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Jay
Farrar gets familiar Musicians and morning rush-hour traffic do not go well together. About a year ago, Jay Farrar, late of Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt and now a solo artist, decided to move his recording studio, Jajouka, from its former location in Millstadt to Dogtown, in part to avoid clashes with conventional commuters. "When I was recording 'Sebastopol' (his 2001 album), the hours I was keeping were pretty rough," says Farrar, who lives in south St. Louis. "I started at like 10 p.m. and got out anywhere from 3 to 5 a.m. I don't know if you've ever been up all night and encountered rush-hour traffic, but it's something I don't want to experience ever again when I'm fatigued." Farrar may be a little extra tired these days from having a new baby in the house, his second child. Still, he says, being a dad doesn't really affect his ability to make music. "It makes you kind of restructure things," he says. "A lot of times when I was writing songs for this new record, I was getting up at 5 in the morning, before the kids got up, just so I'd have some time. You just learn how to make it work." Apparently, he has. On Tuesday, Farrar will release "Terroir Blues," his second solo album and first on his own Act/Resist label. The night before, Farrar will preview some of the songs from the disc in a special show at Blueberry Hill's Duck Room. A tour with a full band will kick off later this summer. "Terroir" is not a misspelling of "terror" but rather a term that Farrar ran across while reading an article on wine in The Atlantic Monthly. It's a French word that refers to the soil, climate, culture - everything that gives a distinct personality to the grapes being grown on a certain plot of land. "It just struck me as an interesting word, plus the fact that there was no direct English word it translated into," Farrar says. "I thought it would work as a title." Indeed it does, because Farrar's work also has its own terroir, dealing more and more with people, places and events of this region. As far back as Uncle Tupelo, he was writing about his hometown of Belleville and its environs. In more recent times, he's colored his work with references to Ste. Genevieve, Times Beach and other familiar locales. On "Terroir Blues," that trend continues with "Dent County," a touching tribute to his late father, "Pops" Farrar, who was a familiar character on the local scene and a musician in his own right. There's also "Cahokian," a thoughtful meditation on the area's ancient earthen burial mounds - remarkable structures that speak to our self-destructing society, though we're more inclined to simply take them for granted. "There used to be a Grandpa's store right there, right in the middle of all those mounds when I was a kid," Farrar says. "I'd go there to look at Harmony guitars and stuff they'd have for sale, and you'd look out, and there are the mounds. There was this odd juxtaposition of the parking lot, the mounds and people's backyards. It seemed strange to me then, and it still does now." "Terroir Blues" is rather sparsely produced, in part as a reaction against the more textured, fleshed-out sound of "Sebastopol." That album featured more keyboards and overdubbed instruments, whereas the new one - which includes performances by a core band of Mark Spencer (ex-Blood Oranges), Jon Wurster (Superchunk) and John Horton (Rockhouse Ramblers, Mike Ireland & Holler) - goes for a live-in-the-studio feel. Fans may get whiplash as Farrar jumps from one style of recording to another, but he finds trying different methods is the best way to keep a fresh perspective on his work. "You sort of learn from the people you're influenced by," he says. "Like Neil Young and Bob Dylan. One of their strengths is that they're always changing things up." In that regard, the new album offers a handful of brief instrumentals - backwards noise loops, really - that Farrar dubbed "Space Junk." Those tracks are not mere filler, but rather a subtle tribute to his dad. "I was writing songs during the last few months of his life, so it was kind of an emotional roller coaster," he says. "I turned to working with some of the backwards sounds as a way to escape the weight of what was going on." Beyond that, four of the songs - "No Rolling Back," "Hard Is the Fall," "Hanging on to You" and "Heart on the Ground" - are presented in two separate versions, one acoustic and the other electric. "For the last couple of records, I've been trying different instrumentation on a song," he says. "This time I decided to throw a couple of the extra tracks on there. I was listening to a Flaming Lips record that I liked where it threw in some alternate mixes. It's the kind of situation where those versions would likely wind up on a B-side or get put on the Web site. But it's not always easy for people to track those things down." Not when they have to deal with their kids and fight the morning commute, anyway. Jay Farrar has been there, folks, and he's felt your pain. |