Fust continues the search at Nelsonville Music Festival

A feeling of wanderlust permeates Genevieve, the excellent 2023 album by roots-oriented North Carolina band Fust, which arrives populated by characters who set out for the West Coast, make late night, starlit drives in cars cursed with busted odometers, and hold tight to concerns that even in new towns they’ll continue to be the same troubled people.

“What we’re looking for is difficult to say,” singer and songwriter Aaron Dowdy offers on “Searchers.” “But it feels good to be a part of a greater kind of looking/Gonna be a searcher for the rest of my days.”

Often, these ventures are linked to a specific place, Dowdy’s songs unfolding as a travelog that stretches from Maine to California, with side treks to remote locales such as Silent City, alternately known as City of Rocks National Reserve, which rests well off the beaten path near the Utah border in southern Idaho.

“I think that sense of place [in the songs] comes from a desire to think about America, this country that we’ve inherited,” said Dowdy, who will join his Fust bandmates in helping to kick off the Nelsonville Music Festival with a 2 p.m. set at the Creekside Stage on Friday, July 26. (The festival runs Friday through Sunday, July 26-28, and a full schedule of performers can be viewed by clicking here.) “I’m not trying to give that big picture, like, ‘This is the state of things. This is the state of America.’ But regionalism is incredibly important to me – small places with very specific habits and ways of living. … If we’re trying to get a better sense of what this American experience means, it comes from little details, little interactions between people and little frustrations, as opposed to any kind of larger certainty of this is the way things are.”

These smaller details frequently surface in the interactions between Dowdy’s characters, who reside at myriad points on the relationship spectrum. On the album’s title track, the narrator makes a clean break from his love, Genevieve, setting out for California in spite of the pull she continues to exude on him (“Did your eyes say not to leave?”). Then there’s John and Angel, the childless couple who make an appearance in “Violent Jubilee,” and who have managed to hold together in spite of the unnamed tragedies life has thrown at them. 

“A lot of it is an attempt to think about why we commit and why we hold onto those things that are worth holding onto,” Dowdy said. “It’s kind of counterintuitive, but I’ve always thought, like, ‘Break things down. Break it apart. Have it fail.’ … You can talk about the loveliness of something, but if you put a thing that’s worthwhile at risk, it feels more precious. If it feels like you’re about to lose something you care about, I think that’s a strong instigator for wanting to hold onto it or wanting to preserve it. … More broadly, I think commitment is not just committing yourself to the good things. It’s committing yourself to the things that are hardest. So, when characters are having a fight, or a character is having doubts, the question is, ‘Are you willing to commit to the thing that’s causing you these concerns? Is it ultimately worth it?’ And it’s not always yes, but a lot of the time it is. And I’m interested in stories where that question becomes important and worthwhile.”

It helps, of course, that Dowdy is a tender and perceptive writer, capable of providing novelistic detail but also holding an awareness that some of the emotional resonance in a narrative can come from those things left unsaid. On “Violent Jubilee,” for instance, Dowdy shies away from providing any backstory for John and Angel. And yet, when he sings that the two never had any children of their own, the line resonates with a sadness that suggests they at one point very much hoped for the opposite.

“In literature and films, I think that’s something we love: the gap, the thing that’s unstated,” Dowdy said. “I think in doing these regional, narrative stories I’m doing, things often go unsaid. … You can’t fit everything, and you wouldn’t want to. You need some space to feel like the unknown is affecting the characters. … There are a lot of songs I write that don’t make it. And a lot of the reason I don’t take them further is because they say too much, or they say the thing too obviously. So, when that moment comes and the character has this realization, I feel like I didn’t earn it.”

Some of the issues with which Dowdy’s characters struggle are culled from the musician’s own experiences, such as the anxiety-ridden loner who stows away in the lovely, fiddle-led “Oil Leak,” or the narrator on “Rockfort Bay” who struggles with the idea that they’ll never evolve as a person. “It’s those moments that feel a little more personal, a little more confessional,” Dowdy said. “But again, the framing is the most important thing in these songs, where they seem to be wrapped in a story or a descriptive hold that allows me to have a little bit of room if I am confessing something, or if I am working through a problem that I’m finding is difficult.”

While Dowdy’s characters are often plagued by uncertainty, the music itself moves with a breezy confidence, the bandmates crafting a comfortably weatherbeaten landscape that feels universally lived in. And even when outside collaborators show up, including fellow North Carolinians Indigo De Souza and MJ Lenderman, there’s never mistaking the results for anyone but Fust. 

Dowdy attributed this in part to how the songs originate, describing them as deeply rooted in a melodic core that tends to remain consistent from the earliest home demos through the final recorded version. “I’m a compulsive demo-er,” said Dowdy, who added that the band recently completed work on the follow-up to Genevieve, a handful of songs from which they intend to debut on their coming tour, which kicks off with this weekend’s stop at Nelsonville. “Everyone in the band gets to know those demos, and it helps them get a feel for the songs. Then as a band we take that demo, and it can totally get transformed. But that voice seems to stay the same, because the voice is everything. It’s where the songs, for me, exist – even as we experiment and try to give them a new underbelly.”