I was writing a record, the two projects merged and I had this wealth of ideas and material. If you turn your daily life into your subject, then everything becomes the kernel.” He cites a phrase in the preface of Henry James’ The Spoils of Poynton, where the author calls those kernels “little germs”—“little things that germinate and then stay in you and grow and get fixated on.” “I think,” Dowdy ponders, “if you’re a writer who takes everyday life as one of your subjects, you’re just going to be completely on the lookout for germs.”

Fust usually collaborate with the artist Sasha Popovici on their covers, and Dowdy wanted the artwork for Big Ugly to be the final part of the band’s triptych—continuing the story they’ve been telling visually for four years now: Evil Joy was a Romanticist painting, while Genevieve arrived impressionistic and unfinished. Big Ugly was meant to be modernist, until a flip phone photograph of a canvas brought Dowdy to a standstill. It’s just three buildings on a dirt path, shadowed by lording greenery, but he became obsessed with it. “I started using it as our reference frame,” he says. “We found out that it was in this place called the Big Ugly Community Center, which is an after school care center for a region that doesn’t really have an elementary school. It’s a very useful institution for this area around Big Ugly and Harts Creek.”

After speaking with locals, Dowdy learned that the painting was developed as a backdrop for a play that children put on at the community center in the early 2000s, where they would interview elders from the area, write songs about their lives and perform them. “The moment I found that out, I was like, ‘Well, this is exactly what Big Ugly is trying to do.’ It’s trying to take this backdrop of this real place that you can visit and take stories of my elders of the area—stories that I’ve come to know and try to reinterpret them and reroute them through fiction. I like the idea that it feels like a backdrop, or a canvas that the album performs in front of. It’s theatrical in that way.”

Fust Big Ugly

When Dowdy set out to write the material that would turn into Big Ugly, he wanted to write about Sweethaven, the fictional town where Popeye lives in in Robert Altman’s 1980 film about the big-armed sailor. It’s a post-military town where, as Dowdy colorfully puts it, “everybody’s totally crazy and has their own wild walk of life, but nobody really cares about anybody else’s.” “I read something that was like, ‘Oh, the opening of Popeye is the only visible image of utopia that we have,’” he says. The environment of Sweethaven is not war-torn, but its residents live in the shit. But they’re also so happy that it feels idyllic. “How is it possible to feel utopian in a place that feels backwards and everybody is just wild and incoherent and irrational and, yet, everybody’s totally okay with everyone else?” Dowdy asks. “I think, when I finally found Big Ugly, it helped me a little bit, to tame down a lot of that energy but also to historicize it and make it real.”

Dowdy is not an anecdotal writer—at least not in the diaristic sense that many singer-songwriters have embraced. His protagonists aren’t versions of himself like he’s Capote progeny, they’re far more in conversation with who you’d encounter in Townes Van Zandt’s gospel. There may be heartbreak in knowing that Fust songs are mostly small fictions, but that doesn’t make the lyrics any less personal. Dowdy takes pages out of Appalachian writers Breece D’J Pancake and Pinckney Benedict’s stories, using objects and material from his life that he can narrate out of and route them into something else. “It’s interesting to take a personal place and then fictionalize over it—take a real place and real histories and use that as the ground for fiction,” he says. “And West Virginia felt the most personal and, also, one of the most complicated.”

The names on Big Ugly are different, but I feel like I have known them all my life. And, in a way, I have. I know Amy and I know Kevin, and I go to Maggie’s Store. I’m always 30 miles from where I’ve been. I’ve passed out from the badness. There’s a reason why pop music succeeds. It caters to many walks of life without stepping into any certain type of specificity. An album like Big Ugly is specific—a portrait of a kind of place that not everyone has access to but could get to if they drove far enough. Fust are anthropologists, doctors of the lives we’ve read about and the lives we’ve seen through. Dowdy likes to make stories that he grew up with, or that he’s felt and thought through, recognizable and easy to live in.

And you can resonate with Fust’s music in a few ways, be it through the intimacies of a relationship full of love yet failing, or the name of a street, or something philosophical, like questioning, “Have I been okay at living?” Dowdy wants his material to be that varied, and he wants to assemble enough images in any given song so that they never feel exclusive. Doing that lets the “particulars in somebody’s life start to take on meaning for themselves,” he says. “It’s a great poetic lineage of people taking their daily life to be worthwhile or valuable. When you do that with the South, specifically, it allows you a different entry into preconceived notions about it, notions that are like, ‘It’s backwards,’ or notions like, ‘There’s no resistance here. It’s not vanguard, it’s not pushing anything forward.’ And I think, by restoring and continuing to tell stories that are so particular creates an identity that anyone can have with it, even though some of the stuff I write about is also corrupt and pained. There’s some struggle.”

Big Ugly (and Evil Joy and Genevieve before it) illustrates life in the South without compromising the region’s image. Dowdy says that being able to name a name or name a place “becomes a way of immediately identifying with something—one particular for another, their particular for my particular,” that “if you keep doing that, and you keep doing stories like that, then the South is, maybe, more recognizable than someone might first have thought.”

Sometimes, I feel so Appalachian that I begin seeing Appalachia everywhere I go. If I see a hairpin bend in a road, I remember the Devil’s Elbow outside of Morgantown. Listening to the world that opens up in Big Ugly, I especially remember going down to Grafton every summer with my grandparents, driving south along the Pennsylvania Turnpike and, as we neared the border, catching that first glimpse of rolling hills and mountains taller than the horizon that centered us. It was like seeing a guardian angel opening up a foreign sky for miles. And yet, I couldn’t see anything at all, only green and the dust pushed into the backseat by gusts of A/C. Dowdy and Fust don’t live in the mountains in their hometown of Durham, but he gets it. “When we drive west on 40 there’s a moment outside of Statesville where the mountains start to creep up over the horizon,” he says. “It’s always a moment for us, or for anyone, because, to return to the mountains, it feels like home. You’ve got your land in sight after being at sea.”

There’s a song on Big Ugly called “Mountain Language” and it’s got a line in it—the Shakespearian “Oh what country, friends, is this?”—that chews on the idea of mountains being a “place away from something,” according to Dowdy, or a place inhabited by orthodoxy yet out of place and long without update. The Guyandotte River is like that, in how its tract of land goes nowhere and maybe the people who live near it can’t even call the water by its name. It’s about as perfect a setting for a Fust tune as any other place—overlooked “because they seem out of the way, or they seem not responsible for the major movements going on in America.”

“I like these places that have struggle but also’ve got tradition,” Dowdy elaborates. “They’re welcoming, in a way.” His songs are full of natural figures flirting with man-made resolve—torn-down hospitals, outside fridges, bulkheads and backseats, Country Boy stores, language lost near the beach, and things you can’t grow, like smokes, cans, bags and tins. But Dowdy doesn’t want his music to restore tradition or retreat to something previous. “If those become the ground, then any drama you add on top of it makes it feel historical,” he says. “Like an argument in the city—yeah, I think that’s maybe interesting. But I’m interested in drama that happens in a place where you don’t know what it is that’s causing the conflict.”

Listeners will greet Big Ugly, hear the songs and pull their own conclusions from them. But there is no doubt that a consequential part of the album comes near its end, during “Heart Song,” when Dowdy poses a rhetorical question: “Have I been okay at living?” It’s the, as he puts it, “ethical conundrum of life, or of a difficult life, or of the difficulties of life.” What’s true about us is that we’ve all done wrongs and we’ve all hurt people. “You may have a lot of regrets,” Dowdy gestures, “but I think being okay at living is an adjustment to crisis. If I can answer that question with ‘yes,’ if I don’t have people who are so deeply upset with me, or who are frustrated by me, if I’ve done the kind of things necessary to take care of people and to take care of myself, I feel like that’s the crux of it.”

Fust could make an entire record of dramas, misgivings and transgressions, but for Dowdy personally, Big Ugly is the first personal record he’s ever made. He doesn’t have a character in the chorus of “Heart Song,” admitting that he’s an anxious person trying to reject the urge to “black out from living,” or the urge to “put up blinders and let things go.” “I think being good at living, it means taking some time to put those blinders down and to pay attention to what’s going on,” he expands. “I think that’s part of what I was trying to do, with the South or with things in my life—to put the blinders down, put the expectations down, and just look around and pay attention to what’s going on.”

Fust Big Ugly

At the end of the last decade and the beginning of this one, Fust was Dowdy’s demoing vehicle. He’d upload EPs to Bandcamp from his New York City apartment and pine for the South. After moving back to the Carolinas, the project became a full band—a seven-piece ensemble, to be exact, as Avery Sullivan, Frank Meadows, John Wallace, Justin Morris, Libby Rodenbough and Oliver Child-Lanning flashed brilliance behind Dowdy. Together, they slowly became less referential and more open to wisdom, especially from Big Ugly’s producer Alex Farrar, whose name has become so famous in the indiesphere that his production discography is now a genre of its own.

And all of it has come together at Farrar and Adam McDaniel’s studio in West Asheville, Drop of Sun. When Fust wanted to make Genevieve, they had no recording budget but Farrar offered to record them for cheap. That says a lot about the generosity within North Carolina’s music community. It’s not a “Hey, I know a guy” situation; these people, especially Farrar and McDaniel, care so much about the music. “So many people have had the chance to work there that are not backed by a label,” Dowdy says. “It’s a studio that can record professional-grade music that competes with Nashville and Los Angeles, and [Farrar and McDaniel] are of the mindset that they would rather have people in there using it and be responsible for continuing to make music than to not and just wait for somebody who can afford the industry price. I’m in awe over them.”

In two years, Indigo De Souza’s All of This Will End, Wednesday’s Rat Saw God, Squirrel Flower’s Tomorrow’s Fire, Truth Club’s Running From the Chase, Hotline TNT’s Cartwheel, MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks, Hello Mary’s Emita Ox and Merce Lemon’s Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild have all been recorded, engineered and mixed by Farrar at Drop of Sun. It’s a lineage, and the popularity surrounding it continues to surge as listeners follow lines of folk tradition within alternative rock right back to it. But, with Fust’s Big Ugly entering the Carolina pantheon, the question now becomes: “Is Alex Farrar the throughline?”

Dowdy certainly believes it, saying that Farrar’s “ears are okay with very big-sounding instruments and arrangements.” “My ears, historically, tend to be kind of small,” he continues. “It’s like, ‘Oh, here’s a tiny little snare and here’s a tiny little rim shot, and here’s a tiny guitar sound that takes up very little room.’ Alex is not that way, but he’s also very intuitive. He has this signal chain that is really specific to him.” There was a moment when Child-Lanning was re-tracking his bass part on “Goat House Blues” and, as Dowdy and Farrar were mid-conversation with each other across the room, the producer jumped out of the dialogue and called out an incorrect note. “His ear is just so brilliant and he’s so in-tune that I feel like I’m in good hands with everything I do with him,” Dowdy affirms.

He first met Farrar when they were 18, saying, with a laugh, that he was intimidated by the producer then, because “he already had [tattoo] sleeves.” That’s because Farrar, despite being pigeonholed working with singer-songwriters in recent years (and despite other Drop of Sun alumni, like Lenderman his Wednesday bandmate Karly Hartzman, having a penchant for loud music), remains ever committed to his metal roots. “He’s very quiet, he’s a head down kind of person. He’s not somebody who goes down huge rabbit holes. He’s very professional, but he’s so kind and thoughtful and I think he really just wants music to be made.” [Editor’s Note: Dowdy says anyone in the Sumac or Tomb Mold world looking to record should reach out to Farrar, because he “would kill that.”]

Dowdy calls his recording relationship with Farrar a “push and pull” between “a big-sounding producer and a tiny-sounding songwriter.” In Farrar’s nearness, Dowdy wants to expand Fust’s sound and brighten it, to step away from being “a creature of spaciousness”: “He has the way he wants it to sound, and then it’s me being like, over the next few months, so careful and particular about moving around little things and tweaking things—because I like to be kind of sculptural and feel thumbprints everywhere on a record, like it’s been touched a lot. I like that tactical sounding recording. But he records loud, but he also loves voice and he loves songs to develop as they go along. He’s always helping us think through song structure and to make sure that we have thought about each section carefully. He’s kind of a genius.”

Fust Big Ugly

When he made Evil Joy, Dowdy never thought of Fust as a band that would play shows for a living—or at least something that resembles a living. But once they decamped to Drop of Sun to make Genevieve over two years ago, they all began a new level of collaboration with each other and they all began learning how to write songs that never feel impossible to play live. It was a simple task that Dowdy began considering at the very outset of the writing process, and it became an experiment for him, a guy who usually makes music in reverse, who writes demos and records them at home in roundabout ways. It’s why “Spangled” became Big Ugly’s lead single. After trying it out on tour last March, the response from fans was overwhelming, with many of them latching onto the line about the hospital on Route 11 getting torn down, or feeling like Heaven in the Shenandoah. Just months before “Spangled” came out, the hospital I was born in filed for bankruptcy. If the song teaches us anything, it’s that we’ve all lost a temple or two.

“Spangled” is deeply textured, every piece of the song—from Rodenbough’s crying fiddle to Meadows’ keys plunking into the melody like tear drops, or the curls of Morris’ pedal steel and Dowdy’s hushes exploding into the best pronunciation of “Shenandoah” ever put in a rock song—fits into the next. It’s a medley played by musicians totally locked into each other; the most synthesized version of Fust I can think of. If one song could be an entire pocket, it’s “Spangled”—a drunken trance of sentimental mystery, of friends coming and friends going, of a beauty you can drive past and remember. And Dowdy saw the song, a two-chord burner with a riff and three verses, as something to give to the people who’d heard it and who’d been asking about it. “Spangled” became the first song Fust recorded for Big Ugly, but it was the last one they finished. “You can just rock out and play so hard,” Dowdy says, “but, at the same time, there’s something sensitive about that song that it lets loose. It’s dealing with a lot of sensitive material, and I wanted it to be compassionate and not just blisteringly loud.”

Big Ugly has a Crazy Horse color to it, as did Genevieve two years ago (those guitar splashes on “Trouble” still ramble). There is something about Neil Young’s relationship to his own volume knob, how he can splice ballads and raucous teardowns together in a way that eliminates dichotomy. That’s the kind of tapestry actualized in Fust’s music, and you can hear it in how the gentle parts of “Bleached” torrent into a guitar solo on “Goat House Blues.” And like Shakey, who can tell an entire story with a million words or only one, Dowdy learned to stretch his lyrical voice on Big Ugly. Much of that is, in part, thanks to the warm reception to “Violent Jubilee” in 2023, which surprised him, given how “dense” the structure is. But, if you ask me, it’s the language in “Violent Jubilee” that makes small life seem anything but. And, even at its most detailed and weird and confusing, Fust’s music is never verbose—and lines like “Tell me where will your child be raised, and do I love you just enough to stay?” and “I like driving with the odometer busted, when I know the stars are gonna fall any minute and I’m ready to burn up with it” ought to exist forever.

Before 2024 could even settle into itself, Fust released Songs of the Rail, a collection of 28 demos Dowdy recorded for those pre-Evil Joy EPs between 2017 and 2018. In fact, Dowdy is still a terminal demoer, and all of the songs on Genevieve and Big Ugly exist in the style of Songs of the Rail. But that’s not because he wants them replicated. “It’s to prove to myself that this thing I’m after can be turned into something that’s listenable,” he says. “If I know that one vehicle for this song feels good to listen to, then I know that we could find another one. There’s enough to convince me that it’s worth pursuing.” When Dowdy gave his bandmates the demos, they played them without thinking. He told them, “Don’t overthink it. Let’s just keep playing it as if we’ve known this song forever.”

“If we all have a version of the song in front of us that we imagine, then everyone’s searching for it together,” he continues, mentioning that “Doghole” was intended to be a “depressive chug-along,” only for it to turn into such a beautiful piano ballad that Dowdy had to “let go of his demo” because his band saw the music differently than he had. “I had to say, ‘This vision was good, but this band doesn’t have the same vision for it.’ So we played it over and over again with different forms, and we found that it was a piano song and it was happy being a piano song.”

Fust are friends first, collaborators second—a dynamic that’s fundamental to Dowdy. “The biggest compliment [I’ve gotten] is when people come up after a show and say, ‘I’ve played in a lot of bands, but I never got to play with my best friends.’ Or it’s ‘I’ve seen a lot of shows and it really looks like you all have so much compassion and love for one another,’” he says, before recalling the energy he’s put into talking with and meeting people, experimenting with recording, taking the time to make sure that everyone in the band has a voice within the material, going on tours and playing shows:

“I do all of that because I get the opportunity to spend deep time with these people and to take care of them and have them take care of me. That’s what music is [for me]. I know I’m being a little selfish when I say that. I feel like music would happen regardless, but this is what Fust has become, for me: this opportunity to be with people I really care about, under the banner of music. And to take that as far as we can right now, it seems worthwhile.” What makes Fust so good is how improbable it is that they all collided and found the space to create music like this in each other’s company. If starting a band isn’t one of the most romantic things a person can do, then I don’t know what could possibly take its place.

Big Ugly is out March 7th via Dear Life Records. Listen to “Bleached” below.

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

 
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