Whisperer: Piedmont Pastimes – an interview by Lou Turner

Petal Motel is blessed to have contributing author Lou Turner return with another fantastic interview with a musician creating understated intricate folk from Appalachia. Sam Fuller Smith, aka Whisperer’s Piedmont Pastimes is a tender and sentimental collection of tunes, pondering fatherhood, the musical roots of the Carolinas, and the possibility for a future of possibilities for his newborn son. Featuring gorgeous slide, Fuller’s mesmerizing picking, and his gentle vocals and pensive lyrics, Piedmont Pastimes is ultimately about a sense of home and its meaning, both on a micro and macro level.

LT: The record is called Piedmont Pastimes, after the region of North Carolina that you’re from and recently returned to with your own family. I’m curious about the word “pastimes” which implies a sense of free time, and wondering if it has anything to do with free time during the pandemic or if the record was written during quarantine?

W: Piedmont encompasses mostly central and western NC — I think the word literally means “foot of the mountain.” It kind of expands up the Appalachian range in other states, too, but for me it’s mostly central NC. 

The word “pastimes” — I was sort of playing with words there. Past time, time that has passed, but also thinking about a pastime as a hobby or an activity… I think of fishing as a pastime. It’s sort of a wholesome word, you know? I thought those two words together looked and sounded good and fit with the record as a whole. 

LT: Your son was born last August and appears on this record (on “Evening Blues (with Jules)”) which is a delight. You write about wondering how to create a childhood in what feels like a vanishing world — and a lot of these songs are for your son. It’s beautiful to listen in on such an intimate process as that. I’m curious if for you personally, staving off that vanishing world is one of the reasons you create?

W: Jules and his entrance into our world did inform so much about the songs. It solidified what this record was going to be, because of all the things that were happening around his new existence. and in a way, my new existence, as a first time father — it turns your world upside down in the best way. And yeah, it felt like the right thing to do, because I had a couple of guitar sketches that I needed to put lyrics to, and when I started to get some free time to maybe steal away an hour or so to play around and write, it just kind of happened that I wanted to talk about him or to him. And that was like: oh, okay, this is gonna coincide with my personal relationship with what was my home at birth until I was a young child, and now what is my family’s home. And so I do feel like this is the most directly personal thing or outpouring that I’ve written. Which felt really good, once I had the intention to do that it was really freeing. And it allowed the songs to come pretty easily.

LT: That’s beautiful.

W: Yeah, thanks. And “creating a childhood in a vanishing world,” [my wife] Alyson and I thought for a long time that we wouldn’t have kids, because we’re so down about the world in general, you know? There’s just a lot to feel bad about. But we both knew at the same time, yet separately, that we needed to add another human to our little existence to counteract some things that we feel are terrible. I speak a bit about it in the song “Your Song”—that’s directly addressing him, and writing, “when you came here, it was first light, but it was darkness you were born into” and just saying, “it might not all roses, but it’s up to you now to make it good, and I can help you as much as I can.” And my own creativity is definitely informed by these feelings of just contemplating what the world is, where do I fit into it, and what can I do in it that makes sense? Or what do I get out of it that I enjoy, and it’s something that I just do in a way to sort of work out these thoughts. It’s a necessary outlet.

LT: Cool. I think that comes across. I’m thinking of the song “Dollar Down” — it’s sort of a lament, but a working-out, like you said. It’s asking, what is this everyman dream? I love how this record is sort of wholesome, like you said, but there’s such a depth of field and a gravity to creating a human, creating a world, and creating anything — and feeling the weight of what’s destructive is a part of that. So I think that “Dollar Down” really grounds the record and I really enjoyed it.

W: Thank you, that’s awesome. Those are really big, dark topics to try to corral into something that’s not too doomy, but I’m glad it doesn’t come across like that. Because I don’t feel that way about everything all the time, but those feelings are there; they linger. I’m glad you like that song because it’s an early one I wrote for the record and it was a little more outward looking, a little more of a social commentary, but it still fit with this whole group of, like you said, kind of trying to weigh out what the world is and how to make it one that’s good for my family. 

LT: You mentioned how you noticed a theme emerging and you decided to embrace it and be intentional about it—and I wonder how much a sense of place was a part of that, specifically the Piedmont region of North Carolina? Because I really love the title track—how you ask us: can you hear the voices of Doc Watson and Elizabeth Cotton, have you seen this, have you felt that… and then in “In the Shadow Of the Cardinal’s Wing,” in particular, you write about being from somewhere, but how you could really be from anywhere: 

“It took me by surprise to learn I had an accent / Up until then / Everyone else did the talking /I can’t relate to relations in this way / I only ever had so much to say / And it’s true / I was born here some years back / When spring was opening the blinds / I’m not a stranger / I’m not regular / I just come from around here.” 

Did you set out to write about Piedmont, or did the sense of place in these songs surprise you? 

W: Yeah. Those two songs are probably the most personal ones because they do mention specific things and places in my life that have meaning. A sense of place has always been something that I’ve talked about on other records—it kind of comes up as sort of a wandering/wondering kind of thing, you know—there’s a song called “89” on my first record that’s a reference to a specific place. And in “Piedmont Pastimes,” I’m sort of talking about myself and also talking to relatives that have stayed there: “Did you always know you would settle down / without a reason to wonder how / the road that goes out of town,” etc. It’s in Surry County that my family has land outside of Mount Eerie… which is where Mayberry is based on, where Andy Griffeth was born, so it’s got that going for it (laughs). It’s this farmland that’s been in my family for well over a hundred years now. It was a place of solace for me as a child, and after we moved away and continued to visit occasionally, it always remained this fantasy place where everything was more quiet and open. There was a lot of natural beauty and land to sort of walk around and think about things. I’m talking about that place a lot in the songs and just in my life. And most of these songs address the real conflict that I’ve had with moving back, which is that I’ve held this place specifically in my mind as this wondrous existence and wanting to get back to that feeling of a slowed-down, beautiful kind of living — and then once I actually did come back as an adult in 2018, I found it really hard to find that feeling. My feelings about the place changed, [because] the practicality of living here is: I need a job, I don’t know anybody, we live in Durham now, which is awesome; but I don’t know these streets, really, I don’t understand who these people are, these aren’t the type of people that I grew up around, necessarily. So that sort of reckoning was what I was working through while writing these songs. I thought I had a clear idea of what this place meant to me, and now that I’m back I’m realizing that I was wrong. And I don’t feel that good about it, because I’ve always held it in such high regard, and I still do, but it’s sort of like a loss in a way. It took me by surprise. And that’s where a lot of [the record] comes from.

LT: I think it’s poignant, because the sense of time passing in these songs is so palpable—there’s this theme of returning and lots of lines about how time changes the way you perceive something, for better or worse. One of my favorite lyrics is from “It Takes A Long Time”: 

“And the changing light can show you the difference / Between a wrong turn and a face you recognize /  is there anything better / Tell me, do you know,than the stillness of night in your own neighborhood?” 

I love that, because the passing of time can show you the difference in something, but it also feels hopeful to me. The turn to asking, “is there anything better?” I sense that notion of creating again there. And it’s really cool, maybe you were disappointed when you returned, but you set out to make a home anyway, and I think that’s really beautiful and maybe even more meaningful than if it had just been the way you remembered it.

W: Yeah. We have no choice but to watch the sun come up and down and do everything we can to make good of that time. I think that’s cool that you perceive it as creating a home where you are, and that is what it is—just feeling that satisfying feeling of knowing where your home is and that you are there. It is hopeful, there’s definitely hope in there and I hope that comes across too, because it’s intended to be there.

LT: I think it really does. You recorded the record at The Clock Room — is that in your home?

W: Yeah, that’s at my house. We rent this old house in Durham and there’s a little side room off the house — it must’ve been a mud room originally. When we moved in, there was a lot of junk in there and the floor was kind of peeling up, and at one time maybe it was just a storage room and other renters never used it. While we were cleaning it up, we realized there was a man that lived there at some point in the sixties and repaired old clocks. And some of them were still in there, old ones with the arms that tick back and forth — all of his tools were inside the desk and receipts and bills from literally 1962. I don’t know the last time anybody was in this room, it was kind of bizarre. So we call it The Clock Room. We painted it and I replaced the floor and I record in it a lot because it has its own door that separates from the house so I can go in here and be a little more isolated. 

LT: How fitting to have a clock as a symbol, with all this time passing going on, that’s pretty cool!

W: Totally, yeah. It makes a lot of sense to me.

LT: I heard some birdsong on the record and I really loved that. Were those intentional field recording moments or did you have it coming in through the window and you kept it, or how did it work?

W: Yeah. In the song “We Start Small” I was recording in The Clock Room, and those were just birds that were in the holly tree right outside the window, and those were unintentional, but I didn’t mind keeping them in there. I’m glad they chirped their way in a little bit. And on the interlude called “Ellerbee Serenade” that was an intentional thing. I recorded those birds in a park with my phone at Ellerbee Creek. That was intentional to have those sounds with that little guitar part playing along with the birds. 

LT: I love the sound of the record and I think it’s incredible that you engineered it on your own and also played it all on your own.

W: Thanks, yeah. I have this old four track that works pretty well most of the time, it gets a little squirrely sometimes. But I was able to get some clean sounds and I limited myself to those four tracks for every song, and whatever I happened to own is what I played. I didn’t seek out anything else which I think worked out really well.

LT: Yeah, it feels intentionally sparse.

W: I like to keep things that way. I’m so used to playing by myself that even when I add a second guitar part, I’m like, woah, there’s a lot going on there (laughs). But yeah, it was a really enjoyable experience for me to engineer myself for the first time in a long time. And Alli Rogers, who mixed and mastered it, did such a good job with keeping it pretty natural but bringing out things and making it cohesive—bringing some more life, which was really awesome. 

LT: Your fingerpicking is so beautiful and hearkens to a long lineage of guitar players but also has such a unique voice—especially the way you layer it. Do you write tunes on guitar and then find melodies, or what is your writing process like?

W: More often than not, it’s something on the guitar that comes first. And whether that’s a fingerpicking pattern or some chord changes—they’ll just kind of pop up. Generally I’ll start with something on the guitar and then hum a melody over it, then lyrics will come at the end. A couple of these songs I wrote in a different way. “In the Shadow Of the Cardinal’s Wing” I wrote freeform as a poem first, then the guitar part just showed up one day and I was like: huh, I think maybe these words could fit to that. So I started to blend them and had to edit and replace words and add more verses to what I had. That was a nice thing to do that I hadn’t gotten to do much of—kind of ramble-write, then edit it down later. That was something that worked well. When I had a lyrical theme to work with for these songs, it made it a lot easier to finish them. 

LT: This feels like such a cohesive collection, the songs enrichen each other. Going back for repeated listens, I was able to hear something new in each one because of something in another one which is really special.

W: That’s so great to hear. I think that’s the first time that’s happened for me, because this is the first real collection of songs that are playing off each other.

LT: Were you concerned at all about it feeling like a concept record? People get hung up on that being a corny thing when really every record is conceptual in some way.

W: Yeah, I didn’t throw that word out, but like you said—it kind of is in its own way. I think a lot of records that have songs that speak to each other and exist as parts of a whole kind of are concept records. It’s one of those words that are cheesy, it’s not a Yes record or anything… (laughs) but I’m okay with that. They are meant to exist together, they need each other to fit. A lot of my favorite people put songs together that way, especially Jason Molina. I’ve been a huge fan of his for years and years and I’ve always loved that the songs on his records flow in and out of each other on every record like they belong with each other. He was always writing for a theme and for side A, side B, and I definitely take influence from that; because I think it works so well, and I love listening to full records more than singles or anything else. With my own work, I try to make it like the things that I like. 

LT: Yes, I can hear that. I love the references to Doc Watson and Elizabeth Cotton (on “Piedmont Pastimes”) and I’m wondering what other voices were haunting this record? Or, what were you listening to while making it?

W: Doc Watson has been in my life for my whole life because of my dad being such a big fan. John Prine, too. He’s been a part of my years since I was in the womb—my parents are huge fans. So definitely listening to a lot of them, a lot of delta blues—a lot of older stuff like that. More contemporary people: I really like Hiss Golden Messenger. His record Bad Debt is a big one for me — and I wasn’t trying to make the same kind of record, because his was written as a new father and recorded during nap times which is what I did too, but those are songs that were meant to be together and recorded intimately, also. 

LT: I’m wondering if you’re a Bill Callahan fan at all, and if you’ve listened to his “dad” record, Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest?

W: Yes, and honestly listening to that when Alyson and I were thinking about maybe having a kid… we realized: if Bill Callahan can do it, maybe we can. I came home and was like, “I was listening to this and I think we should go for it.” And she said, “That’s crazy, because I had a revelation today and I think we should do it.” It was just meant to happen. 

LT: That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for talking with me about this beautiful record. And please come on back to Nashville and play a show when you can!

W: Yeah, it’s really weird to release a record without playing it for anybody, and to not have played them before recording them. That’s never really happened, most of the songs I’ve recorded I’ve played live first. So yeah, I can’t wait to get back out there. 

Pre-order Piedmont Pastimes (out 6/18) on Bandcamp.

Photo by Alyson Fuller-Smith