The man behind XL Recordings delves into his third album, along with his relationship with folk, and the vastly changing landscape of the music industry
“It’s such a great process to make one of these records,” says Richard Russell. “Even if there is the slight creeping feeling of losing your mind. It’s completely all-encompassing.” Russell has spent years piecing together his latest project, the third album under his Everything Is Recorded series: Richard Russell Is Temporary. Chock full of guest features and collaborations – Sampha, Florence Welch, Bill Callahan, Kamasi Washington, Samantha Morton, among numerous others – the man behind XL Recordings has ostensibly made a sprawling folk record. Albeit a distinctly modern one that has evolved and mutated from its more traditional roots, incorporating elements of hip hop, jazz, electronica and left-field pop. Alongside contributions from classic folk singers like Maddy Prior or samples of deceased artists like Molly Drake and Jackson C Frank, in many ways the record is a dialogue between the post-genre digital world and the acoustic analogue era that preceded it.
“The word folk is interesting,” muses Russell. “Traditional English folk music was something I shunned when I was younger because it was the type of thing you might learn about at school and I was not into that.” However, as he began to think about how broad folk music was, Russell came to the conclusion that it had always been a part of him. “I realised I was deeply into a lot of what could quite legitimately be described as folk music,” he says. “From songs I’d hear on the terraces at football – which is quite a pure form of folk music because no one knows who wrote any of them and it’s like oral tradition that’s handed down – to rap and reggae music.”
So, how does Russell go about assembling such a broad cast of people to work with, spanning the folk-jazz of Alabaster DePlume to Nourished by Time’s hazy R&B via the post-punk and dub bass master Jah Wobble? “I approach these things as a fan,” he says. “It’s just simply: do I feel it? You can’t be wrong about the things you love. It’s just me having the opportunity to create this little universe, in a similar way to when I was cutting pictures out of music magazines and sticking them on my wall when I was a young teenager.”
There is an intimate feeling to the record, one that is peppered with snippets of whispered dialogue and chatter. “Conversations with my friends and collaborators were kind of the start of this record,” explains Russell. “And it was staring me in the face through the artist name I use: Everything Is Recorded. I was generating all this spoken word stuff but I just didn’t record it [before]. These conversations that we have in the studio are so interesting and crucial, so I decided to start recording them because they are part of the work.”
Loss – in all its forms – was a theme that was percolating during the making of the album and it became a note that Russell would pass on for collaborators to think about. This would then manifest itself in many different ways. Russell recalls walking on a freezing cold beach in Dorset one day when Bill Callahan – who also duets with Noah Cyrus on the album – responded to him via text on the brief via an acapella song about the late comic Norm McDonald. Russell then programmed and produced the track, complete with samples from the comic.
“The vast majority of musicians now all know that the attention span of the audience is threatened ... But what the fuck can you do? You just have to double down, be super dedicated, and put more effort than ever into the art of making records” – Richard Russell
“It was important to include humour,” he says. “Loss means different things to different people and I really didn’t want to make a miserable record. I hope it doesn’t sound miserable because the process of it was really joyous. I also felt like there might be some utility here. Loss is a present thing for everyone and music can be helpful in processing that. So maybe this is a record that can help serve that purpose.”
Not simply content with making a record that features guests and collaborators well into their double figures, Russell went out and out on the artwork too. “We had zodiac cards made,” he explains. “And there’s one for every single person who participates on this record. A handpainted representation of them on one side, and a fun fact, which I established by interviewing all of them, on the other. It was a huge process. Every one of these took as long to do as the average album sleeve and we did 20 of them. A graphic designer said, ‘You’ve lost your mind. No one spends this long making album art anymore.’ And I thought: we’re on the right lines here.”
As someone who operates a record label, Russell is well aware of the vastly changing landscape of the music industry and audiences’ relationship when it comes to listening to music. But rather than fear a culture that can occasionally feel fleeting and throwaway, he’s attempting to make music that is bigger, bolder, more in-depth and ambitious than ever. “The vast majority of musicians now all know that the attention span of the audience is threatened,” he says. “There’s no avoiding it because it’s happening to all of us. We know that there’s another album coming up on your device the minute after the one that you’ve just spent three or four years making. But what the fuck can you do? You just have to double down, be super dedicated, and put more effort than ever into the art of making records.”
Richard Russell Is Temporary by Everything Is Recorded is out now via XL Recordings.
