On her new record, Durham's Fust explores the world of great ugly

The singer-songwriter Aaron Dowdy comes from West Virginia, but has made a home here in Durham, where he is currently doing his doctorate. Candidate for Literature at Duke. His band Fust celebrates the publication of her new record “Big Ugly” Friday. Dowdy then researches various aspects of life in the south as it looks both and sounds.

Dowdy and Fust drummer Avery Sullivan stopped in our Durham studio to chat with the music reporter Brian Brian to the stories that inspired some of these songs.

This is an extract of a processed transcript of this conversation. You can hear the complete interview by clicking the listen to the listen to the list in this post.

Let's go a little in the title. Tell us the story behind “Big Ugly”.

Technically speaking, Big Ugly is the name of a small area in West Virginia in front of the Guyandotte River. I started writing about West Virginia where my family comes from. They are not from the large ugly area, but they grew up along the Guyandotte River. When I researched it, I came across this name, and he immediately remained as a phrase, not exactly as a place, but as a phrase that they could describe something as or even a person as a person. And I think the recording examines this tension between a certain place and this type of conceptual area in many ways. There is a layer behind everything, and everything has this meaning that does not mean exactly what you expect. So, yes, I found it a perfect kind of title for recording.

It is very simple and impressive how many of your writing. Tell us about the cover.

When I dealt with this record and looked at great ugly, I found this murals on the Internet that this documenter had published, and I was put on it immediately. I liked it was big ugly, but they also had this ugly photo of this beautiful thing. I made some research and found that it was this huge mural in the large ugly community center in this area. It was made as a backdrop for a theater experiment in which the people, the children in the area, their oldest interviewees and songs and sketches created based on the stories and which were immediately used for what I thought for the recording, which took this place and created stories and turned them into something. A kind of mythologization of her own past and her own people and turns them into a performance. I thought it was really nice.

The record begins with “Spangled”. This is a word that has a lot of weight. Tell us a bit about this song.

“Spangled” was one of the first notes that I had when I started writing about this record or writing texts for this record, especially because it is a word that we all know so well and we all said so often, and yet it is one of these words that it is difficult to know what it means at all. It is a kind of familiar, so familiar that it is differentiated. Similarly, I had this idea of ​​hospitals in the south and in America, especially in rural areas and poor areas in which there are many enforcements and the shutdown of hospitals in the USA is a kind of epidemic. And I thought of the hospital in certain places as buildings that have a lot of weight for humans. People have very serious experiences in hospital rooms, be it birth or death or almost death, and when this building disappears, these experiences remain there. And you can stare at the room where the hospital was located and imagine that very important events simply hover there.

Another song that I want to talk about is “Jody”. I think that's a great example of how strong you are a storyteller. How much of your letter is your own reality inspired?

It's a great question. I try to distance myself from my personal life as a writer. I don't have to remember something too personal every time I sing it live. I like to treat characters and stories and situations with a feeling of distance and not to be too much, but I am the writer, so it runs out. And I think it is interesting that you address “Jody”, because this may be the most personal song on the record. It is a song about romanticizing a rough way of life as a child. And I was always someone who is as romanticizing as you know that they are confused or that they are involved in badness. And then I only thought about how many people romantize a kind of ugly lifestyle and a dangerous and self -destructive group of behaviors, and I still romantize it, even if I get older, as if it were part of me. And yet, how can a constant relationship emerge for such rocky reasons?