Spangled

My last bit of blog writing is music related and it proved damned therapeutic. So what the hell, let’s do it again. This time regarding something contemporary as well as something in a far different hemisphere of genre.


I discovered Fust on the All Songs Considered list of best songs of 2025. With anything that is truly good, it took a a couple of listens for me to hear what is actually good about “Spangled,” the first track on Fust’s newest collection Big Ugly.


When I did finally hear what makes it good… damn it’s really good.


When one speaks of the songwriting behind Fust, one is speaking exclusively of Aaron Dowdy. I don’t know from what Faulknerien/McCarthyien Appalachian mud hill this cat rolled down to get here but he’s got the makings of genius.


At first listen, “Spangled” struck me as a throwback track, sounds layered in the mimic of ‘00s alt-country, a genre that produced (along with metric tons of unmitigated garbage) some of today’s greatest folk rock tunes and songwriters, Jeff Tweedy and Ryan Adams among them. If you had played this tune for me and fibbed its release at around 2006, I would have believed you, shocked that I had never heard of it.


To be sure, I am hyper-jaded with such sounds. When I performed and wrote songs in this vein, the genre went by many names, Texas Country, Red Dirt Music, Alt-Country, etc.. With very few exceptions, the cookie cutter lost its edge and eventually lost its shape. Which is one of the reasons I waxed skeptical on my first run through “Spangled.” Sonically, there’s nothing groundbreaking here. The vintage amp accompanied by twin melody fiddle work. Tight high-hat vs quiet snare snap beats. Understated but solid bass flow. All hallmarks of the better examples of the genre. And all of it—to my relief—executed to perfection, nevertheless, recorded in way I am generally unfond of, crisp, flat, and void of ambience. Yet the caliber of the songwriting craft displayed here makes me forget that I hate this style of engineering.


Aaron Dowdy—whose voice comes in as if José González moved to Appalachia solely to become a hillbilly alcoholic—has written a song that had to creep around in my head before I truly recognized just how exceptional “Spangled” is as a composition.


There lies a disjointed narrative within “Spangled.” Wrought with alcohol, death, euphoria, desperation, yearning, injury, aimless religiosity, this song bleeds everything Southern plus a healthy dose of things American in general, including the title, a word not generally used unless announced between the words “star” and “banner.” And Dowdy drives that point with continued hammer strikes in somewhat random places in the lyrics. It’s utterly beautiful in context.


The other constant in the lyrics is the number(s) 3-0-5. Once it refers to a hospital room, then a Virginia highway, and then a state (or municipal) precinct. The way Dowdy uses these three syllables is a wonder to behold, constructing a frame of reference across three different scenes, using the mantra as a through line.


But what is the line? What is the story? Are we jumping forward and backward, backward and forward? It seems each listener can design the story for themselves. We have a hospitalization (or is it the memory of one? a birth? a trauma?) then an incident on a bridge (vehicular accident or maybe a suicide or even still a simple drunken appreciation of the view from it) then we’re in a drainage/septic ditch wishing the rain would take us away. It’s a clinic in angular psychedelic poetry like nothing I’ve heard in music since songs on Joe Henry’s album Trampoline.


Even as Dowdy’s relaxed delivery and top of the beat phrasing sets up a certain mood, he has moments of sheer lyrical gymnastics, which—once one dives into other offerings in the Fust catalog—seems to be a staple of the writer’s art. Some lines stand out as flourish against chords and changes. Such as “I feel like a sparkler/That’s been thrown off the roof.” Or “Wondering who’s the god of that sky?/Who’s the god of memory?”


In closing, I have to say this is as perfect a rural rock tune as any that could be written today, especially in a genre that has been left for dead by most intellectually curious listeners. At one point in time, we thought James McMurtry might have a shot at dragging this corner of “country” away from the low intelligence and transparent cynicism of the twenty-first century record industry. Alas, he had his shot and missed. I’m by no means claiming that Fust might save Southern music. But it certainly sounds as if Aaron Dowdy and crew are having a good time frolicking in what’s left of it.