Nick Shoulders

Refugia Blues, the fifth album from Nick Shoulders, is a record of big ideas and small, intimate moments.

These nine songs are rooted in the stylings of Southern traditional music. Sparse, timeless, and unamplified, they're older than the sounds Shoulders saluted on albums like 2023's All Bad, with its loud, whooping anthems for roadhouses and sweaty dancehalls. Here, Shoulders isn't shouting over a band. He isn't bringing a crowd to its feet with dance-ready tempos. Rather, he's exploring another side of his craft by stepping up to a ribbon microphone as a solo performer, delivering each song with acoustic instruments and a voice that's equal parts country croon, Appalachian yodel, and high-lonesome field holler. As he explains it, Refugia Blues "isn't just a call to action; it's a call to rest, too."

"This is my Nebraska," he says, nodding to Bruce Springsteen's lo-fi acoustic record from 1982. "Some people listen to Bruce for the E Street Band and the big radio hits, but I like the intimacy and rawness of Nebraska instead. I'd like to think of Refugia Blues as a little window into the heart, as opposed to the drumbeat of a revolution."

Shoulders' interpretation of American roots music has always been more progressive and punky than the trucks-and-beers conservatism that passes for modern-day country, and he isn't checking his activism at the door. The album moves between personal territory — from "Bored Fightin'" (a self-effacing look at Shoulders' reputation as a left-of-center radical) to the heart-on-sleeve love song "Tatum Spring" — and broader topics like climate collapse, radical anthropology, generative disruption, and southern identity. The purpose, he says, is to utilize his music as "a Trojan Horse that can be accepted by people who don’t hear anything to challenge their sense of comfort and superiority. That's always been the goal — to say what needs to be said, but to intersperse it with joy, humor, and melody."

The opening track, "Apocalypse Never," is an a cappella ballad he wrote in the front seat of his band's shuttle bus, taking a hard look at each passing town and the "individualized apocalypses" he saw — houseless encampments, impoverished communities, barren cornfields. "Our world has been through countless apocalypses," he says. "The refusal to give in to the direness of our circumstances, while still acknowledging it, is key to surviving this moment in our history."

Born to a musical family with deep roots in Arkansas, Appalachia, and Louisiana, Shoulders grew up listening to old-world folk music and black gospel. "My vocal style is rooted as much in growing up in mountainous Arkansas and having to shout across vast distances to greet my neighbors as it is in my family's very old way of singing," he says. "The way I sing is older than capitalism. Being part of this tradition isn't meant to be regressive; it's meant to be liberating. There were time before cash registers and factories, where people sang like this when they sowed their corn, and I'm trying to embody that."

Refugia Blues was recorded in a home studio outside of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Tracked to analog tape in two inspired days and laced with light touches of guitar, banjo, and fiddle, the album explores the slower, softer textures of Shoulders' music without pulling any punches. Highlights and treatments include:
- a bare-boned cover of Randy Travis' "Diggin' Up Bones," slowed to a warbling waltz
- "Deux Hurry," where wordplay nods to Roger Miller
- "Hill Folk," a sympathetic take on southerners whose cultural inheritance has been commodified
- "Dixie Be Damned," which sings about "manifest destitution" and the sickness of contemporary American consciousness

By bridging past and present, Shoulders speaks pointedly and poetically about today's problems while nodding to styles that existed long before the 21st century. "When you listen to the origins of country music in the '20s and '30s, you're hearing the voice of southern rural dissent against coal companies, repression, and depression," he says. "The old ballad singers of the Ozarks were conduits for current events, documenting not only their own lives, but also dispossession and economic strife on a much bigger scale. Being part of that great stream of rural protest music is something I'm trying to tap into. I want to say things that feel timeless, deep, and rooted, but also touch on topics like endless war and a government collapsing into dictatorship. I want to be part of that tradition of dissent."

At once academic and accessible, Refugia Blues is a raw, resolute version of American country music, punctuated with humor and heavy insights, stacked with songs that go down easy but linger for those willing to invest the time.