It was in his garden shed in Nashville, Tennessee, that Spencer Cullum found an escape from the noise of the world, from the spew of hatred and vitriol that has come to soundtrack the present day.
Here, in the musician’s makeshift recording studio, the discord was muted. The rush of life was stalled, even if just for a moment. It would be here that his Coin Collection 3 would come to life.
“There was a lot about reading news back home and reading news here that made me very frustrated,” says the British-born, Nashville-based singer, songwriter, and pedal steel savant. Holding the constant cycle of bad news up to the light, Cullum tried to create a narrative beyond the violence and greed.
For instance, the artist penned the album’s “Easy Street” after seeing an image of an ICE agent smoking a cigar in celebration of a day’s work detaining and deporting people. The slinking number, a kaleidoscope of languid blues and sleepy folk, envisions the officer ultimately regretful, undone by the harm he caused in the name of “freedom.” Cullum found a sense of justice when he flipped the script.
Not all of Coin Collection 3 is glaringly political in this way. However, most of it is topical, the album’s nine tracks acting as a kind of remedy for reality. “I’m trying to be very conscious of not being too political,” Cullum shares, “but there’s a big concern of how we are treating people and Earth.”
As a way to make sense of everything from the climate crisis to late-stage capitalism, the musician turned to the folklore of his native England. He found comfort – even answers – in the occult-tinged tales of ancient relics and midnight rites rather than in the extreme Christian views that tend to warp his adopted home in the American South.
“I felt more settled in that,” he says of the folk narratives that have found their way into his music today. “I love reading about standing stones and old folk stories about how men would get enticed into the woods and murdered by some sort of witch. I love that, it’s brilliant.”
Grounded in a reverence for, and an almost fear of, nature, these stories gifted Cullum an outlet through which to voice his frustration with the modern world and craft a more just plane beyond the here and now. Several of the album’s offerings, such as “Gavon’s Eve” and “Old Paul Hill,” are written through this folk lens where nature prevails over the evils of humankind. As he puts it: “I made my own A24 horror film.”
It begins with “Rowan Tree,” the album’s opening track. Through skittering strings and supple rhythms, Cullum’s trademark hush-a-bye voice spins a twisted folk tale in which a tree kills greedy men, pulling them in at the roots and having its way with them.
“She killed us all, quite rightly so / We deserve our fate for how little we’ve known,” he sings, “Never chop down her, never disagree / ‘Cause I waged my war on a Rowan Tree.”
That horror show comes to a close with “Music on the Hill.” The luxurious number, plump with rounded keys and dulcet riffs, is another that finds nature attempting to restore harmony, beckoning evil-doers into the woods to be sacrificed in the belly of thorn and vine.
While these songs are merely fabled and fairy-dusted, they were Cullum’s conduits for rational expression. “Having been frustrated by the world and making up a story of revenge from nature has felt really nice,” he says. “It was an organic way to be angry and not just say, ‘You’re wrong. I hate you.’”
Coin Collection 3, however, is not all witchcraft and whimsy, or even all doom and gloom. Throughout the making of the album, Cullum also found solace in the people around him. “There are songs about being happy with my life, living here in this garden with my wife and dogs and having this community helping us,” he shares.
Stepping away from the storybooks, he crafted songs like “Jackie Paints” and “Look at the Moon” as springboards for peace and appreciation. The former track, a nostalgic voyage across The Pond to his mother’s art studio, dives into the unconditional love that surrounds him even though he’s thousands of miles away from family. The latter song finds him right where he is, held securely in the arms of the life he’s built for himself in Nashville.
“There is a loneliness that everyone is feeling,” he says, “but I honestly think the best cure for that is the love of a community.” Cullum has found that in spades. In fact, Coin Collection 3 was, itself, an act of the community he loves so well.
He recruited several musician friends to come as they were, from exactly where they were, to play on the album. Celebrated singer-songwriter Oisin Leech tracked his vocals in Ireland while the skilled Allison De Groot recorded her banjo parts on an iPhone when backstage between shows.
“Everyone’s so busy, but I like the idea of everyone adding a part wherever they were in the noise of it all,” Cullum says. He describes the project as piecing together bits of paper, uniting the vocal stylings of Erin Rae and Annie Williams, the rhythms of Dominic Billett, even the flute flourishes of Jim Hoke into one masterful oeuvre. Wherever the recordings came from, they were all brought together and mixed to cassette tape.
That’s the Coin Collection series to a tee. This trilogy, born from a need for connection to the place Cullum is from and the influences that shaped who he is today, is just as much a platform for his talented circle as it is for his own genius.
This series has powered the last five years of Cullum’s solo career, and come 27th March, Coin Collection 3 will mark its final chapter.
