Robbie Fulks Announces New LP 'Bluegrass Vacation' Due Out April 7, Lead Single Out This Friday (Feb. 17)
ALT-COUNTRY ICON
ROBBIE FULKS
ANNOUNCES FULL-LENGTH ALBUM
BLUEGRASS VACATION
DUE APRIL 7 VIA COMPASS RECORDS
LEAD SINGLE
“ONE GLASS OF WHISKEY”
OUT FRIDAY (FEBRUARY 17)
TICKETS ON SALE NOW FOR FULKS’ SPRING TOUR
Above: ‘Bluegrass Vacation’ Album Artwork
“Before Sturgill Simpson or Chris Stapleton, there was Robbie Fulks…”
— Holly Gleason, PASTE
NASHVILLE, TN (February 15, 2023) — GRAMMY-nominated founding father of the alt-country scene and overall icon in roots music, Robbie Fulks, announces his new forthcoming album Bluegrass Vacation will be released Friday, April 7 via Compass Records. The album’s lead single, “One Glass of Whiskey,” is out this Friday, February 17.
Pre-Save “One Glass of Whiskey” here.
Pre-Save Bluegrass Vacation here.
While bluegrass music has always been a part of Fulks’s musical vision, Bluegrass Vacation marks his first full-length bluegrass endeavor. The album combines Fulks’ brilliance with some of bluegrass’ greatest acts including Sam Bush, Sierra Hull, Ronnie McCoury, Tim O’Brien, Alison Brown, John Cowan, and Jerry Douglas resulting in one of the most remarkable bluegrass albums of the century. The 12-track album proves that this is much more than a musical detour for Fulks.
Bluegrass Vacation opens with “One Glass of Whiskey.” Driven by Wes Corbett’s banjo, it is an upbeat track worthy of becoming a standard of the genre. Written shortly after his move to Los Angeles in 2019, the song is a “contradiction of the stereotypical view of LA,” says Fulks, ditching the common pre-conceived notion of palm trees, beaches, and traffic for Fulks’s more serene reality of porch side mornings, mountain vistas, and running horses.
The album pulls no stops, with each track superseding the last. “Molly and the Old Man,” featuring Brennen Leigh’s harmony vocals and Alison Brown’s banjo, is a poignant homage to the power of traditional music to sustain us through tragedy and help us find common ground across generations. “Angels Carry Me” features Sierra Hull on mandolin and shines as an incredible display of Fulks’s songwriting capabilities, balancing three themes: rural loneliness, rock-star worship, and father-son tension. The autobiographical “Longhair Bluegrass” connects Fulks to the hippie bluegrass festival scene of the early 1970s that helped shape him as an artist and features newgrass pioneers Sam Bush (mandolin/harmony vocals) and John Cowan (vocals). “Let The Old Dog In” is a bluegrass barnburner featuring some top-flight picking from Russ Carson (banjo), Jerry Douglas (Dobro), Shad Cobb (fiddle) and Ronnie McCoury (mandolin).
In the end, Fulks plants his flag firmly in the bluegrass tradition, a genre that built the stepping stones Fulks walks on today. He muses, “Electric guitars might give way to computers, as seems to be happening now, but the mountains will still be right there.” It’s abundantly clear that Bluegrass Vacation is more than just a musical dalliance for Fulks. He owns the music as much as it owns him and the listener is left hoping that this bluegrass vacation will end up becoming a staycation.
Bluegrass Vacation Tracklisting:
“One Glass Of Whiskey”
“Molly And The Old Man”
“Lonely Ain’t Hardly Alive”
“Angels Carry Me”
“Longhair Bluegrass”
“Backwater Blues”
“Sweet Li’l Cora-Mae”
“Silverlake Reel”
“Momma’s Eyes”
“Nashville Blues”
“Let The Old Dog In”
“Old Time Music Is Here To Stay”
Above: Robbie Fulks; Credit: Scott Simontacchi
Robbie Fulks’s adventurous spirit has defined a critically acclaimed 30-year career that has included 15 solo albums and two GRAMMY® nominations. He came to national attention as a defining artist of the alt-country scene in the 1990s, with releases on the Chicago-based indie Bloodshot Records, North Carolina’s Yep Roc, and Los Angeles’s Geffen Records. While Fulks’s aversion to genre constraints and conventions has sometimes made him hard to pigeonhole, American country music, in the widest sense, is his home base — whether the country of Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Merle Haggard, Bobby Charles, or Mississippi John Hurt. For the last ten years, he has focused on his writing and performing with homespun tales and acoustic instruments.
Fulks was born in York, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a half-dozen small towns in southeast Pennsylvania, the North Carolina Piedmont, and the Blue Ridge area of Virginia. He learned guitar from his dad, banjo from the Earl Scruggs instruction book, and songwriting by a trial-and-error process that is still going on. He attended Columbia College in New York City in 1980 and dropped out in 1982 to focus on the Greenwich Village songwriter scene. He moved to Chicago in the mid 1980s, joining Greg Cahill’s bluegrass outfit Special Consensus and teaching at the Old Town School of Folk Music. After a stint as a Music Row songwriter in Nashville in the 1990s, he embarked on a solo career with the Chicago-based indie Bloodshot Records and later, Geffen and Yep Roc, releasing a string of albums that helped to define the “alternative country” movement. His 2016 release Upland Stories garnered Grammy® nominations for Best Folk Album and Best American Roots Song for the track “Alabama At Night.” While Fulks’s aversion to genre constraints and conventions has sometimes made him hard to pigeonhole, American country music, in the widest sense, is his home base — the country of Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Merle Haggard, Bobby Charles, and Mississippi John Hurt, for example. For the last ten years, he has focused in his writing and performing on homespun tales and acoustic instruments.
Tickets on sale now for his spring tour in the following cities: