Reese Fulmer & The Carriage House Band Are “Live At Just The Right Time”

“I think anyone who has come to see a full Carriage House Band show knows we’ve got a pretty broad body of work already, but I felt like it was time to share that in a different way,” says Reese Fulmer about his upcoming release. “This is just about as clear as I can make it.” 

The album, titled “Live At Just The Right Time,” features 17 songs, all written by Fulmer and drawn from four different live performances over the past six months. Two venues, Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs and The Park Theater in Glens Falls feature 6-piece arrangements of his Carriage House Band, while two others, The Hangar On The Hudson in Troy and The Jive Hive in Albany, feature 5-piece lineups. Each time, the combination of players and instruments is different. 

“There were definitely songs that made it hard for me to choose,” says Fulmer about creating the tracklist for the album. “Some had two or three versions across shows that sounded great. But my goal was to arrange the album similar to how I might construct a setlist for a full show with the band. It’s a pretty amazing snapshot of the last six months.” 

What comes along with that goal is a listening experience guided by the writing behind the songs and the energy that that material brings, regardless of the instrumentation bringing it to life. Rather than presenting a collection of consecutive songs from each venue and perhaps allowing a listener to settle into a particular sound, Fulmer asks for a more active relationship. “I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about how the concept of creating an album as a complete work has been disappearing, how people release music in smaller and smaller chunks. I did the same thing this winter with my studio work,” he says, referencing the first four singles he released under Reese Fulmer & The Carriage House Band. “But I saw an opportunity to do something different. I really feel like we create complete work every time we get the chance to play a full show. I put a lot of thought into how each song flows into the next, and each time I watch how that happens, I refine it for the next show and work on how I facilitate that on the mic.” 

This attention to the way each song is presented to the audience makes one appearance in the live album as an intro track. “I thought the first improv piece deserved some clarity because it’s such a visual experience at an actual show. Without including the intro, you’d miss out on a full understanding of how unique the piece is that you’re listening to.” 

The piece in question, titled “Just Gravy #2,” is one of two completely improvised pieces on the album, along with “Just Gravy #4”. “The name Just Gravy is a product of a few rounds of whittling. It started out just as Guided Improv on the setlist for a couple of shows, and then it was Gravy Hamburger after a fun item on a green room menu, and then once I started numbering each piece, I shortened it to Just Gravy. Going back to the first piece at Caffe Lena in October, I retroactively numbered them, and I’ll keep a running count of it from here.”

“The gravy is the good stuff,” he says, “it’s in the moment; it’s just pure expression.” As he explains in the song introduction, the Carriage House Band has a series of hand signals adapted from a musical sign language Fulmer learned from his jazz band teacher in high school, and he uses these signals to guide the pieces along. This active conductor role gives each piece an interesting sense of urgency and unexpected twists and turns as the players adapt to the new directions and, when it unfolds on a stage, offers the audience an unprecedented window into high-level improvisation. 

Taken as intended, the complete work is a striking demonstration of versatility in both songwriting and live performance. The album moves freely from blues to bluegrass to indie-folk to country Americana, from delicate and heartbreaking to gritty and confrontational. While it might seem counterintuitive for the 2023 Eddie’s Americana Artist of the Year to lean into such an eclectic sound, Fulmer maintains that this is exactly how he wants his music to be heard. 

“I get it,” he says about picking a lane, “I just think there’s more of a choice than we’re led to believe by the industry as a whole. The way I see it, the wider the range of sounds I have access to, the more freedom I have to write, explore, and grow. I’m already a much different songwriter than I was when I started performing with the Carriage House Band. I’m not interested in finding and sticking to a sound because some statistical group might connect with it. I am my main audience, and anyone is welcome to listen along.” 

He credits the recording engineers at some of the top Capital Region small venues – Joel Moss at Caffe Lena, Chris Reed Jr at the Park Theater, Troy Pohl at the Hangar on the Hudson, and Alec Lewis at the Jive Hive – for capturing the performances and supplying the material needed for creating the album. “I mixed and produced it entirely myself,” he says about preparing the recordings for release. “It was a very conscious decision, partly because I wanted to see what I could do with it and partly because it made the most sense financially. If streaming is going to redefine the value of my recorded music, I’m going to redefine how I go about producing that music.” 

As it stands, highlighting a cast of nine tasteful and talented players alongside Fulmer’s expansive body of work and their performances on some of the premiere stages in the area, the album seems to present the right people in the right places. As for the right time, “It’s right now,” says Fulmer. “This album is being released exactly as it should be.” 

Live At Just The Right Time will be released under Reese Fulmer & The Carriage House Band on Friday, July 28th, 2023. Use this link to pre-save the album on your preferred streaming service: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/reesefulmerandthecarriagehouseband/live-at-just-the-right-time

Find out more about Reese Fulmer & The Carriage House Band on their website: https://reesefulmer.com/