With the soul of a country singer and the mind of a vaudevillian, Robbie Fulks is a chameleon-like artist who can whip it out in honky-tonk, country, bluegrass, power pop, or whatever strikes his ample whimsy at the time. Don’t miss your chance to see him up close in the intimate Back Room @ Colectivo.

“If country music has an Elvis Costello, it’s Robbie Fulks, who marries Ivy League cleverness to an appreciation of hillbilly music that actual hillbillies could only envy.” — Entertainment Weekly

The eighth full-length from singer/songwriter Jason Eady, To The Passage Of Time first took shape in a frenetic burst of creativity back in the doldrums of quarantine. Over the course of a three-day period last August, the Fort Worth, Texas-based musician wrote more than half of the album, locking himself in his bedroom and emerging only when he felt completely burnt out. “I went in thinking I was going to write just one song—but then the songs kept coming, and I didn’t want to break the spell,” he recalls. “I’d go to sleep with the guitar by the bed, pick it back up when I woke up the next morning, and do it all again. I’d never really experienced anything like that before.”

With its nuanced exploration of aging and loss and the fragility of life, To The Passage Of Time arrives as the Mississippi-bred artist’s most lyrically complex and compelling work to date. As Eady reveals, the album’s understated power stems in part from the intentionality of the recording process, which involved enlisting Band of Heathens’ Gordy Quist as producer and gathering many of Eady’s favorite musicians he’s played with over the years (including Noah Jeffries on mandolin and fiddle, Mark Williams on upright bass and cello, and Geoff Queen on Dobro, pedal steel, and lap steel). “I really love egoless players—people who know how to serve the song,” notes Eady, who recorded at The Finishing School in Austin and made ample use of the studio’s goldmine of vintage gear. “We started every song with just me on guitar, and if someone felt like they had a part to add, they had to come forward and say what they heard there. Everything was built from the ground up, and because of that there’s no filler—nobody playing to show off or take up space.”

The follow-up to 2018’s I Travel On—an album that “overflows with enough spontaneous energy to power a fleet of Ford pickups,” according to NPR’s glowing review—To The Passage Of Time shows the full force of that approach on the hard-driving lead single “Back to Normal.” Like all of the album, “Back to Normal” was recorded live with no overdubs, bringing gritty guitar work and galloping rhythms to an urgent meditation on the inevitability of change. “I wanted to write about how, when things get disrupted, you can never really return to the way they were before,” says Eady. “No matter how big or small that disruption is, you have to accept that change is a fundamental part of life, and just keep moving forward.” The result: an immediately catchy track that’s pragmatic but hopeful, proving Eady’s gift for turning uncomfortable truths into songs with a potent impact.

A near-lifelong songwriter who names Merle Haggard, Guy Clark, and Willie Nelson among his main inspirations, Eady grew up in Jackson and got his start performing in local bars at age 14, showing his natural grasp of everything from soul and R&B to blues and country. After some time in the Air Force, he moved to Fort Worth and started playing open mic nights, where he quickly built up a devoted following. After independently releasing his debut album From Underneath the Old in 2005, he expanded his touring radius and continued turning out critically praised work, including 2012’s AM Country Heaven (a top 40 debut on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart), 2014’s Daylight/Dark (an album that “belongs on a shelf next to Dwight Yoakam’s Buenos Noches from a Lonely Room, Joe Ely’s Letter to Laredo, and yes, even Willie Nelson’s Phases and Stages,” according to AllMusic), and his self-titled 2017 effort (hailed by Rolling Stone as “[h]eavily steeped in his storyteller lyrical style and cleverly framed by uncluttered, acoustic-rich arrangements”). Through the years, Eady has also made his name as an unforgettable live performer, sharing stages with the likes of Sturgill Simpson, Band of Heathens, and Reckless Kelly.

In creating To The Passage Of Time, Eady incorporated several songs born from a songwriters group that started up during quarantine, including Patton along with artists like Brent Cobb, Adam Hood, and Jamie Lin Wilson (who also joined Patton in contributing harmony vocals to the album). “In the early stages of quarantine we realized that nobody was getting any writing done, even though we all had so much downtime,” he says. “We started this group and gave each other prompts to try to turn out a song a week, and it really helped get rid of that paralysis we were all feeling.”

Looking back on the making of To The Passage Of Time, Eady points to such unexpected moments as the recording of the album-opening “Nothing On You.” “Apart from my guitar, the only two instruments on that song are cello and steel guitar—which is a combination I’d never heard before, and gave it a whole new character that took my breath away,” he says. But for the most part, Eady achieved a rare outcome in the album’s production: a direct expression of his deep-rooted and highly specific vision. “I write my songs on acoustic guitar, so sometimes in the studio things take different turns and end up not really matching with what you had in your head,” says Eady. “But because of the approach we took with this album, there’s hardly anything that came out different from what I’d envisioned. This is 100 percent the album I hoped I would make.”