John Fusco says you know it when you’ve made it. He ought to know. Fusco spent about an hour last week on his 200-acre farmstead off Stagecoach Road in Stowe unspooling the story of his life, from a rebellious teenager with a fierce love for his father’s forbidden Hammond T-200 organ to his current eagle-eyed focus on the X-Road Riders, the band he’s brought together, digging up friends from every chapter in his life.

Fusco, leonine, with a ramrod-straight spine and a cowboy’s bearing, talks like someone with a bit of patina on his soul. He’s built like his house, the outside a New England façade and the inside pure southwestern Americana.