(credit: Pete Duvall)
Since 2004, the American musician known as Fulton Lights has brought together noise, melody, resilience and self-discovery in a brilliant, bullheaded survey of the solo songwriter tradition. Emerging from Washington, DC's DIY scene with projects like John Guilt and Maestro Echoplex, Andrew Spencer Goldman debuted Fulton Lights as an instrument for musical exploration and self-reliance; through four albums and numerous EPs, on adventures from Brooklyn to Baltimore to Geneva, across tragedy and true love, viral videos and the blog-rock boom, Fulton Lights' youthful restlessness has gradually given way to a father's capacity for abiding. This is music suffused with darkness and heart, urban clamor, part of a tradition that contains everyone from David Byrne and Folk Implosion to Mark Lanegan, Claire Rousay and dälek.
"I made the very first Fulton Lights record when I was about 25," Goldman recalls. Listening to it, "I can hear how I'm still trying to pull off the magic-trick": learning how to make a song seem effortless. Many years later, that illusion of effortlessness doesn't feel so important. When he samples the voice of one daughter—or dedicates a song to another—what Fulton Lights conveys instead is a preoccupation with the world beyond himself. "In these songs is the fear-slash-love, and fear-slash-wish," Goldman says, "or—hope." This isn't music for forgetting the world with: the songs of Fulton Lights are for carrying on, burning bright, despite.