Photo by Graham Tolbert
Fust’s 2023 album, Genevieve, garnered unexpected yet well-deserved critical acclaim, receiving praise from publications such as Paste, Pitchfork, and Stereogum as Aaron Dowdy, a doctoral candidate in literature at Duke University, demonstrated masterful storytelling, crafting character studies inspired by lived experiences, travels, and imaginative landscapes. Throughout all his work, Dowdy’s narratives offer listeners an immersive exploration of Southern life, encompassing both triumphs and tribulations.
Big Ugly, named after a West Virginia community Dowdy visited during the album’s conceptualization, continues this exploration of Southern narratives through music. Recorded with producer Alex Farrar at the familiar Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina, Dowdy aligns himself with the vibrant artistic movement emerging within the state, alongside artists like Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Sluice, and Indigo de Souza. Initially uncertain of Genevieve’s reception, Dowdy adopted a measured approach to touring, balancing academic commitments with select performances and festival appearances. The positive response to Fust’s Americana-infused folk music has emboldened Dowdy to embark on his first extended tour (dates provided below), anticipating engaged audiences.
A conversation with Dowdy is like a conversation with a long-time friend. His genuine warmth, a hallmark of Southern hospitality, is evident as he articulates that a primary motivation for his musical pursuits, including touring, is the opportunity to cultivate new connections and forge lasting friendships.
When we last spoke in 2023, you were balancing a PhD program, teaching, and playing music. Are things still equally divided between the three or are you able to shift a little more towards music?
AARON: I hope that I never become solely one thing. I just have too many big interests and investments to let one of them take over. I think it’s always been a balancing act for me, the things I have in my life. But what’s exciting is upping the ante on all of them. I was doing music projects for so long, that people liked Genevieve was a fluke, kind of. I knew people would listen to this next record, and we’d have to invest in it more. And what that means is investing in, not the music, but investing in time and more time spent together as people. There is more going on with music, but that just means that the time I spend with other things has to be matched.
I had reached out directly to you via email for that first interview and you responded. Now you’ve got a publicist which, to me, means things are going well and you’re getting to the point where you can’t manage all this by yourself.
AARON: It alleviates a lot of extra work for me as somebody who is very busy with so many things. I’m really lucky. When you emailed me a year and a half ago, that was an exciting proposition, because I do this to meet people and to make friends and music. Having somebody do this for me or be speaking on my behalf is never meant to some way be disengaging. It’s really set up for me to be able to interact with more people. Investing in a project is a funny way to think about it, but we’re definitely trying to take it seriously, as if more people might be interested, and if that speculative future grows more and more true, then we’re happy. We want to do it right, and be justified in doing it.
The way you write lyrics – from an unreliable narrator’s perspective – has always been intriguing to me. I’ve discussed this with a lot of artists that I’ve interviewed and always point back to the conversation we had. You mentioned that you do use some real life stories when you write lyrics but you view them as an outsider so what you’re singing may not be entirely true.
AARON: People who love songs hold the songwriter accountable in a different way than in most other art forms, like painting, but even movies and films and literature. Those media, their capacity to narrate a fiction and then realize that it’s weaving in personal experience. It seems so normal for those but in music it seems like you’re either doing something truly personal, almost testimony, or you’re constructing something or the whole meaning of it is that it doesn’t have meaning. There are all these different ways that people think about it. I really love all of them. I really love narrative. But, I’m still a person writing. I’m writing sensitive songs that seem to be so personal, figuring out a way to talk about how to deal with those two things. I’m glad that my songs, or our conversation about it, has become a way to talk about that kind of difficult little stymie.
I was talking with Shawn from Cryogeyser about her tour with Karly Hartzman and Wednesday. Shawn said that Karly calls her music “regional music” rather than attaching a genre to it and I thought that made total sense. I understand what that means. I think of your music as “regional music” as well in that you sing about everyday life, you sing about the geography around you. You’re finding things to sing about in the mundane aspects of everyday life.
AARON: I get that from Karly’s music. It’s a big thing with music, when I’m in Minnesota or something, I feel The Replacements. You start to project on the regional quality of where people’s music comes from. That narrative can get out of hand and overwrite some of the stuff and become too overstated. But I definitely like the idea of regionalism, especially like in literature and movies. I love regional films. One of my favorite films is called The Whole Shootin Match by Eagle Pennell. I don’t know if you’ve seen it from 1976. It was actually the film that Robert Redford saw and inspired him to do Sundance. It’s bare budget story of two guys and trying to find jobs but it’s so local and has local actors and non actors, and it’s all about the place. On one level, I think it’s great to produce regional stuff, but, also, the things I like can be described described as heavily regional.
Something I end up saying a lot is that when you make the region or your area, not only the subject, but also the very thing that you’re taking so seriously outside of the stuff you’re making, like your friends who are writing songs, and even not recording them, and sharing voice memos of songs they’re writing, those become your favorite songs in the world because it’s familiar. You’re blown away by somebody you know who has the ability to do something. Of course, listening to The Band or something, or you know, the great masters, sure, it’s just the best thing but there’s something even more profound when the people around you are doing things and making songs that almost that profundity makes them even more valuable because they are so part of your everyday.
When I was in college, bands weren’t able to record easily, cheaply, quickly and distribute their stuff by simply clicking a few buttons on their computer. I have a lot of memories of seeing local bands that I will never get to hear again because they never recorded anything. In a way, that pains me. But, in a way, those are great memories because it’s just based on my memories. Maybe they weren’t the greatest band ever but, in my head, they were and there isn’t any physical proof that they weren’t. With the use of technology, you don’t have to just rely on your memories. You can document your entire life with a cell phone.
AARON: That very thing you’re saying is so inspiring to me, this history of the unrecorded. A super famous book, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, is all about what she calls unrecorded lives and all the people who went through the history without writing down what they were feeling because they didn’t have a room of one’s own. Even in recent history, our thing, which is regional local music, bands starting up and trying to get a scene together, the unrecorded is so profound. There’s something melancholic about it. You wish on some level that the thing was still available. It’s not the fact that there’s a bunch of videos of live shows on YouTube. I mean, they’re okay, but it’s not like they’re they’re the solution. And sometimes those things don’t even reflect what you feel is so good about it. There’s that tension between things being readily available, which I’m a big fan of, I’m a big fan of home recording and of not overthinking it, but then, on the other hand, what we’re really shaped by are things that go unrecorded. What we take to be ideal can be something that we don’t have a reference for, only a memory.
There was this club I went to regularly in the early ’90s called Stache’s in Columbus, Ohio. Most bands that blew up once alternative rock hit the mainstream played on that stage. I saw Nirvana there just a few weeks after Nevermind came out. There was no internet so no way of knowing who was coming to club unless you physically went there and looked at the posterboard hanging on the wall that had the entire month shown with all the dates filled in. And, as we were talking about the local bands who never recorded anything, you had to write down on your hand when their next show was because that would be your only chance to hear their songs.
AARON: That’s so awesome. What you’re saying gives me chills because it feels so not the case now. We’ve so quickly come into a different age. Always in DIY culture there’s going to be attempts to try to relocalize and get off the internet. Obviously, the internet’s so important for music culture today but it’s that like institutional memory of what you’re talking about that also needs to continue to come to the floor and be remembered as part of our tradition especially if people get disillusioned with most of this being an internet thing. I’m really moved by what you’re saying, but it feels so far away.
You have a background in literature. In the bio for the new album, it talks about how you visited West Virginia with your grandmother and that inspired the new album. That seems like a good story to tell in a bio and it made me wonder if that was your intent.
AARON: I’m a writer and I have really specific ideas about what I’m doing. It’s so great to read peoples interpretations because it gets me out of my very specific view of what I’m doing and conception of what I’m doing. When it comes to writing about a record that I made, this one was a little bit different, because I knew we were going to be pitching it and doing more of a normal publicist kind of campaign. I wanted it to read and be legible for the kind of history of that genre, the album bio, but I wanted to be within my view, my way of talking about things. The story with my grandma, that was just a great way for me to kind of historically situate some of the origins or the reality behind this kind of album that deals with a lot of unreality, a lot of storytelling, a personal form of storytelling that is difficult to talk about. So, situating it within some kind of real life experiences was a kind of a good maneuver.
Did you ever live in West Virginia?
AARON: I never did, but my family’s from there. My great grandfather lived outside of Union and we had family in Beckley. I spent a lot of time there growing up, and it was really close to where I grew up in Southwest Virginia. It’s just right up the road, basically.
What was the purpose of the visit to West Virginia with your grandma?
AARON: It’s very intentional. I’m really close with my parents, and it’s my dad’s mom. My dad spent a lot of time in West Virginia, born there, but also, lived there in and out. My grandmother is getting older, and I’ve always been really invested in her story and in my dad’s story. Those are two lives that I have thought about the narrative of for a long time. My dad’s a photographer, that’s one of his practices, and he was doing a lot of photography trips in that area. He had the idea to take her back and see the places that she grew up and talk about it. It was casual, but I was fully invested in it as a family event, as a way of bringing purpose and remembering. You can sit on the couch and hear stories, but to go and walk around is to dislodge things that are long forgotten. We had this plan to go up. I had some other interests in West Virginia, too, that we combined. At a certain point, I was really interested in the Hawk’s Nest Disaster, which resulted from a hydroelectric project to cut through a mountain. There was silica in the mountain, and all these workers during the Depression died and were thrown into an unmarked grave. It was this wild, awful event. I wanted to go see it, and see the mountain and see the graves. That was one trip I had in mind that I wanted to do. We combined that and brought grandma along. We went to her hometown and saw her high school and saw her old home, and how it’s changed, and saw the house she was born in, which is no longer standing, but the ground on which it used to stand, and she’s remembering it.
That overlay was so profound to me of past and present, the way she talked about it with such romance and humor. It enlivened her. I got really inspired by a person’s experience with a place being the thing that brings it to life, especially when that place doesn’t look like it has as much life or future as it might have once had when, during like an industrial period when an industry was so big in the region, it seemed to have this kind of future that’s no longer there. It’s an obsolete future. You’ve got this place that doesn’t look like it’s so alive but that’s totally wrong. That’s a wrong way to look at it, because all you need is human memory and experience, as this totally enlivened thing, proving that preconception wrong.
Did your dad take photos or document it in any way or is this going to be like the concert calendar I remember from the ’90s and something that you’ll just remember and have pictures of in your head? I have to imagine some of the trip made it’s way into the record, directly or indirectly.
AARON: I’m a note taker so it exists in my journals, in my writing, and my dad has photos from it, of course. Those are great documents, in fact, they might be better documents than the record. They’ll be exact indices of being there in the moment being there. This is more something else, a development that is sort of taking its time to grow in me, part of a larger reappreciation of where I live. Maybe some of that stuff did make its way into the record, like that actual trip. I can’t be totally sure where it is. I might be able to pinpoint words here and there, but what that trip really did was spark my love of the South, and where I live, giving it a new kind of power in my worldview. So yes, there are documents from that trip, and there are maybe some references scattered here and there. I use that trip as a moment of a turning point for me, a turning point where history and the future feel very much alive in the South. And themes that then come from that are what this record sort of became for me. The meditation on that tension between the past and future of the South.
I think it’s awesome that your grandma gave you this tour of her past, or her life and, by putting a record out, you’re documenting, through words and music, your life that someday your kids and grandkids will be able to back and visit to learn more about you.
AARON: There are other things that are so great that you get from when you start taking what you were just saying about this unrecorded element of your education and music. It’s bygone practices that allow it to stay alive. My record may be taken up later as one of these examples, but we have my family’s journals and notebooks and letters. There are these like remnants that also make everything feel very much alive that brings the past to bear on the present. I’m really proud of my family, it’s always been a sort of working family but even my grandma’s grandma, my great-great-grandma, I guess, she would wake up early in the morning and write histories of the area. She wrote it through the county she lived in, woke up at 3 or 4 and wrote for a couple hours before the kids got up. So part of what I loved about these trips and learning more was this sense of resilience and practice. It wasn’t just like, “Get up and live life and it’s gone.” It was real practices of resistance and of constructing monuments to your own preservation. All that stuff just means so much to me, it’s a thing I’ve inherited.
The new album took only 10 days to record. Is that pretty standard or had you done a ton of rehearsing leading up to go into the studio so that you didn’t waste any time? Did you have any spontaneous moments, like the Beatles had in the Get Back documentary, where you just wrote a song on the spot, refined it, and then recorded?
AARON: It’s a mixture. 10 days for us felt like a luxury. I think that might be standard, but in terms of being in a space that’s well-equipped and brings out the best in you, working with good people and being around good people, 10 days was a lot for us.
An overview of the way I approach this band, and recording, is I compulsively demo at home without the other musicians. I record them and make sure that they sound like they could be a song that I’d want to listen to. Then I give that to the band. We had one rehearsal before going in. Everyone listened to the demos, and I made charts, and we just played through and made sure that we were all on the same page. I don’t want to go in knowing exactly what we’re going to do. I just know that we have these songs and everyone kind of agrees these are what the songs are.
Then when we get there, it’s awesome. We all set up in the live room, and we pick a first song and we play it a few times, and then we move on to the next one, and we play it, and we play it, and we play it, and then we move on. Eventually, we’ve gone through them and then we look back and say, “How is this sounding? How’s this feeling?” Certain ones give you pause, like this doesn’t feel right so let’s do that one again. Let’s play it differently. And it’s like, “This song really doesn’t work. What could we do to bring the song into a different shape that we would like?” That happened on the song “Doghole,” for instance, the third song. It was this driving, downbeat. song. I really had a vision for it. I was like, “This is how it has to be” but it just sounded wrong. And then one morning, early over coffee, Frank’s sort of playing it on piano. and then Avery stumbles into the other side of the room and starts playing along to Frank, doing a ride kind of rhythm, and I’m just sitting there listening to them two play and I’m like, “That’s actually the song.” I was adamant that this is the way that it has to be, but hearing it played this way made it something new and better.
That’s something that the studio and that time affords you is realizing that a different shape is possible even in your own band, and even with the people you know where you think you’re all on the same page, and it is just what it is like. There’s still so much within a group of people searching for song. There’s way too much within a group of people searching for song to just say, “This is the way it is.” We should really believe in our own capacity to find different and better versions. That’s sort of the way it went. Go in with a general sense of what we were doing and what the songs were and adapt when we ran into a general feeling that it wasn’t working.
As a throwback to earlier in this conversation, did you film anything while you were in the studio to document the recording?
AARON: That’s such a great question. There’s a lot of photography. But it plays like a movie in my head. There’s some video clips here and there that I’d love to share at some point. I have friends who are filmmakers who, every time it’s over, I’m like, “I made a huge mistake. I should have had them come because this is such a fun and weird time and set of relations to be the subject of a film.” Like you’re saying with the Get Back thing, while recording, everyone’s moving between being very goofy and silly and joking around to being very serious. There’s just all of this dynamic back and forth, and the real pleasure of songs coming out. And then people getting really frustrated by it not being exactly right. There’s just all this dynamic that would be great. I love watching album recording docs. But, no, there’s not footage in the way that I wish there was.
The other thing that struck me is that you recorded in June of 2024 and the album is out just nine months later. A lot of artists I talk to tend to record at least a year, if not two, before the release date and they wind up sitting on finished songs for a long time. Does it feel to you like June 2024 was a long time ago or does it feel like yesterday in terms of how quickly the album came out?
AARON: That’s a good question. I have a funny situation where I’m on a record label that really supports Fust and this project and make sure that if we wanted to put out in 2025 that we would have a slot to do it as long as we made these deadlines of submitting the masters at a certain point to order vinyl. As long as we met the deadline, we could have this release date. I think a lot of people don’t have that luxury. They’re like, “I’ve got a finished record” but then their label says it can’t come out for a very long time. It’s just the way calendars work. That’s one thing where I feel like I got lucky. June to March is nine months, that’s a pretty short turnaround for today’s day and age.
I wrote those songs basically right after Genevieve was done, starting in the summer of ’23 and then we recorded it the next year. So. ’23 to ’24 wrote it, recorded in ’24, worked on it that whole summer and then submitted it. The aftermath has been still working on things – getting the cover together and getting the writing together, and photography and all the things that are not the music. It felt like one continuous thing. The recording session is such a big, good experience in my memory that it feels so close.
I don’t listen to the record all that much now that it’s done, I listen to it whenever people say something about it, I’ll go back and listen to it and be like, “Oh, yeah, that’s really interesting.” There was a period where I listened to it every day and had to really engage with it as song and sound, and that feels a little distant. But it’s felt like one fluid motion, from writing to recording, to finishing to now.
One of the things that makes your songs so intimate is dropping names into the lyrics. Are the names and places you drop into songs real? Are they made up? Are they made up to protect people? Like, you sing “Give my love to Amy / Give my love to Kevin” in “Spangled”. Are those real people? Are they representative of people in your life?
AARON: They’re sort of neither. They’re creations that become the kind of vehicle for me to express something that’s maybe real. In that moment on “Spangled,” the protagonist is so undefinable and everything that defines that character is so erratic. Remembering that they have friends or family members, whoever they are, naming those people adds a sense of responsibility, which is what I really wanted from that line. That’s something I feel deeply. I don’t mean to say a stale cliche about how your actions have consequences, but, instead of saying that, I say, “Give my love to Amy / Give my love to Kevin” as a way of saying there are real world consequences to actions and people who are affected by you. That’s sort of the way I use characters, especially in that song, not as real people in my life, or anything, but as a way to get around cliches to express something and make it real without it resorting to those kind of tropes.
I love hearing you talk about the lyrics and what they represent. When listening to “Spangled,” I was trying to figure out if Amy and Kevin are your neighbors? Your family? Your friends? But the fact that you’re using names to represent feelings and emotions without sounding cliche, that’s just a special way to write songs and think about things. Next time I listen to the album, I’ll be listening to it differently. So, with that being said, the song “Jody” does seem like it’s about someone and that it’s very personal.
AARON: “Jody” is a bit different because that song is kind of personal. That’s a song that was very difficult for me to write, very, very difficult in fact. I rewrote it, and I rewrote it, and I rewrote it because I wanted to get it to something, and I made it way too complex. I had to keep simplifying and keep simplifying and I think it’s definitely the simplest form, even though it’s a very complicated song. Even when I listen to it now, I’m like, “There’s a lot going on here.” Growing up where I grew up, I saw a lot of relationships born out of rough situations and maybe even in some level, my relationship that I have with my partner was born out of rough situations and romanticizing destructive behavior. I loved it and I still love like friends hanging and drinking culture. All of that stuff, from where I grew up, is embedded in me. I loved movies where people were getting messed up. There’s something so romantic about it and that’s so weird. As I get older, I know that’s so troubling in a way, from one view. I also can’t help but find truth in that romanticization. To tell those two things simultaneously, that kind of strange romanticization of bad things and a good relationship that comes out of it, is so personal for me. Maybe Jody, or a person in my life that is very personal, even though that’s not the name of the person or the people or the friends, it gets closest to a character that feels like somebody I know.
Another specific lyric question. In “Mountain Language,” you sing, “$87 on the worst stuff in the store. That seems very specific.
AARON: That song, “Mountain Language,” the structure of all the verses is, “This is the situation, but if it were this way, then in this situation …” That second verse sort of about consumerism, but also really not just consumerism, because we have to buy things to survive. l’m not trying to say this whole thing is messed up. It’s the way it is at this point. I was thinking about a lot of places in the South that don’t have a grocery, don’t have a market, but they have Dollar Generals. They are like these food deserts. You spend all this money on survival, and it doesn’t even have to be the groceries, but you spend all this money on false needs or these things that you think you need, and it’s not even anything. It’s scrap. It’s maybe buying something to make the next part of your life work. You’re investing in the immediate future.
Where the other two verses are maybe a little bit more personal and intimate, this one deals with more of a structural problem around resources. You work for a wage to buy this stuff that’s not even really doing anything. It’s not taking you to the place you want to go. It’s not building out the life that you want. So, $87! That was the actual amount of money I spent on groceries the day that I wrote that song.
Two years ago, you weren’t playing many live dates, and you mentioned that you’d like to play some festivals. I suggested a festival in Ohio called the Nelsonville Music Festival. You said you hadn’t heard of it and then, a year later, you were invited to play. I know that I didn’t have anything to do with that, but I did think it was pretty cool since we had talked about it.
AARON: One evening while we were there, we went to this movie theater right outside of town. It was the wildest thing, we still talk about. It was very cheap, and there were all these arcade games. It was right out of the ’80s. There’s all these political posters up from campaigns that had happened 20 years ago. Moving between that and the magical nature of Nelsonville, and then going to see Twisters in this old remnant that was filled with people having a blast. That combination, in this really strange middle of nowhere place, to have these great two experiences that were totally different but really both of them felt so alive and great. We have really fond memories of being there.
You do have some tour dates coming up. That’s a change. Are you trying to work dates into your schedule or are you taking the summer off work to dedicate to playing shows?
AARON: It’s a priority to tour the record. I’m in a position where I can do it. We have this first tour set up to do a loop up through New England over to Minneapolis and down. I think we’re going to Mississippi and then back up. It’s a good first loop, and we’re going to do more this summer and more in the fall. It’s definitely a priority to tour this record and to do it within our means and to do it within our schedules. We’re all very careful, and we’re all very busy, but we’re totally committed to touring, which means to being together, committed to being in a group for so much time, and we’re all excited.
We’re excited and we love playing. It’s a good feeling and we’re a group that really loves each other. The show kind of comes second and hopefully people see that or sense that this is a group that wants to be there and we just so happen to be playing music as the reason we’re there.
The whole reason you tour is you get to meet people who have spent time with your work, or maybe not, but have spent time with the kind of work that this belongs to. As a homebody like myself, this is a great opportunity for me to come into contact with like minds.
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Fust 2025 Tour Dates
