Brittany Howard, Jake Xerxes Fussell on The New Yorker’s Best Albums of 2024 List
14. “What Now”
Brittany Howard
If anyone is presently poised to inherit Prince’s mantle, it’s Brittany Howard, the former front woman of the indefinitely sidelined Southern rock band Alabama Shakes. Howard is a visionary; she can write an earworm, but is more interested in work that melts the boundaries between genres. “What Now,” her second solo album, is sometimes hostile, sometimes calming, but always unafraid. “If you want someone to hate, then blame it on me,” she sings on the title track, an agile and acerbic recounting of what it feels like to fall out of love. It takes balls to write a song from the P.O.V. of the antagonist, the person who woke up one day and just . . . wasn’t that into it anymore. You’ll root for Howard regardless.
13. “When I’m Called”
Jake Xerxes Fussell
Critics love to call things unclassifiable, which can sometimes feel like a subtle admission of defeat. But Jake Xerxes Fussell’s music, which draws heavily from nineteenth- and twentieth-century vernacular folk songs and archival field recordings, is idiomatic, and entirely his own. My favorite song on “When I’m Called,” Fussell’s fifth and best album, is “Leaving Here, Don’t Know Where I’m Going.” (Ennui is, of course, a very ancient and omnipresent feeling.) Fussell learned the song from the late folklorist Art Rosenbaum; he included an extra verse that, Fussell said, he discovered on “a Berea College archival recording of a somewhat similar song called ‘Alabama Water’ performed by the great Tennessee/Kentucky banjoist and singer Virgil Anderson.” Fussell’s music often comes with complex citations; he is a folksinger in the truest sense, collecting ideas and melodies and lyrics from distant and disparate traditions, looking for the things that unite us in our humanity.
Read full article here.