11/22/2023 0 Comments Son volt new albumWhen news of Berry's death came, the band was playing St. It's almost impossible to play a guitar solo without at some point going into Chuck's style of soloing.” “Chuck was such a major influence on pretty much everybody. He had an interest in going out and seeing punk bands for a while. “So I was able to catch him there a couple of times … and then I once saw him at a Husker Du show in the 1980s. “I think starting in the mid-1980s he did monthly shows at Blueberry Hill. Louis music, Farrar said, and in some surprising places. That tune started more in the English folk style, he said, “but it seemed to me it should be more amped up and it became more uptempo and became the song that it is.” “With darkness on your doorstep,” it advises, “keep your feet on the ground.”Īnother artist who came out of that nexus of country and blues - and then, by some estimations, invented rock 'n' roll - was Berry, who died March 18. It's intended to be a rally song to take on adversity, kind of a shield of sorts for challenges that may come up.” ![]() Farrar said the second tune, “Back Against the Wall,” “comes from the same place as a song like ‘Windfall' on the first Son Volt record. Rays of light shine through, though, as well. But most of the rest of the record features a grinding, fuzzy guitar as it explores classic blues themes of hard living and hopes of redemption: “I'll drink shine in Cairo,” “must atone for the women and wine,” “it's always midnight way down in hell.” He described the opening tune, the folk-tinged “Promise the World” as kind of “a bridge” back to the rest of his catalog and being most directly influenced by Drake, the British singer-songwriter. The one common thread in all those guys is that I always viewed them as having a certain mystique attached to those tunings … and they all used a lot of fingerpicking style.” And then there was another guy thrown into the mix, Nick Drake, someone I've been a fan of for years. Hank Williams, in particular, Jimmie Rodgers, they essentially embraced blues, and in the case of Hank Williams, he was taught to play guitar by a blues musician.”īeyond picking up the electric guitar in the studio again, Farrar said he was inspired by a desire “from more of a student perspective, to learn the tunings of a couple of old blues icons and heroes, Fred McDowell and Skip James. The blues were really a foundation of early country music. “So entirely comfortable with it? Perhaps it could be a better description there, but you have to kind of roll with it at some point. The catalyst, the focus, was more on blues, but I was really aiming for where folk and blues and country converge, in terms of what I felt like this record should sound like. When told that the new record, “Notes of Blue,” was classified under “country” when ripped to a digital format, Farrar said that was fine “for the most part. Louisan, and, yes, to his apparently improving relationship with Jeff Tweedy, the Wilco frontman and Farrar's former partner in the seminal alt-country band Uncle Tupelo. But for all the specificity in his writing, he has a reputation as being a tough interview.Īnd while you wouldn't call him exactly expansive, the now 50-year-old was engaging on subjects ranging from that new record to the late, great Chuck Berry, another St. ![]() ![]() ![]() I pulled that out, and I felt like that amplifier had the right aesthetic for these songs.”įarrar's songs, through decades of band and solo work, have chronicled the many shades of American melancholy, in riveting detail and in a voice that sounds like the steel guitar that so frequently backs it. And to kind of mark that 20-year Son Volt milestone I pulled out the old amplifier that I used on the very first Son Volt record, ‘Trace.' The amplifier is photographed on that cover. “I really had not played electric guitar on the last few Son Volt recordings,” Jay Farrar, the band's frontman, said from his home in St. The story of Son Volt's new album, which the band will feature in a sold-out Thalia Hall show Saturday, is the story, more or less, of the aged amplifier memorialized on a Son Volt album cover, some old bluesmen and their distinctive guitar tunings and, oh yeah, Nick Drake.
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