In her 2008 filmic auto-portrait, Beaches of Agnès, artist andfilmmaker Agnès Varda says, “if weopened people up, we’dfind landscapes.”For Varda, thoselandscapeswerebeaches. For singer-songwriter Pony Bradshaw, they’rethe hushed hillsand deep valleysof North Georgia. And from the first aching thrum of “Ginseng Daddy,” theopening track offhis latest record,Thus Spoke the Fool, he’sinvitingus back to that beautiful, haunted place, his homeplace,to visit again. Similar to hisprevious two offerings, the tracks on Thus Spoke the Fool feel less like songs you hear, and more like places you go, odes to the land and language of Appalachia, lyrical topographiespaying faithful homage to the region whereBradshawput down rootsnearly two decadesago. The songs are lush with mountain laurel and tobaccoleaves, taking listeners to mill towns, and American Legions, and Mineral Bluff. They’re flushed with the flood of the Coosa and Hiawassee Rivers, tense with the tenor of a buck dancer’stapping feet. Recorded in part in the sanctuary of an old church outside of Athens, Georgia, Thus Spoke the Foolisa taut,10-song collection, andthethird and final installment in a trilogy that began with 2021’s critically lauded Calico Jim. What began as a bluegrass record alchemized during recording sessions in Nashville to create a more hybrid, textured sound, heavy on fiddle and pedal steel. Beyond any strict genre classifications, however, it’smountain musicthat bears witnessto a maligned and misunderstood regionby a songwriter forever contending with the notion of what it means to call a place home. “My hope is that [my music] brings these small and big ideasforward to share a new perspective,” saysBradshaw. “It’s something I think is important and worthwhile in this strange world. Place, and community, and sticking around seem important. History does, too. Telling the story of North Georgia seems important.”If Thus Spoke the Foolseems more at home within anoeuvre ofnovels and poems by writerslike Wendell Berrythan anymusical contemporary, that’s by design. A writerdeeply reverentofplace and thenatural world,and ever-curious about our relationship to it, Berryis a strongly felt influence inall of Bradshaw’s work, although listeners of Thus Spoke the Foolcan alsofeel the spirit of writers like Jean Giono and Maurice Manning shimmering throughout. “GinsengDaddy” is a “myth-making tune,” Bradshawsays, writtenin thevoiceof the album’s narrator,“a singing raconteur,”and in the spirit of Melville. The ekphrastic “¡Viva Appalachia!”conjuresStephen Vincent Benét’s1925ballad,“The Mountain Whippoorwill.” Listenersof a more literary bent will hear echoes of the James Dickey poem“Buckdancer’s Choice”in the high-stepping “Housebroke.”Thus Spoke the Fool gives us Bradshaw at perhaps his most kaleidoscopiclyrically, each song a kind ofworld-buildingvignette, vivid scenes paintedwith characters as real and unreal as those populating Faulkner’sapocryphal Yoknapatawpha County. But listeners should resist the impulse to assume autobiography, Bradshaw warns. His songs offer gorgeously-rendered glimpses into mountain life as he sees it, but they are, he says, primarily fictions. “I’m a shapeshifter,” Bradshaw reminds listeners of Thus Spoke the Fool. “You can’t trust me. I’m Ginseng Daddy, and Calico Jim, and Holler Rose. Does that make me an unreliable narrator? Iamall of them, but I’m none of them, too." Tyler Key grew up in Bowdon GA, a tiny town between Atlanta and Birmingham, surrounded by farmland and generations of kinfolk. Sharecroppers and mechanics and truck drivers and seamstresses made up both sides of his family, not a musician in the lot. Instead of playing an old time fiddle tune, they did what good southerners do best: they told stories, shot the bull, carried on. All this “carrying on” tuned Key’s ear to the cadence of a good story from the get-go. After stumbling his way through college with a degree in literature, he found his footing in Athens GA, a college town and hub for creative types and eccentrics. There he wrote 2019’s Local Supportand started touring regionally. Key honed his musicality as a pedal steel guitarist for country-ish acts like The Howdies, T. Hardy Morris, Little Gold, and Pony Bradshaw. His most recent album, Wild Azaleas and Other Tall Tales, sounds a bit like Sticky Fingers-era Stones with the offbeat lyricism of John Prine. It’s comfortably weird, and weirdly comfortable. For Key, it’s his way of carrying on that grand tradition of telling stories, lies, half-truths, and tall tales.