Folk has always been an anomaly in the way it adapts to whatever context it finds itself in. It's a shapeshifter; a genre that captures the soul of a setting through the language of the musician it inhabits.
Aidan Robinson, the rising new folk artist from Columbus, Ohio, is a fresh voice in the modern folk world, bringing shape to his midwest experience.
They say the universal is in the particular, and Robinson is redefining folk within the urban midwest by showing it through his own eyes. As upfront and embodied as the concrete covered picture on the front of his new album titled love yourself or die !, he is giving his storied perspective of the midwest, from the roughed up gas stations on I-70, to the surprisingly diverse city of Columbus itself.
The album opens as Midwestern as it gets with "goodwill outlet !" (note the unique emphatic grammatical style he sticks with for each song). This opening number, about finding love that might finally get your act together, rests itself very comfortably in the scene of Midwest suburbia.
Gone for now is the epic, mythological storytelling of classic folk artists like Bob Dylan. Instead, Robinson brings the listener right back to his sense of home and familiarity with a central image of a Goodwill thrift store. Though the instrumentation might not be immediately associated with urban living, the song remains convincingly rustic and homespun from its opening acoustic guitar chords all the way to its energetic fiddle melodies. His particular context is giving these familiar tropes new meaning.
The urban odyssey continues with the aptly titled "ciggy gas station song !."
This notable number chronicles an epic journey anybody can relate to: selling cigarettes at the grocery store chain Giant Eagle. Robinson renders the story with a mix of humor, irony, and some down-to-earth livin', as he's been known to do. The whole thing is told as if it's a campfire tale, imbuing the song with ironic humor without sacrificing the song's connection to the populist and grounded storytelling that folk music offers. It feels achingly modern yet also anachronistic.
Love yourself or die! doesn't take itself seriously all the time, but that hardly means the album never tries to impress the listener.
The song "time moves !" is very striking in the way it paints the ever-pressing passage of time within the album's setting. In this track, the rush of time is thrown into a conglomerate of streaming services and also classical religious figures like God and the Devil. The song paints a world in which the Devil can be seen "throwing firecrackers" out into the road. The grand nature of the myth of these figures is stripped back by the contrasting images of modern life.
Though the album finds itself within a very unique lane of modern urban folk, the songwriting still aims for some tradition every now and then. The song "darker shade of blue !" is first and foremost about the give and take of love. Anyone who is a proclaimed fan of folk music will recognize the tropes and rhythms of this song and find it easy to enjoy. The track also features one of the best performances on the record, as the slow-driving fiddle melodies and highly accented vocals from Robinson are as infectious as they are immersive to the song's setting.
With a poetic folk singer's eyes and ears, Aidan Robinson is bridging the genre's storied past with the oddities of everyday modern living.
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