Fust is a band from Durham, North Carolina that started out as the songwriting project of Aaron Dowdy. Before shifting to a live group, Dowdy home-recorded and self-released several EPs on Bandcamp between 2017 and 2018; they’re no longer available on the platform, but you can revisit that era of the band via Songs of the Rail, a collection of 28 demos recorded during the same time period that came out a year ago. After releasing their sun-kissed, soulful debut Evil Joy in 2021, Fust – now a seven-piece featuring drummer Avery Sullivan, pianist Frank Meadows, guitarist John Wallace, multi-instrumentalist Justin Morris, fiddlist Libby Rodenbough, and bassist Oliver Child-Lanning – decamped to Drop of Sun to record Genevieve with producer Alex Farrar, with whom they reunited for their astounding new album, Big Ugly. Named after an unincorporated area in southern West Virginia, around which Dowdy’s family has deep roots, the record is conflicted yet aspirational: homey while grappling with the mystery of home, hopeful when hope rests between the promise of a new life and relenting in old, slow, ragged ways. As the title may suggest, it wrings beauty out of the most unexpected places, honing in the band’s knack for making small feelings appear monumental – that is, closer to their true experience.

We caught up with Fust’s Aaron Dowdy for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about his relationship to the South, the tension between documentary and fiction, making Big Ugly, and more.

There’s a story in the press release about a placard you saw memorializing a gutter off the streets in Athens, where I live. I’m fascinated by how being away from home or your roots can force you to see them in a different light, and it sounds like that’s something that was happening when you were in Europe a couple of years ago.

Athens was such a special place. I don’t travel well – I’m sort of a homebody. When I travel, I start to get anxious or feel out of my element, like I’ve strayed too far and I’m losing my superpowers that really only exist when I’m at home and comfortable. But Athens was the best traveling experience I ever had. I think maybe what I felt there – I was starting to write towards new music, and just being around such a disparity between the ancient and the modern, visibly everywhere, this kind of tension of time. What I really loved was not just the major monuments, but how everything, with time, becomes important. Obviously, Athens is the center of something the West has inherited, but seeing the gutter was the first moment where I was like, “Wow, everything has value.” Even the forgettable detail, the thing that goes overlooked.

I started to think then about the South. We have mountains and landscapes that are very old, but in terms of the materials – the things people have made that you see around you – you don’t get that kind of historical tension. So you almost have to project into the future the value of things. In my backyard now, there’s a fallen gutter, and it’s nowhere near as beautiful or well-made, but you almost have to see it with that point of view. You can start to make monuments out of your own world and see how the detritus might belong to something at some point, even if it doesn’t feel important now. I wanted to look at my place with that sense of history – not just immediate history, but a big historical weight. I started to imagine some of these images – homes, buildings, trash – and wonder what it would look like if they were taken as valuable.

You mentioned things people make, but people obviously also make art and literature, and there’s definitely a lineage of Southern writers honouring that perspective – seeing the value in things otherwise lost to time. 

Yeah, that’s exactly right. I tend to be very interested in people and human relations. I write about conflict, disillusionment, excitement – little feelings. Obviously, those feelings have been had well beyond the South, well beyond Athens. But through Southern music and Southern literature, it becomes clear that part of our monuments are very specific kinds of human relationships – making something, a relation or interaction, that seems so unimportant, something anyone else would pass by, into a source of literary value. If we don’t have that immediate sense of vast history, we nonetheless have history, and a lot of it values human relationships and the poetry or dissonance within them. I’m a big fan of Southern literature and Southern music, and I take those things very seriously. So when I say Athens made me want to rethink the way I view the South, it doesn’t mean we don’t have our own monuments. It just looks different, and you have to change the way you think about what we do have.

Beyond music or other people’s poetry, how do you go about relaying the Southern experience when people ask you in day-to-day life, or when you spend time away from it? Or do songs make up for the lack of language for that kind of thing? 

That’s a good question. I’ve always gravitated towards song as the way I engage the world. It’s a form that helps me piece things together and make sense of my own experience. But also, when I hear other Southern music, it feels like it expresses or gets at something, and it’s often very unclear what it’s about – there’s this ambiguiry, which I like and try to maintain in my own work. I lived in New York for a while, I lived in Brooklyn, and I moved away from the South, from North Carolina, in part because I thought other places in the world had a vanguard – it was doing something pressing and forward-thinking. Growing up in the South, I thought, maybe poorly, that there were some backwards, traditional, or conservative ways of life. I was interested in what it would look like to be in a place where everyone was productive, always making things, driven. 

But when I was in New York, I immediately started using forms from the South – melodic forms or references. It took me leaving to realize those Southern elements aren’t backwards at all. They might be slower, but they’re actually something missing that is missing elsewhere – a certain waiting, wading patiently. A certain slowness I grew up with and loved, I embraced and embodied it. When I was in the South, I thought, “I have this other thing – I make music, I have this other element that’s not being expressed here.” But the moment I left, I embraced those elements. I loved being slow again, embracing this down-homeness, this dirtiness, this thing I didn’t know was so part of me until I felt it wasn’t around me. When I was in other places, I felt dissonant, and coming back made me want to understand what that was – what draws you back and makes you want to defend it. 

But I think a lot of us listening, reading, taking seriously what it means to be from the South – it’s about that tension. It’s not just a full embrace. It’s embracing it because there’s something complicated that makes it valuable. When you read Faulkner or Frank Stanford’s poetry, those tensions are everywhere – there’s harm, hurt, and pain lurking everywhere. It’s not something that’s often said; and if it is, it’s always coded in something else. Saying a nicety that covers over something more painful is part of the language of the South – how do you say something so difficult about a place while saying, “This is the place I choose to live”? That’s a lot of what’s going on in this record – a crisis of language, of being able to express this value.

Speaking of slowness, one of my favorite lines on Big Ugly is from the title track: “Even if sometimes I’m slowing down, I know I’m slowing over you.”

Yeah, thank you. That’s a song, I guess, about commitment. “They’ll have to haul me off,” you know, they’ll have to take me out of here if I’m going to leave. But what am I sticking around for? It’s this relationship to the earth, the place, the people, and its specific way of life – how it compels you and makes you relate to it, and act that way, too. I like that song and that line. It’s an odd one.

I relate it also to the final song and that question of “Have I been okay at living?” The line that really strikes me is the one that comes right after: “Do I have heart when I’m blacking out from living?” I feel like that’s a lot of what the album is ultimately about: the things that compel you to stay, to not indulge in escapist or dissociative behaviour.

Yeah, I think so too. A lot of this stuff is about being overwhelmed, feeling incapable, like the world is moving in the wrong direction. So you shut down – whether through staying home and becoming more insular, drinking culture, or whatever allows you to shut out the world. Obviously, blacking out has a drinking quality, but it’s more than that – it’s a real closing out of the world. A lot of what we see today is, having heart means being open, sensitive, careful. That’s perfect – it’s a good direction and way to be. But how do you do that when you’re born out of almost a repressive way of approaching the world? If that’s your core, having heart seems like the thing you don’t have in that new sense of being open. I love that tension – when the person or character can’t do something, yet it’s that very thing where you expect it not to be that might shine through as important. That’s what I like about Southern literature and themes – the kindnesses are exactly where you don’t expect them.

I feel like that tension is foregrounded in the title, which at first seems like a continuation of the linguistic juxtaposition of Evil Joy, but it’s a real place. When you decided to use the mural depicting the area around Big Ugly Creek as the album cover, what role did it play for you? And more broadly, how does the real lineage, community, and personal history you discovered serve as a backdrop for fiction and songwriting?

I’ve always been drawn to little couplets, two words that, when put together, feel wrong or like they shouldn’t exist. “Evil joy” should be negative, but it’s something people know intuitively, this badness that also gives a kind of pleasure. I think “big ugly” is a more developed version of that. I like starting with something very negative and trying to milk it for its beauty, helpfulness, or sensitivity. Linguistically, it sets me up for the narratives I like to tell: an ugly situation that has a lot of heart. I thought it was a great name for those thematic tensions, but it’s also a great name for the spatial things going on in this record – small towns, an almost documentarian sense of people living their lives. I wanted it to be real, because not everything said on here is real stories about real people, but it should feel real. I wanted it to be a real place that someone could find on a map. That tension between documentary and fiction, historical fact and narrative, is perfectly encapsulated in that name. 

It’s not like I have a specific relationship to the small, unincorporated area called Big Ugly, but I have a relationship to West Virginia and the Guyandotte River, where my family is from. Big Ugly is one of those names that sticks with you as a place and as a name. It’s funny that a place like that exists, and it’s funny that the name has lived on. When I started to look into it, I found that it’s actually an incredibly beautiful place. What I found there was this mural and a whole history of people producing music and literature about this area. It’s very aware of itself and inspired by itself, producing all this reflection on itself. For me, outside of my own investments and poetry, that became a real example of expectations being totally undercut.

Similarly, with my family, going to West Virginia, there’s an expectation that it’s not going to be great. But then I went with my grandma, and she showed me all the places she went to, all the love she had, all the experiences and dreams she had. She sees them as being there, and it undercuts it. You think one thing, but then you go there, and it’s filled with dreams and aspirations. All of that together made it such a powerful starting point or image for me to move through.

Can you tell me more about the expectations that were undercut during those trips with your grandma?

Well, my expectation – and this is just from living in the South, even in North Carolina and Virginia, all the places I’ve lived and visited – is that these are places in decline. Places that have suffered economic crises, drug crises. These are places that are hurting, and people are closed off, conservative, wary of outsiders. Even though I’m from here, I anticipate them being rundown, suffering areas. But instead, with my grandma there, walking around, with her energy and talking to people – her personal history is projected onto it, and she sees it come to life. If she’s doing that, if she’s bringing this place to life – it may look rundown and exhausted, but it’s not. It’s filled, through her view, with all these memories and energies. And if she’s doing that, then everyone’s doing that. It takes a reconsideration through the lens of the people who live there, workers, the people who live on the land. Appearances are deceptive. Obviously, there’s a lot of poverty and structural poverty here, but that’s not the end. Restoring or emphasizing the hopes and aspirations there seems to be the inversion needed.

I think these things are also truisms. Every place has its problems, yet people remain. People look past it and think forward. I’m not saying anything totally new, but it was big for me, as someone thinking about personal history, to experience it through my grandmother – to see her looking at the home she grew up in, the steps she played on, or the house she was born in that was torn down. She’s looking at this absent building – a building I can’t see, but she can. It’s that historical memory overlaid with appearances and expectations, rewriting those negative projections with lovely ones – that was so profound for me.

You talked about being fascinated by human conflict, these little feelings, and what I get from Big Ugly is people being on the verge of vulnerability –  or people on the other side of that vulnerability, trying to dig it out. Is that interpersonal tension something that appeals to you?

Each of these songs has a character – if not named, then it’s about people, people having feelings, crises, frustrations. It’s classic, in a way: ‘Gateleg’ is kind of a love story, ‘Spangled’ is a repressive, traumatic thing, and ‘Doghole’ is full of excitement. But none of them are so available – it’s not just the pure essence of excitement or love. Everything is up against the world in these songs. Like I said earlier, with the idea of blacking out, a lot of it is about being raised in a culture with a lot of restrictions, and feeling that’s kind of important: a quiet approach to the world, not being vulnerable, blocking things out. 

No one’s put it this way, but I think it’s exactly right: this being on the other side of vulnerability, having it break through in tiny ways. Whether it’s through language, being able to talk about something in a certain way, or releasing the stronghold on expressing yourself, like digging a hole – I love that image of a dog bursting out of the house into the yard, digging. That idea of joy, breaking through the barrier, having that be an expression of excitement and love. Or in ‘Bleached’, looking back on how you became what you are when you barely had thoughts, barely could speak. You took up with friends and became a specific way because you were trying to match them, and then realizing it’s kept you from being more vulnerable – or at least capable of receiving new things. I really do think that gets at the core of it. I like to route it through people and interpersonal relations because it happens at the level of people. 

In the song ‘Jody’, you’ve got these characters who are in a relationship, and they both grew up in a culture that’s maybe abusive, or about playing hard, having a meanness. And then producing a really healthy relationship out of that. Like with Big Ugly, these expectations – you think it’s this bad thing you’re defined by, but instead, it’s this breaking through that gives it the energy that’s worth listening to or putting into a song or reading. That’s the thing that’s so valuable here.

A lot of that energy and excitement is captured in ‘Mountain Language’. I’m curious about the extent to which it’s something you personally identify with it, or if it wavers for you, that kind of romanticism.

It feels personal. A lot of songs on this record feel more personal in that way. Each verse in ‘Mountain Language’ takes up a problem in each verse I know very well from my life – socioeconomic restrictions or situations that hold you back, making you work a wage job, have relationships that don’t feel exactly right, or have friends and family members in crisis. It’s so hard to think that, despite these situations, there are still these sweet, lived resistances to it all. But if there was some other way – the big utopian question – we’ve got to hold onto that image, however romantic or unviable it is. That song and sentiment are ones I really feel. 

I’m someone whose first principle is hope. It doesn’t always feel critical, and sometimes it doesn’t look very political, but my first sentiment is hope. I think hope is a great first philosophy to have – to look back on the hopes of people as something that’s worth remembering, even if they didn’t materialize. Maintaining hope, whatever that means – the thing that’s yet to come – makes the present feel purposeful. It’s a simple wish-fulfillment type song, but I think those sentiments are important.

As you mentioned, there’s characters all throughout the record, but one of its most moving songs is ‘Sister’, which has no names or no signifiers of place. It makes me feel like that’s a song that hits home for you.

It’s one of the only songs I’ve ever written as a kind of elegy – a song about death. I wrote it after the experience of death in my life. I try not to make songs too personal because then, every time you play or listen to them, the personal thing comes up constantly. You grow tired of it, or your position changes, and you don’t want to think about that thing anymore, so the song becomes lost. But this was a rare example of processing something in my life through a song. I wrote it straight through in about 10-15 minutes because I was in a very vulnerable moment in my life. 

It’s similar to what’s happening in ‘Spangled’, where something absent still has presence in the world around you. When it comes to death, when someone passes away, you see the remnants of their life, you still see the traces of life. It’s a strange tension of presence and absence – experiencing someone’s loss through what they’ve left behind. But I also think it’s a universal song in a way. I always feel that because it’s particular, someone else can find their thing through it. That’s what a lot of the characters and details do in my songs, or I hope they do. But here, without those things, it’s purely a feeling song, an internal song that maybe does it on a different level. It definitely feels like it’s an exception on this record, but it’s one of my favorite songs and recordings. Libby’s fiddle on it is so harrowing – it’s droning and crying. There’s so much at the musical level that feels like it’s doing the work.

You recorded the album with Alex Farrar, and something that separates you from many artists I’ve talked to who’ve made albums with him is that this is your second full-length collaboration in a row. What was it like working again with him?

Well, when we recorded Genevieve, it happened so fast. I had come out of years of home recording, and it was my first time in a studio. I was always against studio stuff because so many people in my generation expect the sound of home recording – it’s part of our musical DNA. But with Alex, it was immediately gratifying. He had such a sound and touch, and it felt natural. I wanted to do a second record with him because we had more time to work on it together, which he was very happy to do. 

When I look back on recording Big Ugly, it was very structured – we worked 10 to 7. Alex has a kid, and his partner, Larkin, is one of my favorite people. They’re the definition of good people. The people at Drop of Sun are all so caring and thoughtful. It was a community effort with Alex. Also, he’s a great reader. He reads so much, and he’s so sensitive to themes and philosophical concepts. We’d record, and then we’d talk about books and movies. He’s so quiet and serious and careful when it comes to recording, but also able to break away and have the most intriguing conversations. It’s not so technical – it’s very fluid. He’s on a wavelength where we’re making music not because there’s this urgency, but because we are friends, and we each have our talents and capacities, and we want to be around each other. And the music feels like a byproduct of that. When I think back on the record, I think of it like that: a document of two weeks spent in close quarters with good, caring, thoughtful people, as opposed to a transaction. 

The word we often use to describe how bands work together is “chemistry,” but I wanted to ask what meaning you’ve found in the companionship – a word that feels more apt here – of Fust as a group.

Yeah, I don’t know about chemistry. I think any combination of people would produce a kind of reaction, but I’m not someone who firmly believes in that sense of chemical reaction. I’ll write songs because I’ve been doing it for so long. Luckily, it was the first project where strangers liked it. There’s the question: What’s different? Why do people like this one? Is it because of chemistry between this group of people playing it and Alex? It could be, but those aren’t the questions I’m super interested in. 

What made Fust great was that I surrendered to not being the only musician who played everything, to not recording and mixing everything myself. I surrendered to total control and made music not a precious thing that has to be exactly right, but actually a commitment to other people. To Avery, who’s such an incredible and sensitive drummer – a songwriter’s drummer. He plays with phrasing that gives me the momentum and stability I need. Playing with Ollie and Justin, whose voices joining me is something I could never replicate. They’re the perfect choir to sing with. It’s this commitment to other people’s hard-earned ways of performing and being around people. Alex’s hard-earned way of making music. Being very cautious and careful with who I choose to spend time with. 

I don’t need to do this – there are other ways of living life. I don’t need to do all of this to put this record in front of people. What makes it all worth it is that it means I get to have more intense relationships with these people, that I get to continue investing in them – not just the music, but these people. I’ve got such a great community – it’s almost embarrassing how good the people I’ve found myself gathered among are. So talented, so special. I love the pivot you made between chemistry as just some kind of symbiosis – this thing where talents come together and it works – and people who love to be together. Could Fust sound differently with a different group? Absolutely. But that’s not what I’m listening for. When I listen back to Big Ugly, I’m hearing my friends, my people doing things I didn’t write, things I didn’t know they were going to do. I’m hearing traces of the people I love, as opposed to the musical idea perfected by a gun-for-hire.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Fust’s Big Ugly is out March 7 via Dear Life Records.