Spencer Cullum is a Nashville-based, London-born pedal steel player and guitarist. Cullum is co-founder of instrumental group Steelism and a member of Miranda Lambert’s touring session band. Cullum has also recorded with artists including Kesha, Dolly Parton, Angel Olsen, Erin Rae, Ruby Amanfu, Tristen, Jessie Baylin, Andrew Combs, Caitlin Rose, Herman Dune, Dylan LeBlanc and City and Colour.
Coin Collection 3 is the concluding album in the Coin Collection trilogy (2021, 2023) – a series that has defined his solo career, born from a need for connection to the place Cullum is from and the influences that shaped who he is today; just as much a platform for his talented circle as it is for his own genius.
A kaleidoscopic collection of folk, jazz and pop, Coin Collection 3 was made up of reel to reel field recordings, iPhone voice notes and rough studio takes taken around the world, and all put together to cassette tape. It features collaborations with Erin Rae, Rich Ruth, Oisin Leech, Hollow Hand and more.
FFO: Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt, Nick Drake, Jeffrey Silverstein, Ted Lucas
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. 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.