Alive (TOTR 496)

 -originally aired on WTTU 88.5 FM The Nest on Saturday, April 19, 2025
-you can listen to the audio archive here:
Stream Alive - TOTR 496 by Teacher On The Radio | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
-This episode features From Dreams We Emerge, the new album by Hayden Mattingly & Honeybrook, along with an exclusive interview with Hayden Mattingly, Mike Harrison, & Cody Smith at Sunday Drive Studios
-We will also celebrate the album release on Thursday, April 24, 2025 at the Wesley Arena (271 E 9th Street), with performances by Hayden & Honeybrook & special guest Casey Neill
-all views only represent the host, interviewees, & the artists played, never the student managers or the Communication department or the university

Hayden Mattingly - Alive
Hayden Mattingly - Candlefish
Hayden Mattingly - Dreams
Hayden Mattingly - Isabelle
Hayden Mattingly - Fossanova
Hayden Mattingly - Broken
Hayden Mattingly - Visionary One
Hayden Mattingly - Highland Dig
Hayden Mattingly - Second Stand
Hayden Mattingly - South Wind Says
Casey Neill & the Norway Rats - Savages
Casey Neill & the Norway Rats - In the Swim
Casey Neill & the Norway Rats - The Ones You Ride With
Casey Neill & the Norway Rats - Meteor Shower
Casey Neill & the Norway Rats - Sending Up Flares
Casey Neill - Riffraff
Casey Neill & the Norway Rats - Radio Montana
Casey Neill & the Norway Rats - All Summer Glory
Fust - Spangled
Fust - Gateleg

Glorious gusts of spangle jangle folk-rock with North Carolina’s Fust

 

Discovering, digging, then diving in, falling for a new band that already fills a sweet spot is such a sweet thing. Right now we are swooning over a gust of Fust, their brand new album Big Ugly & a current tour of tiny venues throughout the southeast. (To be fair, 2023’s warm fuzzy Genevieve was also on my radar, but I had not fallen all-the-way in.)

In this case, the sound that is swallowing me is already achingly intimate, a sprawling dusty & expansive soulful southern folk-rock, that evokes & invokes intoxicating indie that ruffles the edges of alt-country, such as the gravel roads & local honey of aughts/00s acts like Band of Horses, My Morning Jacket, Bon Iver, or Magnolia Electric Company/Jason Molina. 

It’s not just the swelling guitars, fiddle, & keyboards that shake & slay me in my deepest parts; it’s the addictive feeling I find in the restless place-based poetic lyrics sung-with-hunger & feeling by the sweet-tea & cheap-beer croon of lead-singer & lyricist Aaron Dowdy. This front-person poet of ginger-curls & professor-spectacles does double duty as a PhD grad student in literature at Duke University, when he is not touring with this amazing six-piece band, which shares several members with fellow-travelers Sluice. I have no doubt that it’s Dowdy’s literary sensibilities that so fully foster the feral world-building of Big Ugly & its backroad stories & blackout fables.

I got to this record more than a month after its March 7th release & have placed it in steady rotation ever since. When a band hooks me by the heart-&-guts like Fust does, I love to devour the journalistic buzz about a new record, & this one has aplenty. The search engines led me to incredible long form pieces over at Paste by Matt Mitchell & Anna Pichler. In addition to my above-mentioned antecedents & fellow travelers, another reviewer also placed Fust in conversation with John Prine & the Drive By Truckers. Their album was engineered by Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, also making them very specific contemporaries of rising western NC star MJ Lenderman. 

The record revs into my audio soul with “Spangled”; it steals your heart from its opening strums & the album keeps you choogling-&-chugging in its setting of a West Virginia locale. “They tore down the hospital” condenses the abandonment of American rural infrastructure in a poetic stanza, but the point of Big Ugly is also finding fierce beauty in the fight against blight. Road names & room numbers never sounded so good as when sung in this blistering banger that I want on repeat for this entire spring & summer.

Track two is called “Gateleg” & might be the spiritual thesis of the record for me, the way Dowdy reimagines & inverts Dylan’s Maggies’s Farm to be situated in the small-town retail-&-gig-economy. My students prefer the term “relatable” when discussing lyrics as simple & memorable as these: “Like the cans, bags, tins, and smokes/All the pull-tabs and OTC rolls.” The chorus says more than it clearly says about the economy & the culture & it already says a lot: “You ain't gonna work on the line no more/You're gonna work at Maggie's store.” Things clicked even further in my mind at the Louisville show when Dowdy told me a little bit about his academic research & writing, about the things that could have been, & the fascinating fact that his dissertation director was renowned literary-critic leftist Fredric Jameson, who sadly recently passed. 

The entire Fust record rivets-&-rocks with such believable stories & characters, they all bring me back to dip my bucket again & again, each track acts as a haunting hymn that my mind-body-spirit simply needs. 

“Jody” is a jam that centers love & alcohol with immediacy & intimacy & every listener from a rural area can visualize that “outside fridge.” The title track “Big Ugly” brings it all together with its anchors in the dirt, with its allegiance to a river, with its lonesome loyalty to land & place that says they will only ever haul me off, if & when it’s in a pine box. This admission of a deep & thorny sense of home, even when some of our neighbors betray us as misfits or  even call us traitors, it gets redeemed in the southern jangle spangle medicine that holds this album both shimmering & aloft, as well as deep deep inside. Poetic meditations & problematic regional morality aside, the gust of Fust hooks simply hook me as I cannot help but to hum & sing along.  

When you are as addicted to a new record as I am to this one, I needed to rearrange my week to find a way to catch a show, which we did at Louisville’s Zanzabar. Nashville’s glorious garage-psych siblings the Styrofoam Winos have just joined Fust for a week, & it was really great to see the Fust gang join the audience, standing near the front to support the Winos, as they amazingly switch instruments & rotate vocal duties on every single song. Jake Tapley’s set to start everything was also stellar. Wow. 

Fust (with Styrofoam Winos & Jake Tapley)

Zanzibar in Louisville, KY

4-16-2025

Setlist:

Big Ugly 

Gateleg

Doghole

Jody

Bleached

Violent Jubilee

Mountain Language 

Heart Song

Open Water

Sister

Spangled 

Fust are a 7-piece on the record & a 6-piece live; the album credits are:

Aaron Dowdy: guitar, vocals, and synth

Avery Sullivan: drums and percussion

Frank Meadows: piano and percussion

John Wallace: guitar and vocals

Justin Morris: guitar, pedal steel, vocals

Libby Rodenbough: fiddle and vocals

Oliver Child-Lanning: bass, vocals, dulcimer, and synth

Digging, Dreaming, & Dancing with Hayden Mattingly & Honeybrook

 

-words originally conceived as liner notes to the new album From Dreams We Emerge-

In every “framily,” every workplace, every campus, every community, we need a house band. We need a soundtrack to daily life. I’m incredibly grateful to have friends & fellow-travelers in close geographic proximity cranking out such consistently compelling & conscientiously crafted songs as found on the new album by my community’s house band, Hayden Mattingly & Honeybrook.

Having worked at the same higher education institution for more than 20 years, I am always grateful to learn about my colleagues’ more interesting hobbies, second careers, & side hustles. It was at least 15 years ago when my sadly-now-deceased colleague Kurt told me about a band that he heard jamming in the parking lot by the Catholic Church at a festive seasonal shindig. The lead singer, guitar player, & principal songwriter of the group that was then-called Tenshades is wildlife biologist & environmental science scholar Hayden Mattingly.

Not long after learning about Tenshades, I made sure that we booked them at a local street festival. In addition to the sparkling originals in their set, the cover songs in their repertoire confirmed a kinship with the psych-jangle of place-based roots rook, ranging from R.E.M. to the Band. For the current live shows, the band is now called Honeybrook, a name that perfectly evokes the ensemble’s organic sweet & flowing audio ambiance. Over the years, my former student, keyboardist, & solo-artist in his-own-right Drew Griswold brought more to their live shows, which we frankly don’t get enough of in Cookeville, maybe two-or-three a year if we are lucky! (Griswold doesn’t appear on the current offering, but if you see Honeybook in-person, you will hopefully catch him.)

With 2022’s The Next Moonlight & now the brand-new-for-2025 release From Dreams We Emerge, Hayden Mattingly has distinguished himself as a visionary rock poet whose literary songbook is a profound extension of his love for the natural world in all its wild diversity & spangled specificity. How else do we get an anthemic lament for an endangered species like we find in the song “Candlefish”!? This gorgeous & groovy hymn gets an uplifting bounce to its serious topic by the seriously talented rhythm section of Benjamin Clark on bass & co-producer Mike Harrison on drums. The late-disc heartfelt ballad “Second Stand” alludes to the unlikely courage that we find later in life to align with our values of love & truth, to defend against all that offends love & truth.

The natural world bursts from the grooves on every track found on this record, even & especially with overt lyrical references to biology & ecology found on some of the songs. It’s no wonder that Hayden draws so much of his inspiration on the trails that traverse the mountains & the creeks & the caves of our local bioregion. When Hayden shared his appreciation for the early-20th-century “vagabond of beauty” Everett Ruess (referenced in “Candlefish”), the internal recognition I experienced was from the misty depths. When this album gets its official streaming release, I cannot recommend it enough for taking your smartphone & best headphones on your favorite local trail, to experience these songs as a solo-walking-meditation, embedded in the ecological expanse from which they are born.

When the album opens with “Alive,” listeners immediately get injected & infected with the record’s thesis statement. When the narrator asks us to “adjourn from the rotten status quo,” he doesn’t need to ask us twice. We are as ready now as we were when Stipe, Buck, Mills, & Berry asked us to “Begin the Begin” more than 40 years ago. With the singer, we are “coming alive,” because we are! As I spent a few weeks allowing the advance listening copy to hook me on this needed addition to the Hayden Mattingly canon, I found myself texting the songwriter about certain tracks. With “Alive,” we shared a chat about its affinity with the late mystic Howard Thurman’s viral meme: “Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Punctuated by the pulse of Harrison’s drums, this track is the perfect opening track. It grabs us by the soul & skin; we are all in!  

The genius that drips from these dreams emerged to be fully formed on a recent winter-break creative-binge in a rural recording studio. Enter co-producer, collaborator, & technical curator Cody Smith, whose Sunday Drive studio, found at the end-of-the-road overlooking a vast vista in Overton County, provided the physical & spiritual playground for creating this jammy, juicy, & fulfilling feast for our ears. Entering the amazing room that another regional musician simply called “sick” for the first time, I immediately got vibes of similarly sacred temples of sound in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, & Motown, an inspiration for his labor-of-love that Cody immediately owned & acknowledged. Even before almost getting lost on the back roads finding Sunday Drive, I knew that this album acknowledged a delicious debt to the very dirt of our homeplaces. Now that I have visited the hallowed space that Smith has created, I will always revere & recommend it.

While “classic rock” may be more of a contested referent for hardcore collectors & nerds than a genre per se, Hayden Mattingly’s albums are the greatest instant-classics of classic rock that your friends outside our regional scene may have never heard of, a reliable & humble vibe of warmth, fuzz, & funk. Because if Sunday Drive studio isn’t the Fame or Muscle Shoals Sound of the Cumberland Mountains, it might also be our Big Pink. A defining sound of classic rural country funk might be the wonky wah-wah of The Band’s Garth Hudson’s clavinet on “Up On Cripple Creek.” The sound of that addictive boogie shows up on “Highland Dig,” attributed to Hayden’s sister Mary Ben Bonham, who adds a spoken-word interlude to that crunchy earworm. It makes me want to do my silly hippy dances, just thinking about it.

Stop whatever else you’re doing, no, really do it right now. Then fire-up your best stereo with its banging speakers, give your heart over to the secret glories to be discovered in From Dreams We Emerge.

Dig it. Dance to it. Do that again. Then tell all your friends. -Andrew William Smith/Sunfrog/Teacher On The Radio
April 2025

Flood (TOTR 495)

 

[1990s archival images from the personal collection of Scott Winchell. Top picture includes our co-host on the far right with members of Big Tent Revival]

-originally aired on WTTU 88.5 FM The Nest on Saturday, April 12, 2025
-Our special guest co-host today is Scott Winchell, for a Lent/Easter season mix of 1990s contemporary Christian rock

-you can listen to the audio archive here:
Stream Flood - TOTR 495 by Teacher On The Radio | Listen online for free on SoundCloud
-all views only represent the host, interviewees, & the artists played, never the student managers or the Communication department or the university

-check out the bonus interview with Scott Michael Winchell:
https://www.youtube.com/live/AzA6OM3tNgs?si=OCOIIjVZkunCxwYb

Jennifer Knapp - Undo Me 
Jars of Clay - Liquid
77s - Woody 
PFR - Great Lengths
DC Talk - Colored People
Newsboys - Breakfast
The O.C. Supertones - Supertones Strike Back
Lost Dogs - Breath Deep
Adam Again - Deep
Charlie Peacock - After Lovin You
Caedmon’s Call - There You Go
Jars of Clay - Flood
P.O.D. - Southtown
DC Talk - Consume Me
The Choir - A Sentimental Song
Bleach - Land of the Lost
Sixpence None The Richer - The Fatherless and the Widow
Big Tent Revival - Mend Me
Seven Day Jesus - Butterfly
Grammatrain - Believe
Third Day - Alien 
Satellite Soul - Fool 
MxPx - Punk Rawk Show
Switchfoot - Dare You To Move

Out In The Open (TOTR 494)

-originally aired on WTTU 88.5 FM The Nest on Saturday, April 5, 2025

-Our special guest today is professor Kinsey Simone, in cooperation with the Mad Topics event taking place today at Tennessee Tech:

Mad Topics - 2025 Mad Topics: Anxiety & Depression

-Listen to audio archive/podcast version here:

Stream Out In The Open - TOTR 494 by Teacher On The Radio | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

-all views only represent the host, interviewees, & the artists played, never the student managers or the Communication department or the university

Katrina & the Waves - Walking On Sunshine

The Beatles - Here Comes The Sun

The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations

Bill Withers - Lovely Day

American Authors - Best Day of My Life

U2 - Beautiful Day

Sara Bareilles - Brave

Miley Cyrus - The Climb

Bruno Mars - Count On Me

Coldplay - A Sky Full Of Stars

James Bay - Let It Go

Alexi Murdoch - Breathe

Ben E. King - Stand By Me 

Brian Johnson & Jenn Johnson - You’re Gonna Be OK

fun. - Carry On

Snow Patrol - Crack The Shutters

Elbow - One Day Like This

jeremy messersmith - We All Do Better When We All Do Better

Redbird - Ooh La La

Pixie & the Partygrass Boys - Be Kind

My Morning Jacket - Out In The Open

Bill Withers - Lean On Me

Sam Cooke - (What A) Wonderful World