Jay Farrar interview
Jay Farrar has made a career out of embracing the sounds of the past — particularly those of country music — and ushering them gently into the present, with the hope that he’s still honoring a musical form that Nashville may have long dispensed of.
Farrar has been a mainstay in the realm of alt country for two decades now — in fact, many agree that it was his band Uncle Tupelo that pretty much invented the genre. Alongside songwriting partner Jeff Tweedy — who has now achieved fame through his band Wilco — he helped forge a sound that has become familiar to all our ears.
Since splitting from Uncle Tupelo in 1994, Farrar has helmed Son Volt, a band that continues to give Farrar an outlet for his musical obsessions and whimsies. Farrar has also released several solo albums and at least one side project, Gob Iron, which updated blues songs about death. The thread through Farrar’s work has been a desire not to replicate the sounds that he came to love, but to translate the songs to a modern audience, giving them a new context and appreciation while still honoring the original form and keeping it as genuine as he can. He came to praise country, not to bury it.
JM: Your last CD is a little different for you guys — the horns being an obvious one, and it seemed as though you experimented with different sounds more than usual.
JF: I guess the approach was a little bit different from the previous record, which was a getting back to the fundamentals record — electric guitar, bass, drums, that aesthetic — and this was a reaction to that, trying out horns. It’s something that I always really wanted to try but never really had the opportunity, the time it came about, I probably got the spark to try it from the Rolling Stones. There were also a couple more songs written on piano for “The Search,” and that added a different element to it.
JM: Were these things that you had wanted to do for a long time, or was it the result of a group desire?
JF: In terms of the songs, in the case of “The Picture” and the horns, that was something I wanted to try. I think if you take a song like “Circadian Rhythm” there’s a backward guitar loop in it that the song is structured around.
JM: Gob Iron was a lot more traditional, a lot of blues stuff on it.
JF: The foundation of Gob Iron was based on acknowledging traditional music and we did add more of a contemporary approach to playing — Anders Parker and I both grew up playing in rock bands, so we had that approach to traditional music.
JM: You mix up it up in regard to where you’re pulling from, but stylistically you have this central sound that unites it all. What’s your process in taking all these traditional elements through your own filter?
JF: As far as the writing and the eventual manifestation of that, which is the recorded part on the record, I was thinking about that earlier today because people usually ask what I’m listening to. When I take the iPod around, I usually put it on shuffle and it’s much more of a mixture of things, I really don’t listen to any one thing. Perhaps that is why different styles pop up in the end result.
JM: Is your musical brain kind of like an iPod shuffle?
JF: It’s becoming increasingly like that.
JM: I get the sense that you’re well rounded in your musical taste anyhow.
JF: I don’t know about that, but I try to keep abreast. I’m not as tuned in as other people who know what’s out there, but there’s so much previously released stuff going way back that I still find inspirational and I always try to keep an ear to that as much as possible.
JM: Is that the stuff you still dive into, older stuff?
JF: Yeah. My iPod has Muddy Waters, Shankar, Big Star, it’s the unexpected coming out.
JM: When you sit down to write, do you think in genre terms?
JF: Increasingly it’s become more like that, but in the past I would usually think about it in terms of where I wanted the song to go, I usually try to let the writing happen as naturally and free form as possible, finally getting to the point where all the structure is there. Sometimes you really don’t know and you try the song a lot of different ways — drastically different tempos or instrumentation. That’s why it’s good not to think as you’re writing that it has to be a certain way.
JM: Do lyrics sometimes feel a style?
JF: They can, but I think from my perspective more often than not, it’s the music that comes first and the music determines which direction it goes in.
JM: Are there certain topics you like to match up with specific styles? Or do you like to mess with subject matter and expected stylistic choices?
JF: One example, the Gob Iron record, we were using some traditional lyrics and putting them to different music — we didn’t go in with a preconceived plan. We had all this stuff to record and a lot of the songs were about death, which is where the title came from. From my perspective, death songs probably work best as folk music. I’m not really into death metal.
JM: When you started out in Uncle Tupelo, it was alt country, at least that’s what they call it now.
JF: When I started out, that terminology didn’t exist.
JM: Did you consider it alt country by the end — or did you ever really care?
JF: I’m reluctant to freely associate the music with labels, but certainly in the interest of talking about it, that’s one of the most common labels thrown around out there.
JM: It doesn’t seem as though Son Volt followed the expected path — it’s not strictly alt country in the sense the term is usually applied.
JF: I think the awareness of there that terms like “alternative country” were fairly reductive and placed you in a box, but like I said before, that terminology came along much later. The idea of what I wanted to do musically was already formed way before. I was drawing inspiration from various forms of music — folk, country, punk rock, whatever. I hope to keep the list open.
JM: At the beginning of Uncle Tupelo, who would you say your influences were, and by the end, how would you say they changed?
JF: I was heavily into the Ramones and the Clash at the time, I was getting into the music of my parents — Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie. I was just trying to determine parallels between all those various things. There was an awareness, maybe not at first, but at some point it sort of clicked that Hank Williams was as important as the Sex Pistols.
JM: Can you remember any moment where you first thought that country music was cool?
JF: There was such a stigma attached to it, perhaps there still is. Most people of a similar age to me, their first impression of country music was “Hee Haw” or something like that. It was a corn pone association, which, in my estimation, was a negative thing. It took a while to really see the true ethos and passion of country music. I grew up around it, my father played music around the house and sing songs, so I kept hearing it at an early age.
I think there was always a mild acknowledgment of it as a teenager, I’d play songs like “Act Naturally” by the Beatles when I was 12 or something like that. I was getting it through the Beatles and that made it okay. I eventually realized that Buck Owens was the source.
JM: Which is funny, because he was on “Hee Haw.” Did you make that connection at the time?
JF: That’s probably why I stayed away from Buck for a long time, I didn’t think it was worth looking into and then I discovered that he probably made one of the biggest contributions to country music and also left a detrimental impact. It was kind of a mixed bag, but ultimately he really contributed some real stuff.
JM: Did you ever want to do the music in a pure way, or did you always try to interpret it for people who might not get into it otherwise?
JF: I don’t think there was ever really any serious thought that we could do it pure. Interpreting it was always the best way, I don’t think, especially early on, we weren’t as advanced, our abilities were more rock. We didn’t know people who played pedal steel guitar.
JM: Do you have a sense of if your Son Volt work and solo work hits any country fans?
JF: I guess it does to some degree, but probably not on a very high profile level. I’m not on CMT or anything, but people find out about it.
JM: Because there is an aspect in which the new country sound might make ears more attuned to what you do at this point — they’ve incorporated more mainstream rock and pop sounds and you have a hybrid thing going on.
JF: I don’t really pay attention to Nashville, but I guess I see what you’re saying in a sense. I have been surprised by things I’ve casually heard on TV and in the background. For the most part, you don’t hear too much pedal steel guitar in country music anymore.
JM: Do you think that it’s the traditional culture of country music — the type of thing that initially turned you off of it through things like “Hee Haw” — that is possibly more important to the audience than the sound and that’s the difference between popular country and alt country?
JF: I suppose it depends on what time period we’re talking about. The definition of country of music has changed to the point where it’s really a sort of pop-rock now, but it still can be inclusive of the traditional, which gets introduced more as an anomaly, a weird nostalgic look back. The “Hee Haw” element, I guess, has survived.
JM: And that element has sort of transformed into a hyper patriotism. What things concern you lyrically in that realm?
JF: I guess I’m a news junkie and some of that finds its way into the writing, but I’m much more apolitical when there’s no need to think about it, which seems like it will be very possible very soon.
JM: What direction do you see you or the band heading in? With the last record, you tried some new things, is there any part of the experimentation that stuck, that you’d like to pursue further?
JF: I’m in a period right now where I’m doing writing and I’ve been listening to a lot of country music, more than the horn-based sound, so maybe that’s where it’s headed. It’s hard to predict when you’re in the writing process, but that’s where the inspiration’s coming from right now, traditional country.
JM: And you never know what’s going to come up on the iPod.
JF: Right. Reggae.
JM: Would you do a reggae album?
JF: You know, I used to joke about it, but I listen to more and more over the years, especially the dub music of the 70s. I’m quite interested in that music.
JM: Well, I’ll keep an eye out for that one.
JF: All right!
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