ADAM FAUCETT

Adam Faucett Turns It On Again With His New More Like a Temple

The Burg Staff

by Matt Ashare 

Adam Faucett's More Like A Temple

It’s four in the afternoon and Arkansas-bred singer/songwriter Adam Faucett has just woken up on a floor in Chicago where he and his band spent the night after a gig at the Ace Bar.

"We played late and we hung out real late," he says in a gravelly voice that only intensifies his syrupy Southern drawl. That’s nothing new for the big, bearded Faucett, who’s more or less been perpetually touring — and crashing wherever he’s welcome — since the release of his first album, The Great Basking Shark,in 2007. In fact, by this Saturday, the road will lead Faucett, longtime bassist Jonny D., and drummer Will Boyd (who’s currently filling in for the band’s usual drummer, Chad Conder), to the Lynchburg area to support his new "More Like a Temple" as one of the headliners at the Hill City Roots Festival.

     Faucett was born and raised in Benton, which happens to be where the film Sling Blade was filmed. "It’s kind of attached to Little Rock," he says. "If you leave Little Rock headed toward Dallas, you go through several towns, and Benton is the last one you hit. After that, it’s nothing but country. It’s kind of an old suburb of a town that doesn’t really deserve suburbs." 

     When he was 18, Faucett relocated to an even smaller Arkansas town, Russellville.

There he found a teeming scene of fellow singer/songwriters zeroing in on a midway point between the Texas troubadour traditions of Townes Van Zandt, Rodney Crowell, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore and the contemporary Americana leanings of indie outfits like Eric Bachman’s Crooked Fingers, Chan Marshall’s Cat Power, and Will Oldham’s Bonnie Prince Billy. It’s probably also worth throwing Ryan Adams in his rootsier incarnations into that mix as a touchstone.

     "We had a bunch of DIY venues, and we were all pretty much friends who played at each others’ houses every weekend," Faucett recalls, referencing some names who are also playing this weekend’s folk fest — Blake Reams, Justin Sherry, Fatty, and William Blackheart.

Faucett, who plays guitar, banjo, and piano, didn’t exactly start out as a rootsy songster. As he puts it, "I was in another band before this and everybody was like ‘You guys are like a redneck Pink Floyd.’ I’d be like, ‘whadaya mean?’ And they’d say, ‘you sound like a hick when you sing.’ That was news to me."

     And he had an epiphany of sorts when he moved to Chicago for a short time in 2006 that put him on the path that led to the soulful, acoustic fingerpicking that characterized his first album and remains one of his strengths. "You know, I didn’t even realize I had a Southern accent until I moved and everyone there was like, ‘sounds like you got marbles in your mouth… what’s Bill Clinton like?’"

     Faucett’s now based out of Little Rock, although you get the sense from the songs on More Like a Temple — his third album — that he’s more at home on the road.

"Man’s Not the Answer," one of the more affecting acoustic ballads on the disc, takes the point of view of a young, small-town girl from one of the dozens of odd places Faucett’s found himself stranded.

     "I was sleeping in the back of a head shop in a tiny New Mexico town for half a week with a hitchhiker I picked up in Arizona," he recounts. "He was a street performer who could play the hell out of a slide guitar. And there was this musician from New Orleans who was trying to get back home. I pretty much begged them to finish out my tour with me. One night there were 15 or 20 people there, and we basically got into a contest drinking whiskey to see who could write songs faster. That song just came out. We stopped there, so I think I won that contest."

     For the most part, More Like a Temple sticks to the spare, dark, moody template Faucett laid out on his first two discs. There’s no banjo this time around, but the addition of strings and more piano adds an alluring lushness to the arrangements. And "Blood Is Blood," a hard-storming rocking that builds to a noisy peak reminiscent of Band of Horses, is as outright anthemic as Faucett’s ever sounded.

    "It’s more fleshed out, I guess," Faucett admits. "And it’s sold more than the other two," he laughs. "You know, things just end up working out in a way that you never expect. You go into the studio and you think you’re going to come out with this record with these songs and at the other end of the pipe you come out with that record with those songs."