Robbie Fulks

Robert William "Robbie" Fulks (born March 25, 1963) is an American alternative country singer-songwriter, instrumentalist and long-time resident of Chicago, Illinois. He has released 15 albums over a career spanning more than 30 years.

He graduated from Carolina Friends School in 1980 at the age of 17 and moved to New York City, where he attended Columbia College, Columbia University with the class of 1984.

While at Columbia University, Fulks often played at Gerdes Folk City and other places in Greenwich Village.

He also performed on campus in places such as the Postcrypt Coffeehouse.

He eventually dropped out of college after two years to pursue music full time.

Fulks moved to Chicago in 1983 and started teaching at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music.

In 1987, he joined The Special Consensus Bluegrass Band, where he showcased his unique guitar flatpicking style.

In the early 1990s he performed in the musical Woody Guthrie's American Song.

He also recorded his original compositions.

Many of his early tracks were engineered by Steve Albini, and the Chicago punk-country label Bloodshot Records began releasing them in 1993.

While living in Chicago, Fulks worked for four years as a country songwriter, mainly for Music Row publisher API.

His solo debut album, Country Love Songs, engineered by Steve Albini, was released on Bloodshot Records in 1996 and received positive reviews.

The Skeletons, members of whom later formed the band The Morells, played on most of the tracks and Tom Brumley and Buck Owens also featured.

Country Love Songs was followed in 1997 by South Mouth, which confirmed Fulks's retro-alternative image.

Fans had grown used to his rough and sparse sound, but his third album, 1998's Let's Kill Saturday Night, on Geffen Records, was different.

Fulks recorded it during the spring of 1998 in Nashville with producer Rick Will, and the album included performances by Lucinda Williams, Sam Bush, Bill Lloyd, and Al Anderson, as well as guitarist Rob Gjersoe (Jimmie Dale Gilmore), bassist Lorne Rall, and drummer Dan Massey.

Geffen Records disbanded shortly after the release of the record and Fulks, finding himself without a label, started his own company, Boondoggle Records, and released an album of previously unreleased material called The Very Best of Robbie Fulks.

He also licenses his music for distribution by Bloodshot.

In 2001 he released Couples in Trouble, a dark, brooding, and decidedly non-country album, and 13 Hillbilly Giants, a collection of covers of classic country numbers, both obscure and well known.

Both records were released by Bloodshot Records.

Also in 2001, Fulks was an inaugural member of the judging panel for the Independent Music Awards, which supported independent artists.

It was his first release on that label since 2001's 13 Hillbilly Giants. The album featured banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and upright bass.

Fulks did not release another album until 2005.

Georgia Hard on Yep Roc Records was a return to his county roots, and was notable for its use of long-time Nashville talent such as Lloyd Green, Hank Singer, Dennis Crouch, and Dallas Wayne.

He also released a novelty single called "Fountains of Wayne Hotline," in which he imagined the power pop band Fountains of Wayne having a hotline that struggling songwriters could call for help with their song structure.

He had been working on the album since 2005.

In April 2007, Fulks released a 2-CD album, Revenge! (also on Yep Roc Records), which consisted mainly of live concert recordings of older songs and included some new material.

One disc, labeled Standing, featured a full-band sound, while the second disc, Sitting, consisted of Fulks solo with little or no musical accompaniment.

Standing opens with the tongue-in-cheek studio track "We're on the Road", which describes life on tour and simulates a telephone call to Fulks from Yep Roc Records President Glenn Dicker, demanding a new record and denigrating the sales performance of the "path-breaking, not chart-breaking" album Georgia Hard.

In 2009, Fulks released an alphabetically organized collection of 50 songs via his website, a compilation called ''50-Vc.

Doberman.'' He noted that this method, and electronic-only release in general, was not typical of musicians who worked in his genre.

In 2010, Fulks released his next album, Happy: Robbie Fulks Plays the Music of Michael Jackson, on Yep Roc Records, in which he covered some of Jackson's songs as a tribute.

In 2013, Fulks released Gone Away Backward, an acoustic album recorded and mixed by Steve Albini and released on Bloodshot Records.

His 2016 record Upland Stories was nominated for a Grammy for Best Folk Album and the song "Alabama at Night" was nominated for a Grammy for Best American Roots Song.

Fulks was born in York, Pennsylvania, the son of a school teacher father.

He grew up in small towns in southeastern Pennsylvania, the Blue Ridge Mountains area of Virginia, and the Piedmont region of North Carolina.

Fulks's family moved often when he was young, eventually settling in North Carolina when he was 12, and Fulks considers North Carolina his childhood home.

He has a younger brother named Jubal.

Fulks was exposed to music through his family in which everyone played a different musical instrument, from his Aunt Stella on banjo, his Aunt Mildred on violin and his mother on autoharp, to his father playing guitar.

Fulks picked up his aunt's banjo when he was six and started playing guitar at age 11.