Commercial country tends to look and sound like a cotton candy daydream version of rural small-town life; it’s highly glossy and produced with vocals that now lean more towards the pop tradition; more and more twang evaporates and bigger notes, choruses, and hot licks take over. It tends to focus on the idyllic romantic image of good-looking corn-fed farm boys and girls falling in love by pristine lakes, kissing innocently in truck beds under the stars with light beer buzzes on, maybe having a “wild night” at a honky-tonk with some colorful characters.
Country has become music for a cookout or a first date.
Cumberland Gap songwriter Brandon Fulson explores a slightly more realistic, sardonic and unflinching view of rural life on his new CD Dark Side of the Mountain.
“People in my town don’t look that good standing around bonfires,” he says, laughing.
Songs like “Three Dollar Wine,” “Praise the Lord and Pass the Pills,” “Zombie Town” and “Middlesborough 1974” cover issues of painkiller addiction, trouble with the law and messy relationships between damaged people. The sound ranges from chill Southern rock to gothic outlaw country. Fulson’s vocal tone is reminiscent of Robert Earl Keen, Waylon Jennings, Scott Miller and Jason Isbell. Mostly Dark Side of the Mountain just feels–even in its dark or wild or funny moments–natural and honest.
“A lot of it was just true stories, things I just experienced myself or someone told me,” Fulson says. “There’s a lot of me in there. Places around me, my family, my dad, stories he’s told me he’s lived through.”
The Knoxville Mercury recently published a cover story exploring Knoxville and Appalachia’s prevalent issues with opioid painkiller abuse and addiction. Gray, TN, is embroiled in a controversy over contested plans for a methadone clinic. Cheap papers compiling the week’s mugshots from area jails litter the counters of convenience stores and DUI numbers have risen and have become seemingly a right of passage for many. And in his hometown of Cumberland Gap, TN, just near the border of Kentucky, Fulson says similar issues are at play.
“I’ve often said to people if they’d sell those [pills] at the bar, more people would start coming back out,” Fulson says, laughing. His recording and live foray into Knoville’s scene may be directly related to the decline of a legitimate scene back home. “Around here,” Fulton says of Cumberland Gap, “people aren’t going out because everybody has DUIs so people don’t go out like they used to. I think it’s a different generation. Where I come from there’s not a lot of work to be had and not a whole lot to do, and then they go and numb themselves and they don’t really go out and see music.”
So a few years back in 2010, Fulson briefly moved to Knoxville and started playing open mics, going to Karen Reynolds’ songwriter night, and playing with a country covers band called the Realbillys, which also featured a lot of his original music from previous homemade albums. He had noticed back home that often when he stopped in a cover set to play originals, people would start to glaze over and phase out, so he played around with putting more sensational, sarastic and strange lyrics into his songs to try to catch his crowd off-guard, and to get them thinking.
“I reached a point where I was like ‘ah, they’re not listening anyways, I might as well just be sarcastic. If you can get them to laugh, you can get them to think.”
Eventually he met players like Barry Hannah, and bands like Barstool Romeos, like-minded connoisseurs and purveyors of real, honest country music around town, and began to collaborate. He’s even done some shows with Jesco White, the famous Dancing Outlaw.
His previous releases like Sunday Morning Rain and Old Farts and Jackasses had a more homemade approach and feel, and he’d experimented with professional recording with the Robby Turner-produced single “Writing About Waylon” he did in Nashville, but Fulson says this time around, he was able to more fully realize his musical and artistic vision.
The fuller new sound Fulson envisioned was engendered and fostered by his producer John T. Baker of the Arbor, who also plays in Fulson’s live band, as well as with Heiskell and other groups around town. It was developed with studio guitarist Barry Hannah and drummer Vince Harris, with ace Knoxville sessions musicians like Greg Horne on fiddle and piano and Barstool Romeos’ Andy Pirkle and Mike McGill on harmony vocals.
“Whatever we thought the song called for we just tried it and what we liked we kept,” Fulson says. “For us it was just more about having fun. We was just thinking about how can we make it sound better and how can we have fun doing it. It was loose, but at the same time a lot of thought went into it. Everybody got a long really well and that’s what came through. There was never a time ego got in the way.”
Often the humor that goes over best is self-deprecatory, and Fulson wants his hometown folks to see that it’s just that: he’s in on the joke because he’s often guilty of the same things he talks about.
“I didnt want folks back home to think I am belittling them or exploiting them or trying to look cool,” he says. “If you actually lived with the girl from ‘Three Dollar Wine,’ it would be a sad life. I’ve noticed I’ve played it to people in a town like Knoxville, and someone’s like ‘man, I am from Harlan Kentucky, and that really speaks to what was going on back there.’ If you can get people to laugh, you can get people to think.”
Fulson is having fun playing locally now but says he’d be open to taking the show on the road.
“I’ll see where it leads me,”Fulson says. “I enjoy being on the local scene so I am just anxious to see how it goes.”
Dark Side of the Mountain is available on Spotify, iTunes and soon in local stores. Check out the music video for “Zombie Town” at:
