Hear Spencer Cullum cover Kevin Ayers, Trees, and Bridget St. John in Lagniappe Session for Aquarium Drunkard
Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection is out on 9/24 via Full Time Hobby
[click here to pre-order]
STREAM – Lagniappe Session
Today Spencer Cullum is sharing a three song Lagniappe Session for Aquarium Drunkard featuring covers of Kevin Ayers, Trees, and Bridget St. John. Stream the session & read about each track here.
“Not one to avoid earnestly exploring the sounds of his influences, Cullum reached into the overflowing 60s/70s British folk bag, proffering three selections from pillars of the era in Kevin Ayers, Trees, and Bridget St. John. These deft reinterpretations are patient and affecting, each take heightened by Rae’s truly fine vocal accompaniments. Overt respect to the forebears.” – Aquarium Drunkard
Bio:
With an arm’s length list of credits stretching from the likes of Kesha, Dolly Parton and Deer Tick, to Miranda Lambert and Little Big Town, pedal steel savant Spencer Cullum is one of Nashville’s most in-demand session cats. That’s in addition to making up half of acclaimed, primarily instrumental space-country duo “Steelism.” Clearly he’s had little trouble fitting in since moving from his native London to Music City by way of Detroit eight years ago, even if it’s mostly meant blending into the background. “I guess I’ve always hidden behind [the instrument],” he deadpans. “I’m always the guy who looks like he’s studying for a test in the background.”
Now, with a debut solo album, Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection, paying homage to the ’60s and ‘70s psych-pop, folk and proto prog heroes of his homeland, this Nashville sideman’s stepping out from the shadows into the spotlight. The album is being released September 24th via Full Time Hobby. Along with a supporting cast of fellow Music City stage and studio aces like guitarist Sean Thompson and multi-instrumentalist Luke Reynolds, as well as singing and writing partners like Caitlin Rose, Andrew Combs, Erin Rae, Annie Williams and James “Skyway Man” Wallace — he’s bringing a bit of Britain to Tennessee.
“I wanted to write a very quintessential English folk record, but with really good Nashville players.” Cullum says of Canterbury Scene conjuring Coin Collection. Cuts like glass-lake-placid album opener “Jack of Fools”, “Seaside” and the dreamlike “The Dusty Floor,” recall the prime work of the influences he name-checks: Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt, Fairport Convention and Sandy Denny. Beyond that, the album manifests his love for psych-prog ground-breakers the Soft Machine (“Tombre En Morceaux”), digs deep into cerebral ambient inspirations like Robert Fripp and Brian Eno (“My Protector”) and krautrock icons NEU! (“Dietrich Buxtehude”) – references he’d previously explored with Steelism. “I’ve always wanted to mix krautrock music into folk and psychedelic,” he explains.
While that might sound a little off-brand for a picker who’s made his bones on arena and stadium stages with Miranda Lambert, Cullum notes that his introduction to pedal steel was actually through the instrument’s prominent appearance on classic English rock albums released in the 60s and 70s. In fact, the man who taught him to play the instrument was the master steel player on those very recordings. Multi-genre stylist and session man B.J. Cole, recorded with a staggering range of diverse artists including Elton John, Sting and John Cale, to Beck and Björk.
Paradoxically Cullum handling lead vocals duties here left little room for showing off his pedal steel mastery on Coin Collection. “I have a very thick East London accent and really wanted to sing how I talked and not put on a persona,” he says.
Produced by Jeremy Ferguson and recorded at the Grammy-winning Nashville indie-rock producer’s Battle Tapes Recording studio, the album boasts a wide-open, bell-clear sound fit for a deftly shimmering set of songs with non-narrative lyrics culled from the mystic corners of the subliminal mind. The lyrics come from “my own experience,” Cullum explains, “but [I] also wanted to not be emotionally specific, almost in a dreamlike, subconscious state. Like spidergram.”
Spencer Cullum
Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection
(Full Time Hobby)
Street Date: September 24, 2021
[click here to pre-order]
Track List:
1. Jack of Fools
2. To Be Blinkered
3. Tombre en Morceaux
4. Imminent Shadow
5. Seaside
6. Dieterich Buxtehude
7. The Dusty Floor
8. My Protector
9. The Tree