Just in the last month, Jimmy Hughes took himself out of Athens, Georgia, moving to the city of brotherly love with his wife. It’s a move that’s unlikely to affect his personal tides and compositions, for once the zaniness and uncorked atmosphere of one of the weirdest cities in America has reached you on a personal or impersonal level, there’s not extracting it back out. The drugs are inside and pounding on the door for them to open up, this is the time of repossession, isn’t going to do any good. The drugs have already acted or even if there are no drugs to be seen, the sweet air down there, where quirkiness has it’s own flavor and it’s own zip code, is fat with the acting ingredients needed to get that job done when people aren’t asking for it or paying attention to their inhalations. … [Story Continues Below]

First song
The Unknown Adapted / The End (Folklore) [5.13MB] [684 downloads]


– original versions are unreleased and appear on Carpenter’s Falls respectively
All of our songs are pieces of stories, the albums being the whole story, so to describe the song I usually resort to describing the fiction behind the song. The first half of this song is “The Unknown Adapted” an unreleased track that is slated for our next album, a post-apocalyptic story about animals living on Earth after the human race has gone extinct. Right after the actual humans die, there are two human-like species left, the unknown adapted, who have survived since they were able to breathe underwater. This song is about them realizing their duties to the remaining living species, keeping the animals safe, and then making the tough decision whether or not to reproduce their own new species. Ultimately they decide to disappear back into the water, fearing that the human-nature in them could lead to further Earthly disasters, such as those caused by humans before them. The second half of this song is “The End” which is the closing track on our Carpenter’s Falls album. This song describes how the slow shifting of water is really the root of everything, arguing that water is really the closest thing we have to a tangible God. Ian plays an insane slide-whistle solo on this one. This song is also the 3rd part of a three-song suite from that album, all songs working with the same concept of birth, movement, water, death, etc.

Second song
The Vet / Bill & James (Folklore) [3.58MB] [622 downloads]


– original versions appears on The Ghost of H.W. Beaverman
Here are two songs from our first album, The Ghost Of H.W. Beaverman. The Vet is an old man who knew H.W. Beaverman as a youth. Prior to his story, it is believed that Beaverman is possibly dead, but The Vet assures that he is not a specter, but rather, a prankster. Though a friend of Beaverman, The Vet has uncovered a series of ropes and pulleys constructed upon a hill visible from his back window. Knowing that he is a believer in UFOs, Beaverman has constructed this contraption to toy around with his friend, particularly when he is entertaining company like at the end of the song when the Vet asks his current visitor “They go by now, don’t they?” The second half of this song is a more rambunctious performance of “Bill & James” than appears on the album. In this song, Bill & James, who have been haunted by Beaverman’s ghost via a hand-crafted Ouija board, return to the local small town pharmacy where they purchased the Ouija in search of answers, only to find that the store has been torn apart and abandoned. They fear that the ghost has been there, but really it is just the pharmacist who is having his own problems and has self-medicated himself into a frenzy. This live version of the song gives Aaron a chance to blaze on the trombone plus it’s more fun to play live this way than the more sedate album version.

Third song
Going Home (Folklore) [1.49MB] [629 downloads]


– original version appears on The Ghost of H.W. Beaverman
This is the closing track from The Ghost Of H.W. Beaverman album, although on the album we only got to record this with acoustic guitar, vocals, melodica, and a clarinet. A nice version, but we’ve enjoyed working this into our live set with a little more life. Story-wise it is basically a classic outro: the narrator’s retrospective on what he has learned. A lot of the lyrics are based on a recurring dream in which I know how to fly, but not in the traditional way that people think about flying… it’s more like floating, but with control of direction. It usually happens around water, as in, I’m on the shore and float out over the water and look down on the shoreline. It’s an exhilarating feeling and a fun thing to do, even if it’s just in dreams.

Fourth song
A Few Years Forward (Folklore) [2.72MB] [640 downloads]


— unreleased
This is another new song that we have been working on (a work in progress if you will) that we plan to put on our next album, Home Church Road. This is the post-apocalyptic story again. This track describes several plagues that wipe out the human race. First, many humans die off from a terrible disease. Then there’s a huge flood that washes much of this death away, but also kills everything that didn’t retreat to the highland. Once the water recedes, many new oceanic species are redistributed in little lakes, altering the food-chain, but also the surviving predators return to the lowlands to feast on the carnage, fooled by their own gluttony as they feed on the diseased carcasses of the deceased. This disease has leaked into the water sources as well, so soon the flightless birds become extinct. The birds of flight take great offense to this and pool their remaining forces to team up on the remaining predatory mammals (including the last of the humans) and strike them all dead. It’s a big bloody mess, basically. The song is coming along and is really fun to play. Typically, we have more brass players and additional instrumentalists that we didn’t have with us on this tour so I think this song will really come into its own once we have everybody playing on it.

Fifth song
Cogswell's Cottage (Folklore) [1.35MB] [603 downloads]


– original version appears on Carpenter’s Falls
This song is part of the Two Cousins’ Camp Store section of the album. Named after my mother’s old antique store, the idea is one that my cousin Steve and I came up with years ago while staying at his summer home on Lake Ontario. The concept is a simple one: to open a store where you sell only decorative camp items (for Steve and I, a “camp” is a “summer home,” just to make that clear). So I envision us in our old age sitting in rocking chairs on the porch of our camp store while rich summer folk stop in to buy rustic looking oars, or the classic giant fork and spoon, or old fishing poles… wall hangings for their summer home. The song “Cogswell’s Cottage” addresses these characters’ disgust in their increasingly bourgeois clientele as they contemplate closing the store. Originally Steve and I intended to write more songs regarding the camp store, maybe it will still happen, but for now I am glad that “Cogswell’s Cottage” and the theme song “Two Cousins’ Camp Store” found a home on the Carpenter’s Falls album. I particularly like this recording of the song since Ian played that awesome sounding Daytrotter piano brilliantly.

All of the inhibitions get completely stripped away from people, thrown onto a big pile and lit up into a big, three-story bonfire. Those newly minus the inhibitions might even like to stand there watching the flames, there at the city limits, shivering and naked, but with a whole lot of nutty stuff to look forward to. Hughes, who splits his time as one of the members of the legendary Elephant 6 collective band Elf Power, is the lead singer and songwriter for Folklore, a band that also shares members with Dark Meat, and the yarns that he spins are reminiscent of those that a babbling old man at the end of his days would produce over an October night, by a fire and surrounded by dense darkness or a chilled fog. They’d come out of a man who’s lived to tell so much that there’s no stopping the tales that he’s collected with those eyes and an awareness that’s been better. These aren’t stories that get typically spoken by whippersnappers, more worried about their own problems and the potential mating habits that they will or will not be in control of as they trudge through a self-satisfying life. Hughes created a persona – a man who might or might not be a ghost of a man – named H.W. Beaverman to further the narrative of one of the group’s latest albums. Beaverman, the name, could be some legionnaire or millionaire, or another aire, living on a shady street with majestically spanning and hanging oak trees, one of the row of lucky stiffs who capitalized on the assembly line or the logging boom back over the second-to-last turn of the century. Or he could just be some folded over, bespectacled and fuzzy old man with nervous hands and a deceptive memory. He’s got the trifles down and he’s got the worry rashes appearing all over his body as the future keeps getting further away from the present and that only means that the disastrous “way things are” or “way things will be” is making him uncomfortable. Beaverman believes in UFOs and probably believes that the corners of his eyes and what’s seen out of them are the most believable visions and aberrations. They were there and they are there. There are times, in the welcoming and off-kilter rock and roll that was the stuff of college radio in the 80s, when the elaborate storylines (more post-apocalyptic novel or a novelization of the radical post-apocalypse) have the odd dimensions of something that Stephen King might have written into Needful Things to set the mood, but the horror isn’t there. These scenes of getting to the oldest of ages, of rebirth and returning back to when youth wasn’t pushing us out of the nest. Much of what Hughes brings to light is a response to the “what does it all mean and what’s my place in the whole she-bang?” question. If there’s no quick answer, maybe that means going back and retracing the steps or doing it all again from the first day to see if anything new shakes loose. When you go about doing something like that – maybe like the fictional Beaverman – it could very well create just the right amount of chaos, a Georgian kind of chaos, which is just everyone’s own personal folklore.

Folklore Official Site
Folklore MySpace Page