Older Jay article
Thanks for the advice guys.
I came to Jay through Son Volt, but that has nothing to do with my love of UT. I think they're great. It's just that I'm always wary of bands that rerelease albums with a couple of extra tracks. Eg. there's a few R.E.M. albums that were rereleased with a few extra tracks that cost twice as much or so as the originals, and that seem to be packaged more like collector's albums than actual listener-albums. Also there's just something weird about buying the same album twice, even if the second one has a few extras. Anyway, it sounds like the UT rereleases are a sound investment, pun intended. It'll be nice to get on board.
I came to Jay through Son Volt, but that has nothing to do with my love of UT. I think they're great. It's just that I'm always wary of bands that rerelease albums with a couple of extra tracks. Eg. there's a few R.E.M. albums that were rereleased with a few extra tracks that cost twice as much or so as the originals, and that seem to be packaged more like collector's albums than actual listener-albums. Also there's just something weird about buying the same album twice, even if the second one has a few extras. Anyway, it sounds like the UT rereleases are a sound investment, pun intended. It'll be nice to get on board.
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Lawrence Fan
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I came to Jay through UT back in the day, although there was long layoff in between. Anyway, I've been finding it hard to relate to people who came to Jay via some other route. I mean, your question alone kinda boggles my mind. Hell Yeah they're worth buying!Trellis wrote:Thanks bourbon. I really like this one.
Does everyone here agree that the new UT discs are worth buying?
Of course, intellectully I've come to grips with the fact that a lot of people heard Jay first and UT second, or heard UT first but still prefer SV or Jay solo.
So, the short answer, imo, is definitely yes. Just my $0.02.
-gk-
PS Great read on that article, thanks for posting it Bourbon
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saratoga jay
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bentonbourbon
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Older Jay article
"I primarily grew up being influenced by and listening to The Beatles. I was influenced more by them than country music. When people ask me to describe music that I'm doing, I'm always tempted to say 'alternative Beatles.' [It] makes more sense than 'alternative country.'"
--Jay Farrar
The first time I ever met Jay Farrar in person, during a photo shoot for a story on Uncle Tupelo's brilliant folk outing March 16-20, 1992, it was as awkward and silence-laden as the phone interview I did with him the previous week. Hung over, not at all interested in having his picture taken, Farrar's approach to the trappings of the music industry seemed to be "just let the music do the talking." Aggressively so.
A full decade later, Farrar is a solo artist with his own label (Act/Resist Records), a website with live and studio shots of him and his touring band, and much more at ease talking about his career. He stills refers most questions back to the music -- it's certainly the place he's most confident in expressing himself -- but the experiences he has gained during the past 10 years (the demise of two bands, a stretch of time in the major label world, becoming a father, the recent passing of his dad) has perhaps made Jay Farrar less protective and more comfortable separating himself from the music he makes.
Farrar's most recent solo joint, Terroir Blues (Artemis), is the most experimental record he has made to date. 2001's criminally under-heralded Sebastopol (Artemis) was the songwriter's first solo effort, a richly layered and thickly textured slice of rock and blues, and it pointed the way for Terroir Blues' more sonically dense songs (including a six-song cycle of experimental tracks, titled "Space Junk," that pepper the album).
"I had been accumulating more studio gear about the time of the last Son Volt record," says Farrar. "You reach a point where you just find inspiration in different areas, different instrumentation, different music. With Sebastapol, I was going for more of a studio-oriented, layered sound on a lot of the songs. With Terroir Blues, the basic approach was to try to get more of a live feel on a majority of the songs. The backward instrumentals obviously weren't live, but I wanted them on the record to try to make it more fluid."
Both solo records make good on that inspiration. And the desire to stretch out this way was part of the reason Farrar called it quits with Son Volt.
"We just reached a point with Son Volt where we settled into a groove, and it was hard to get out of that. I felt like I wanted to try different instrumentation, and I guess I didn't want Son Volt to disintegrate in a bad way. I wanted to end it and move on. Hopefully," adds Farrar, "at some point we could get back [to] it."
It was an ending of a very different nature that informed most of the music on Terroir Blues: Farrar's father was fighting a losing battle against cancer (described by Farrar as similar to what felled Warren Zevon).
"I was writing a lot of the songs during the last couple of months of his life," says Farrar. "It kind of made me more reflective on my life with my father, and reflecting back on his life. Some of the songs do elude to aspects of his life. I turned to the instrumental backward stuff [the 'Space Junk' series] as a way to get away from the reflective. It was a non-verbal way.
"I felt like I was close to my dad," he continues. "He and my mom were real willing to share whatever musical knowledge they had. He had a real strong conviction about teaching other folks, whether it was his own children or the people in the neighborhood. I can remember many times throughout my life him asking if I had been practicing, had I learned that Hank Williams song yet," he laughs. "I found it inspirational the last year and a half of his life . . . it was somewhat similar to Warren Zevon's situation. My dad sort of had a second lease on life, and he took advantage of it. He started learning a lot of songs, playing shows, the same kind of stuff I was doing when I was 17. He played a show about a month before he died."
During that time of transition, Farrar became a father for the second time ("I haven't really gone the children's song route -- I pretty much just play regular Woody Guthrie songs to my kids"), and decided to take his music career into his own hands by starting a label, Act/Resist. "I figured at this point it was the best way to do it," Farrar explains. "Over the years I've seen people being treated poorly by record labels. Having to wait to put records out, being dropped, sometimes the label goes out of business. The way to ensure that I have an outlet for what I'm doing is to start a label. It's really not that much different. You're either dealing with the label and that dynamic, or you're doing it for your own label. Overall, you're still involved."
Reissue label Sony/Legacy finished releasing remastered versions of Uncle Tupelo's four albums earlier this year. While each disc benefits from the cleaned-up sound, the bonus tracks included on each make the series worth shelling out money for -- whether you're a longtime fan or a newcomer to the band's legacy. (Tip: start with the debut, No Depression, and third album March 16-20, 1992 and fill in the rest later.) What makes these reissues legit is that the original Uncle Tupelo trio approved all the material.
"The way it worked," Farrar describes, "was the guys from Legacy did a lot of the legwork of tracking down the master tapes and plowed through them and found songs that weren't released that might make it on a reissue. They sent out compilations to all of us in the band and we gave our feedback. I was glad to see it come out. I think adding some of the unreleased original songs as well as some of the covers presented a broader perspective of what the band was all about."
Back to present day: For the first time on Terroir Blues, Farrar has included the song lyrics in the CD insert, something fans must certainly appreciate.
"That was kind of an about face," Farrar admits. "In the past I always felt that they shouldn't really stand alone. They would sort of be interpreted as poetry, which they're not. Occasionally you'd get real interesting misinterpretations. I finally just came to the recognition that people might want to know what the heck it is I'm singing about."
Fans have been thinking about what Jay Farrar is singing for nearly 15 years, misinterpretation or not. And as he continues to push deeper into the traditions and eccentricities of American music, you can bet that what he sings about is worth hearing.
-- Michael Harris
--Jay Farrar
The first time I ever met Jay Farrar in person, during a photo shoot for a story on Uncle Tupelo's brilliant folk outing March 16-20, 1992, it was as awkward and silence-laden as the phone interview I did with him the previous week. Hung over, not at all interested in having his picture taken, Farrar's approach to the trappings of the music industry seemed to be "just let the music do the talking." Aggressively so.
A full decade later, Farrar is a solo artist with his own label (Act/Resist Records), a website with live and studio shots of him and his touring band, and much more at ease talking about his career. He stills refers most questions back to the music -- it's certainly the place he's most confident in expressing himself -- but the experiences he has gained during the past 10 years (the demise of two bands, a stretch of time in the major label world, becoming a father, the recent passing of his dad) has perhaps made Jay Farrar less protective and more comfortable separating himself from the music he makes.
Farrar's most recent solo joint, Terroir Blues (Artemis), is the most experimental record he has made to date. 2001's criminally under-heralded Sebastopol (Artemis) was the songwriter's first solo effort, a richly layered and thickly textured slice of rock and blues, and it pointed the way for Terroir Blues' more sonically dense songs (including a six-song cycle of experimental tracks, titled "Space Junk," that pepper the album).
"I had been accumulating more studio gear about the time of the last Son Volt record," says Farrar. "You reach a point where you just find inspiration in different areas, different instrumentation, different music. With Sebastapol, I was going for more of a studio-oriented, layered sound on a lot of the songs. With Terroir Blues, the basic approach was to try to get more of a live feel on a majority of the songs. The backward instrumentals obviously weren't live, but I wanted them on the record to try to make it more fluid."
Both solo records make good on that inspiration. And the desire to stretch out this way was part of the reason Farrar called it quits with Son Volt.
"We just reached a point with Son Volt where we settled into a groove, and it was hard to get out of that. I felt like I wanted to try different instrumentation, and I guess I didn't want Son Volt to disintegrate in a bad way. I wanted to end it and move on. Hopefully," adds Farrar, "at some point we could get back [to] it."
It was an ending of a very different nature that informed most of the music on Terroir Blues: Farrar's father was fighting a losing battle against cancer (described by Farrar as similar to what felled Warren Zevon).
"I was writing a lot of the songs during the last couple of months of his life," says Farrar. "It kind of made me more reflective on my life with my father, and reflecting back on his life. Some of the songs do elude to aspects of his life. I turned to the instrumental backward stuff [the 'Space Junk' series] as a way to get away from the reflective. It was a non-verbal way.
"I felt like I was close to my dad," he continues. "He and my mom were real willing to share whatever musical knowledge they had. He had a real strong conviction about teaching other folks, whether it was his own children or the people in the neighborhood. I can remember many times throughout my life him asking if I had been practicing, had I learned that Hank Williams song yet," he laughs. "I found it inspirational the last year and a half of his life . . . it was somewhat similar to Warren Zevon's situation. My dad sort of had a second lease on life, and he took advantage of it. He started learning a lot of songs, playing shows, the same kind of stuff I was doing when I was 17. He played a show about a month before he died."
During that time of transition, Farrar became a father for the second time ("I haven't really gone the children's song route -- I pretty much just play regular Woody Guthrie songs to my kids"), and decided to take his music career into his own hands by starting a label, Act/Resist. "I figured at this point it was the best way to do it," Farrar explains. "Over the years I've seen people being treated poorly by record labels. Having to wait to put records out, being dropped, sometimes the label goes out of business. The way to ensure that I have an outlet for what I'm doing is to start a label. It's really not that much different. You're either dealing with the label and that dynamic, or you're doing it for your own label. Overall, you're still involved."
Reissue label Sony/Legacy finished releasing remastered versions of Uncle Tupelo's four albums earlier this year. While each disc benefits from the cleaned-up sound, the bonus tracks included on each make the series worth shelling out money for -- whether you're a longtime fan or a newcomer to the band's legacy. (Tip: start with the debut, No Depression, and third album March 16-20, 1992 and fill in the rest later.) What makes these reissues legit is that the original Uncle Tupelo trio approved all the material.
"The way it worked," Farrar describes, "was the guys from Legacy did a lot of the legwork of tracking down the master tapes and plowed through them and found songs that weren't released that might make it on a reissue. They sent out compilations to all of us in the band and we gave our feedback. I was glad to see it come out. I think adding some of the unreleased original songs as well as some of the covers presented a broader perspective of what the band was all about."
Back to present day: For the first time on Terroir Blues, Farrar has included the song lyrics in the CD insert, something fans must certainly appreciate.
"That was kind of an about face," Farrar admits. "In the past I always felt that they shouldn't really stand alone. They would sort of be interpreted as poetry, which they're not. Occasionally you'd get real interesting misinterpretations. I finally just came to the recognition that people might want to know what the heck it is I'm singing about."
Fans have been thinking about what Jay Farrar is singing for nearly 15 years, misinterpretation or not. And as he continues to push deeper into the traditions and eccentricities of American music, you can bet that what he sings about is worth hearing.
-- Michael Harris