On his debut solo full-length Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection, the eponymous pedal-steel player and singer lends his mild voice to a set of songs that evoke the folkier dimensions of early-’70s English prog rock. It’s an addictive exercise in style that doesn’t register as dated in 2020. Cullum evokes the jazzy folk-prog of Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers with help from an array of Nashville musicians — the “coins” in his “collection,” as he puts it — including guitarist Sean Thompson and singer-songwriters Caitlin Rose and Erin Rae.
Cullum gets the details right throughout Coin Collection. At its best, the set of original tunes gives the music of Wyatt, Syd Barrett and Brian Eno a new shine, and Cullum proves himself an excellent songwriter. He’s also a fine pedal-steel player, as his work as part of Nashville instrumental duo Steelism and with country stars like Miranda Lambert proves. Though Coin Collection isn’t a showcase for his considerable chops on the instrument, the story of how he came by his skills is relevant to the new LP.
Now 37, Cullum was born in Essex, U.K., and grew up immersed in the sounds of psych-folk rockers like Wyatt and Fairport Convention. He moved to Nashville in 2011 after stints in London and Detroit. Along the way, he says in a phone interview from his Nashville home, he started studying the credits printed on ’70s album covers. He discovered B.J. Cole, an English pedal-steel savant whose textural work has graced recordings by John Cale, Björk and Elton John.
”I didn’t really get into country pedal-steel playing when I first started,” says Cullum. “I would look up vinyl of Elton John and Humble Pie records — a lot of old ’60s and ’70s British bands that would have, you know, pedal-steel music. I kind of saw [Cole’s] name on the liner notes, and then went and saw him at one of his own shows. He does electronic pedal-steel stuff now.”
As Cullum tells me, he began taking lessons with Cole in London in 2004, which helped prepare him for his eventual move to Nashville and his work with Ohio-born guitarist Jeremy Fetzer in Steelism. The duo’s music fuses the Southern-fried instrumental rock of bands like Area Code 615 and Alabama funk rhythm section The Fame Gang with the krautrock of Neu! and Can. On brilliant tracks like 2017’s “The Henchman/The Buffalo,” Fetzer, Cullum and drummer Jon Radford connected old-school funk to post-rock.
Coin Collection connects modern Nashville to the experimentalism of early-’70s England, when pop and folk collided with jazz and minimalism. The album peaks with “My Protector,” a track that sounds uncannily like an outtake from Robert Wyatt’s 1974 album Rock Bottom. The track’s guitar parts pay homage to the work of Robert Fripp and Phil Manzanera, and Cullum’s lyrics describe a fraught relationship.
Elsewhere, “Jack of Fools” sports guitar licks that sit somewhere between Richard Thompson and cult legend Ollie Halsall. Cullum re-creates the hazy atmosphere of prog-folk on “Imminent Shadow,” which sports an intricate acoustic guitar figure that reminds me of English singer-songwriter Bridget St. John.
There are a few pro forma moments on Coin Collection that approach pastiche, but Cullum has captured the wooziness — and the charm — of the music he so clearly loves. Thompson’s guitar licks are particularly apposite, and James “Skyway Man” Wallace’s piano and Mellotron work adds to the texture.
As Cullum says, Coin Collection is a reminder of music’s ability to cross barriers and span oceans.
“Even though the music has an English sound, I’m seeing all these amazing players in Nashville that are sort of influenced by that sort of music, like Skyway Man, Erin [Rae] and Sean Thompson,” he says. “I think it’s important to say that there are great folk pickers in Nashville who are unbelievable.”
