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CHICAGO
TRIBUNE
ST. LOUIS -- In a career that spans two revered bands (Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt) and countless concerts across North America and Europe, Jay Farrar remains as reliable as the sunrise. His approach is less about innovation than it is immersion; why go searching for new sounds when the one you've already got is so full of possibilities? With each album, he aims to go deeper, not wider. Farrar's voice doesn't so much snatch notes as swoop over and under to envelop them, a drone crying to be a croon, a sound that's not so much 2003 as 1943. His sparse music resonates with reverberating strings, desolate open-tuned guitars and plaintive understatement that wouldn't have sounded out of place on an old Folkways record or an Alan Lomax field recording. On his latest album, "Terroir Blues," he meditates on what's been lost: the ancient Indian burial grounds only a few miles from his recording studio in this city's Dogtown neighborhood; and his father, folk-artist Jim "Pops" Farrar, who died in 2002. In the hymn-like "No Rolling Back," Jay Farrar pleads, "Deliver us now, from this 21st Century blood." Farrar is indeed a student of the past, well versed in his city's architecture and classic literature. The stacks of old 78-rpm platters--Guitar Slim's "The Story of My Life," Joe Turner's "Honey Hush," Gatemouth Brown's "It Can Never Be That Way"--and a Magnavox hi-fi in his recording studio affirm that it's more than just a phase. "The past is uplifting," he says with a smile. Farrar is a man of well-chosen words, the fewer the better. His old Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt bandmate, Mike Heidorn, once said of him: "If he ain't singin' it, he ain't sayin' it." Married and the father of two preschool-age daughters, Farrar has always preferred an insular life and intimate music. Even when those Uncle Tupelo guitars were cranked to Dinosuar Jr.-like levels, the voice and the lyrics were a minor-key ballad unto themselves. Now with "Terroir Blues," Farrar sounds more alone than ever--and he wouldn't have it any other way. After a series of recordings for a variety of major labels, the singer has cut all ties with the corporate-rock world, and is putting out the album through his own Act/Resist imprint. "It's a big step financially and personally, because of the time involved in running your own thing, but ultimately I think it creatively will allow me to do what I want, when I want, which is the most important thing," he says. "A lot of things can go wrong when you're dealing with a major label--a lot of investors expect you to produce for them. This just wipes that whole situation away. I don't even think about how much will it sell in comparison to the last one. Freedom is the point. It's like starting fresh." Besides recording the album in his own studio, with various guest musicians contributing sitar, lap slide, pedal steel, piano and drums, he indulges in a bit of sonic experimentation: "space junk" interludes consisting of snippets and shards of backward tapes and synthesizer emissions that link the songs. It's a relatively new direction for Farrar, this fusion of ancient folk and otherworldly atmosphere. Recent recordings--"Sebastopol," "ThirdShiftGrottoSlack," "The Slaughter Rules" soundtrack--find Farrar dabbling in this new terrain with mixed results. A collaborator with a deeper knowledge of these mix-and-match intricacies might have smoothed the transition, but Farrar sounds like a man weary of even talking about producers: "My label would always ask me to consider working with this producer or that producer, which ultimately drove me in the direction that I didn't want to work with any producer." Any producer? Farrar just laughs, a man happiest when he's left to tinker on his own or with a few friends. "Terroir Blues" makes the most of that solitude, exploiting what Farrar has done the best over the longest period of time: Create more out of less. The melodies sound like they've been around forever, and Farrar's voice nearly as long, on the darkly beautiful "Heart on the Ground" and its impossibly sparse, unbearably open companion, "Heart on the Ground II"; amid the moonscape pedal-steel inflections of "All of Your Might": and delivering the 3 a.m. hymn to a father's legacy that is "Dent County." Farrar has long-term ties to the Midwest and St. Louis: He was born in nearby Belleville, Ill., in 1966; started playing guitar in bands with his older brothers when he was 11; formed Uncle Tupelo with his high school friends Jeff Tweedy and Mike Heidorn in 1987 and married his high-school sweetheart in 1996. Now he's created his own one-man music industry there. It's no accident that the French word "terroir" translates as soil; Farrar's roots run deep in this land by the Mississippi. "It's funny, on that first Uncle Tupelo album we were singing about getting out," he says. "But even after all these years of driving and touring, I haven't gone far." |
