When session musicians step out to make their own music, they usually need the help of the big-name (or ‘bigger’ name in any case) collaborators to try and make an impact. British-born, Nashville-located pedal steel player Spencer Cullum started building up his name as a session musician, working for the likes of Dolly Parton, Miranda Lambert, Angel Olsen and Kesha, among others – not a B-list group, by any means. Yet, when it came time to record his own music, he purposefully stepped away from these experiences.
First of all, instead of sticking to something sonically similar to the big names he played for, Cullum decided to show that his spectrum of musical interests is much wider than just country or folk music variations. To show this off, he decided to record a musical series jointly titled Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection, with the third volume now released.
Additionally, instead of going to any top of the line recording facilities Nashville offers, Cullum decided to record most of the music in his Nashville garden shed. This was not just for creating a down to earth sound, but also as a source of inspiration for what he was attempting to offer musically.
And yes, Cullum did call in a number of collaborators, but he chose the people whose work he thought would best fit his musical concepts, rather than by the name they have in music circles. At the same time, their contributions were more or less all remote, recording their parts where they were at that moment in time. For example, Allison De Groot, one of the collaborators on this third volume of Coin Collection, recorded her banjo parts on an iPhone when backstage between shows. As Cullum notes, wherever the recordings came from, they were all brought together and mixed to cassette tape.
Finally, instead of keeping his lyrical content on the lighter side of things, Cullum pursues some personal themes (including a song devoted to his mother here), covers some pressing social, political and wider interest themes like late-stage capitalism and even discusses the climate crisis.
And all that is done through an incredibly varied musical ground. For example, “Don’t Go Downtown” might be considered as something that would fall within singer songwriter genre, but Cullum adds some psych folk flourishes that would fall squarely within late Kevin Ayers’ songbooks, as well as some subdued jazz flourishes that you could hear from Robert Wyatt, another Soft Machine alumni.
As was the case with Volumes 1 and 2, Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 3, is not only uniform in its musical and recording concept, but in exceedingly strong and varied songwriting that establishes Cullum not only as a sought-after session man, but also as an exceptional solo artist.
