Nearing twenty years in, Andrew Spencer Goldman’s Fulton Lights project returns with the four-song EP Well the Night Has Come. Written and produced by Goldman and mixed by Grammy-nominated Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu, Book of Knots) at Studio G, the EP comes after a long fallow period and marks the first Fulton Lights recordings since 2018’s Moonwalking into the Future.

“There were whole years here where I just found myself with song ideas piling up, but I couldn’t finish them. Or maybe just wasn’t allowing myself to.” Returning collaborator TJ Lipple (Aloha) helped snap Goldman out of it. “I was bitching about feeling stuck and he was having none of it.” Lipple suggested matter-of-factly that they just book a day or two in the studio. “A welcome slap in the face from an old friend,” says Goldman.

The songs that came out of those sessions feel characteristically adventurous and varied, and richer for the break. There are themes of preservation and protection throughout, of fighting off encroaching threats in various permutations – to attention, to creativity, to self, to family, to the future – revealing a songwriter and producer finding new depth with age.

As with previous Fulton Lights releases, the songs sonically differ one to the next while having a common attention to texture with layers of acoustic and experimental sounds, and a devotion to the unexpected.

“They are an invitation to a very special reverie,” says Maimone.

Verses quietly shimmering with guitar vibrato and creaky piano string scrapings on “Paloma Sadie May” explode into enormous orchestral choruses with a string arrangement from Jean Cook (Ida, Waco Brothers, x-Beauty Pill) and French horn from Justin Mullens. The song, ostensibly an intimate portrait of a napping child, shows itself suddenly in the chorus as not just a captured moment of the past but as a prayer for a daughter’s future, hitting like a burst of sunlight after sitting too long in a dark room.

Overdriven, staticky, Fennesz-tinged pump organ floats in like a distant siren amidst a downward voyage into mental health struggles and an exploration of the subconscious on “Heavy,” co-produced by Adam Ollendorff (Will Hoge, Kacey Musgraves, Lera Lynn). The song is cloaked in atmospheric pedal steel, baritone guitar, buzzing and pulsing with a hazy mystery that hints at Low or Jeff Tweedy.

Even seemingly straightforward rock songs get bent in Fulton Lights’s universe. “Hold That Thought,” featuring John Davis (x-Q and Not U/Georgie James/Title Tracks/Paint Branch) on backing vocals, points toward Zuma-era Neil before detouring sharply into Augustus Pablo territory with space echoed melodica. Where the Neil/Crazy Horse thing to do would have been to fill those spots with more guitar, the instrumentation choice here is distinctly Fulton Lights and is exactly what the song wanted.

“Well the Night Has Come” flips some of the lyrics of Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” into a dark lullaby, a father’s song to a child in the face of something terrifying. “When my older daughter was little I used to sing “Stand by Me” to her almost every night at bedtime. Twisting the words around it carries a lot of my own fears about the future of the planet, but the song is full of love,” says Goldman. The song carries some similar elements of the classic – vibrato electric guitar, cabasa, triangle, a string arrangement from Karen Waltuch (75 Dollar Bill, Wilco) – but it’s an intentionally disguised and subtle homage. The drums rumble and echo disquietingly, the distorted casio feels simultaneously out of place and also very obviously the right thing. The whole song feels unequivocally new.

The Well the Night Has Come EP shows Fulton Lights continuing to find ways to surprise and innovate while aiming for the heart.

Press: Caroline Borolla, Clarion Call Media