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.
