“All Bad,” the third full-length album from Fayetteville folkster Nick Shoulders, is arriving on Friday, Sept. 8, via Gar Hole Records, the label he co-founded with Kurt DeLashmet. In the meantime, there are wonderful singles to attend to.
Trailing “Whooped If You Will” — the record’s first cut and a masterclass in yodeling virtuosity — is “Won’t Fence Us In,” which came out today and is Shoulders at his most explicitly political. He doesn’t mince words in this one.
Despite bemoaning the ugly sprawl of “interstates and interchanges / Monocrop and truckstops” and wishing “ancestral lands belonged to indigenous people,” Shoulders finds a way to stay hopeful by returning to the titular refrain: “You won’t fence us in.” He knows that telling it like it is and living exuberantly aren’t mutually exclusive.
You can pre-order “All Bad” here.