Hello, Franklin by Austin Cash

“Hello, Franklin,” the latest collection of recorded music from Arkansas artist Austin Cash, is perhaps his most formidable. A further exploration into the realms of American vernacular music and Minimalism, “Hello, Franklin” finds Cash distilling the essence of his composing to its essential qualities and substance, yielding a potent tonic of uncluttered feeling and emotion. The resulting four song EP - written over a long year and recorded in a night - translates the nameless experience of late-pandemic life to solo guitar.


In this intimate audio portrait of such conflicted feelings (isolation and self-mending, anxiety and solace), Cash and engineer/co-producer Eric Whittans treat the guitar as an ensemble all its own. These recordings fixate on the instrument’s dynamic nuance and full expressive potential in a way seldom heard on solo guitar recordings. You are hearing the instrument as Cash himself heard it when carving experience into these melodies and structures. Its closest analogs are perhaps the solo guitar compositions of John Fahey and progenitors and substantiators of the American Primitive style. However, while Cash’s works do well to carry the legacy of the genre’s harmonic and melodic richness and sheer transcendental power, rarely do we see such intensity and jaggedness in the feelings those pieces portray. On “Hello, Franklin,” Cash delivers equal parts despair and elation, fixing teeth to a genre-space defined by drony bliss and whispered meditations.

The beauty of “Dogwood Variations,” named for Austin’s adolescent home, recalls springs and summers of nourishing reconnection. “Grant in the Wilderness,” named after the Battle of the Wilderness in the American civil war, finds Cash in a Nick Drakeian dream state navigating conflict, ambivalence, perseverance, and eventual resolution. “Untitled #3” celebrates a fragile sublime that is temporal rather than timeless, while the loping thorniness of “Franklin, King of Beers,” conjures the mood swings of a late night in a quiet living room searching for answers that aren’t there.

Across his releases, Austin Cash leads listeners on journeys through unmarked terrain. The rocky, mossy paths and grand views of his native Arkansas find their sonic match in these songs. This is not folk music, per se, nor is it precisely americana or country. It is music of its place and time, of these hills and the depth they contain. When you hear these songs, you hear an honest portrait of an unresolved, timeless environment and the lives it yields. Cash is a translator of such lives, and he uses his compositions to tell the stories.

Austin Cash is a guitarist and composer in Chicago, IL.

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