Now Then

"Its time to make a change." Robbie Fulks begins his 2025 album Now Then with these words, spoken with a tone of stoic determination, and as anyone familiar with his work knows, Fulks is not a man averse to switching things up. Hes happy to jump from the acid-tinged alt-country of Country Love Songs (1996) to the rock & roll bombast of Lets Kill Saturday Night (1998) and the Nashville polish of Georgia Hard (2005). He enjoyed some of the best reviews of his career with a pair of spare, literate acoustic efforts, Gone Away Backward (2013) and Upland Stories (2016), and followed them with a splendid love letter to bluegrass, 2023s Bluegrass Vacation. But Now Then is a stylistically diverse set of songs that makes room for occasional bursts of electric ruckus and lots of adult-alternative melodic detours and a tone thats more mature pop with a slight twang than what can strictly be called country. The arrangements and production are full-bodied and imaginative, and of all of Fulks albums, the one that most closely resembles Now Then is 2001s Couple in Trouble in terms of its deep-focus narratives and broad range of musical backdrops. After opening with "Workin No More Blues," where he decides the world is changing more than he likes and hes going to stay comfortably mired in the past, most of Now Then is devoted to episodes presumably taken from his own life -- semi-happy memories of family vacations in "Ocean City," the hard punch of abrupt changes in "Now Now Now Now Now," a journey with unfortunate consequences in "That Was Juarez, This Is Alpine," the many wins and occasional losses of a long-term relationship in "The Thirty-Year Marriage," and a snarky tribute to being smarter than those around you in "Poor and Sharp-Witted." As a storyteller, at his best Robbie Fulks is every bit as good as Raymond Carver (and often funnier), and if he sometimes plays a bit too strongly to the last row of the hall, theres no arguing hes a vital and savvy entertainer. With a band including Wayne Horvitz on keys, T-Bone Burnett associate Jay Bellerose and Elvis Costello sideman Pete Thomas on drums, Bonnie Raitts guitarist Duke Levine, and Jenny Scheinman on fiddle, Fulks has musicians who are more than capable of executing his ideas with the skill he deserves, and Tucker Martines mix gives the recordings a welcome warmth and clarity. Fulks makes albums with an ambition and intelligence few songwriters in any genre can approach these days, and even at their darkest, his songs are compelling and consistently entertaining. Now Then sees him stretching even further than usual, and folks who think they wont like Fulks because hes "alt-country" ought to hear this and have their expectations happily upended. ~ Mark Deming