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Over the last decade, North Carolinas Jake Xerxes Fussell has established himself as a devoted listener and contemplative interpreter of a vast array of lovingly sourced folk songs. On his fifth album, When Im Calledhis first LP for Fat PossumFussell returns to a well of music that holds lifelong sentimental meaning, contemplating the passage of time and the procession of lifes unexpected offerings.

Recognized for his compelling transliterations of traditional music, Fussell took an atypical approach to the material on When Im Called, often constructing the music from the ground up, before considering what existing source material could be applied to the song. The core of the title track to When Im Called is a passage that tumbled into Fussells life, picked up from a roadside scrap of paper that seemed to bear a childs penitent writings. He borrowed his albums sprightly opener, Andy from the eclectic multimedia artist Maestro Gaxiola, who penned it in the mid-1980s as an ode to his quixotic pseudo-rivalry with the pop-art icon Andy Warhol. He jumps next into Cuckoo!, a strings-swept update of a composition credited to the English composer Benjamin Britten and Jane Taylor, author of Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star. The remainder of When Im Called, like so many of Fussells favorite numbers, have extensive and winding traditional pedigrees.

James Elkington returned to the producers chair, offering guidance on arrangements after working with Fussell on 2022s Good and Green Again. As Elkington helped flesh out the recordings with piano, pedal steel, dobro, more guitar, and light synth touches, Fussell again found himself ingratiated to Elkingtons eclectic and finely attuned sensibilities. He's very open to a lot of weird ideas, Fussell explains. I feel like the conversations with him can be really free and open.

With friends like Blake Mills, Joan Shelley, Robin Holcomb, and James Elkington lending their talents to the LP, Fussells latest archival dive expands upon his unassuming style, anchored by his friendly warble and even-tempered guitar. When Im Called is Fussells richest work to date, and with a slate of warm instrumental textures abetting his glowing guitar, Fussell follows a growing artistic edge as he pursues broad questions of belonging.

Though his affection for ballads spans mountainous Appalachian tunes to sea shanties and everything in between, Fussell has found himself particularly close to field recordings made in the 1960s and 70s by painter, musician, and folklorist Art Rosenbaumone of Fussells beloved late mentors, who died in September 2022. He sources Feeing Day, which gets a brassy halo, to one of Rosenbaums 1971 captures in Scotland.

The lightly rolling Leaving Here, Dont Know Where Im Going and its unwitting companion, Going to Georgia, are part of Fussells multidisciplinary inheritance from Rosenbaum; threaded together with the gentle ripple of Gone to Hilo, the LP finds its thematic backbone in its trio of traveling songs. Rosenbaums field recordings of Who Killed Poor Robin? and One Morning in May were among the numerous versions that informed Fussells contemporary takes. In tandem with his relationship to Rosenbaum, Fussell traces his love of post-war field recordings to his upbringing in Georgia by song-collecting folklorist parents, whose enthusiasm for their itinerant work surrounded their son in many different musics for as long as he can remember.

That early-life intensive had a profound impact on Fussells sense of time around music that, too often, gets treated as a museum piece. When I was getting really deep into traditional music as a teenager, I tended to see it more in a continuum, like, This is all tied into an ongoing world, he says. In the ringing warmth of When Im Called, Fussell honors traditions while carrying them into a new generations field of vision, deepening his own understanding of his part in the ongoing world. Hes charted his own terrain of growth and change without any hurry toward a destination, and in his guitar-guided meditations, Fussell plucks at the threads that keep humanity knotted together.