Tag: Jay Farrar

Town Mountain Tap Into the Spirit of Levon Helm for New EP

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Many things contribute to the most memorable recording projects, but according to genre-hopping bluegrass band Town Mountain, there’s nothing quite like working on hallowed ground.

For their new six-song EP, Dance Me Down Easy: The Woodstock Sessions (out January 18), the band had an unexpected chance to record at the upstate New York home/jam space/studio of roots music legend Levon Helm – and they wisely jumped at the chance. Produced by Justin Francis, the equally unexpected set finds Town Mountain tapping the spirit that made Helm and The Band so inspiring, leading to a uniquely funky addition to their catalog.

Built around deep-pocketed, deep-cut covers of tracks by Helm, The Kinks, J.J. Cale, Dire Straits, and The Rolling Stones, Dance Me Down Easy is filled with homespun soul and helps connect the dots between normally separate musical worlds. And as mandolin playing primary songwriter Phil Barker says, it wouldn’t be the same without Helm’s spiritual presence.

“It’ll be tough to top as far as a studio vibe, that’s always a big thing for us is the space we’re recording in,” Barker says. “It’s got to be an inspirational thing, and this place had inspiration for days.”

Speaking with BGS from the band’s hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, Barker did his best to describe a spur-of-the-moment, three-day musical getaway that turned into a bucket-list experience, and gave an already-adventurous band new license to rock.

This seems like the type of project where y’all got to let off some steam and have a little fun. Was it time for a change of pace?

Phil Barker: Well, our label New West was talking to us about recording some cover tunes [to] tie it over to our next record… and we had a show booked at Levon’s Barn, which was our first time playing there. From the other people we’d talked to, we knew this was going to be nothing but vibe and our routing worked out where we had a couple days at the end of the tour. So it was like, “Why don’t we just go back to the barn and hang out there for a few days?” …It was the perfect space to do this. No high pressure situation. It’s just like, “Let’s cut loose and have fun on songs that we enjoy.”

For people who might not know, what does Levon Helm’s barn represent in roots music?

For me, it’s kind of like one of the epicenters of the whole Americana genre. He had such a great way of bridging rock and roll with funk and country and traditional American music. And him as a musician in the bands that he was in, he was such a huge influence on everybody. This place was his spiritual center, where he would come and all the parties he would have there. All the creativity that happened in this space has just kind of generated this buzz within itself, and the word just spreads. Everybody we’d talked to was like, “Oh man, you’re going to love it there.” And we’ve told everybody since then like, “You got to go, man. You got to go there.” So any fan of music and traditional American music in particular, it’s a one of a kind of experience and we’ve always had it on our bucket list to go play. I’m so glad we got to do some recording there as well.

I knew there were jams held there, but I didn’t realize it was a full recording studio as well.

We talked to a lot of folks up there and the story goes that Levon decided he wanted to bring the party to him, he wanted to bring it to his space. So he created this barn literally on the back of his house. If you go through the back wall of the barn performance area, it’s his kitchen. So it’s literally his house and this beautiful property with a nice lake and all these woods. I mean, if you create a space like that and people are already playing music in there, they’re going to want to record. So there’s no fancy infrastructure for recording – it’s just a barn and there’s a couple baffles you can roll around, not isolation booths or anything – but it’s meant for a community kind of performance.

Take me through the first moment of walking in there. What did it feel like?

It’s like being in a church. Everybody just started walking around seeing all the spaces, and you go downstairs and there’s just endless Levon memorabilia on the walls. All these amazing pictures, all these random artifacts you’ll see nowhere else, and you can just feel all the creative energy that has happened in this space and it’s really kind of like buzzing. It was a really moving experience, honestly.

You’ve said that Levon had things figured out, musically? What do you mean by that?

Man, he just knew where the pocket was supposed to be. …It’s like he knew how to connect with the soul of any kind of music, and how it would connect with people.

Is that why you picked the songs you did? They represent a pretty wide swath of rock and roll.

It’s always a challenge to come up with cover tunes and we went through a bunch of ‘em. If it was meant for your band, I feel like you’ll know in the first couple of times you sit down together and play it. …We were open to every genre. Any suggestion was something we would try out if somebody was felt passionately about it. It just so happened that the ones that were working best with us in this particular situation, were more from the rock genre.

Town Mountain as a band has always had a bunch of that influence anyways, right?

Oh, absolutely. We had a Jay Farrar tune on the first record, so it’s always been on something we’ve embraced and not been afraid of.

“Dance Me Down Easy” ended up being the title song – one of Levon’s, but not The Band’s. Why did you pick that and not “Cripple Creek” or “The Weight” or something?

We wanted to pay a little homage to the stuff Levon did outside of The Band. That one’s from one of his killer solo records and something maybe people haven’t done as much. And honestly, it’s just fun to play. It’s like a funky dance tune that we don’t really do. We wanted to highlight that Levon was so much more than The Band, both as a musician and a person. So it was a natural fit.

The Kinks’ track “Strangers” really stood out, too. How did that get in the mix?

That was one of my picks. That song, I’ve just listened to it for years and I’ve always gravitated towards it. I’ll go through these phases where it’ll be on my Spotify mix and I’ll repeat it for literally 10 or 15 times in a row. I can just listen to that song forever because it really resonates with me. I love the writing and I love the feel, it’s really unique and I wanted to give it a little more country-rock vibe.

Did any of them surprise you with how they turned out?

Probably “So Far Away.” When we originally thought about that tune, it’s just like Dire Straits is so iconic and they have this laid-back vibe. It’s such a perfect fit for that tune. But at the same time, the lyrics are so country and we thought it would definitely fit with a pedal steel behind it. We kind of gave it a little bit of a Cajun swing feel.

Is this experience going to stay with you guys? Is the vibe something you’re able to take with you on the road?

That’s a great question. Hopefully we’ll incorporate it into more of the rest of our material, and find a way to tap into that. It’s a very space driven thing, so hopefully we can keep that in mind and let it guide our way in the future.

Photo Credit: David Simchok

WATCH: Son Volt, “Livin’ in the USA”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Son Volt
Hometown: St. Louis, Missouri
Song: “Livin’ in the USA”
Album: Electro Melodier
Release Date: July 30, 2021
Label: Thirty Tigers

In Their Words: “The song didn’t start out as an intentional homage thing, but in retrospect I see it as a nod to Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ or Neil Young’s ‘Rockin in the Free World.’ Those songs established a thematic tradition. I’m just updating and asking similar questions. How can so much wrong happen in this country that’s held up as an example of what’s righteous? Is America the healthiest or happiest country? Democratic Darwinism is the brutal American reality……” — Jay Farrar, Son Volt

Photo credit: Auset Sarno

A Spirit of Activism Informs Son Volt’s New ‘Union’

Posted on by Editor

Jay Farrar took a field trip to make Union, Son Volt’s ninth studio album. Rather than book more sessions at Red Pill Recording Studio in St. Louis — where the long-running alt-country band recorded 2017’s Notes of Blue — he wanted to take his songs out into America and find fresh inspiration. So the band trekked west to Tulsa, where they cut tracks at the Woody Guthrie Center, then road-tripped north to Mt. Olive, Illinois, to record at the Mother Jones Museum.

The spirit of activism embodied by those two figures informs the thirteen songs on Union, an urgent and at times angry account of American life at the close of the 2010s. More naturally than on any other album, Farrar balances the political and the personal, penning songs about how the media-industrial complex profits by dividing the country alongside songs about how his children are growing into adults.

BGS: Why did you want to record at the Woody Guthrie Center and the Mother Jones Museum?

Farrar: I felt like it was a little too comfortable in the studio where I had recorded before. I was writing about topical issues, so I felt like some of the songs needed to be taken out of the studio. I wanted to take them out into the world. I wanted to record them in a more challenging environment, so we went to Tulsa and Mount Olive to remind ourselves of the contributions Mother Jones and Woody Guthrie made, how each in their own way helped get us where we are today. We just felt like we needed to be inspired.

Those are two very different places. How were those experiences different?

The Mother Jones Museum is pretty small. It’s connected to the City Hall, I think. It’s evolved a lot since I was younger. I remember seeing hand-painted signs on the side of Interstate 55 going north. It was like folk art. Over the years it’s evolved, and I guess they got some funding from the city. They’re continuing to grow and build on it. I think she’s buried in the cemetery there as well.

At the Woody Guthrie Center, they have the new Bob Dylan archives, and we were able go by there after the recording. Amazing stuff there — the tambourine that inspired “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Dylan’s address book from ’63 or ’64. He’s got Lenny Bruce in there. Stuff like that. We geeked out for sure. It’s pretty comprehensive, too, because they have everything archived digitally as well as the physical objects. They wouldn’t actually let us touch anything, of course.

That sounds amazing. And, as you said, inspiring.

It was. And we were looking through some of the materials and had a question about one of the videos we were watching. So the curator said, “Wait one minute and I’ll get an answer for you.” He called Bob Dylan’s business office and talked with someone there. He got an answer straight from the source.

How did those places inform the songs on Union?

The songs were ready to go prior to going in. I didn’t write anything there, but with some of the heavy topical subject matter, this batch of songs needed to be taken out of the studio where I recorded Notes of Blue. We needed to be challenged in every way, but maybe I was just looking for a field trip. But I think those two people really did inspire some of the writing, in a roundabout way. Mother Jones and Woody Guthrie really helped shape our society and really stressed the importance of pushing society forward and not backwards.

How much of a conscious decision is it to write topical songs? Do you sit down and think, “I’m going to write a song about the media”?

It goes in cycles for me. I’ve done some topical writing in the past, but this time around it felt like it was my job to take it on. There’s a lot of turmoil in our society right now. I did a lot of the writing in November 2016, right before Notes of Blue was released in the spring of 2017. So I had a few months to put pen to paper and woodshed, and that’s when a lot of these songs came out.

Probably midway through the writing process, I decided I needed some songs that represented a regular rock ethos — essentially, non-topical songs. There needed to be a balance between topical and non-topical songs. I was thinking about the Replacements, who would fall off the stage on the first note of a song. Or The Who. I was thinking about the essence of what a rock band is. “Devil May Care” came from that approach.

Do you find new shades of meaning the more you live with a song, the more you play it night after night after night?

These new songs will probably evolve a bit from rehearsals to when we start the tour. That’s always one aspect of being on the road that I enjoy: reinventing older songs and playing them in new ways, just to keep things interesting. Certain songs just want to evolve, especially if you’re playing them every day in rehearsals and soundchecks. “Windfall” is one that has changed a lot. There’s a CD out there called Artifacts that has a reggae version. We change that one up pretty regularly, and we changed it up again over the holidays. Actually I think we’ve got reggae versions of almost every Son Volt song. But that one in particular is so well-suited to that style that we put it out on a live CD.

Why reggae?

“Windfall” is conducive to reggae. It’s just a couple of chords. But I think from one day to the next you like to stretch out and just try out different kinds of music that you’re not necessarily playing every night. I think some of the guys in the band would probably like to try some experimental jazz-fusion versions of some songs.

Can we expect to hear “Caryatid Easy” done in the style of Bitches Brew?

That’s one song we plan on resurrecting for the tour, so who knows?

Can you talk about “The Reason”? That song seems to suggest that travel and music can be salves in hard times, which makes me think it’s somewhere between topical and non-topical.

That song reminds me of Dylan’s “Forever Young” or Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.” I think it relates to watching your kids become adults, that sort of sentiment. It’s certainly informed by them, to the same degree that those Dylan and Petty songs were informed by their kids. But yeah, in troubled times getting out and traveling is good. You have to find hope wherever you can.

On the other hand, “Union” was inspired by my dad. The chorus goes, “He said national service will keep the union together.” National service is something my dad used to advocate for. Maybe he’s right, I don’t know. There’s a lot of money being made today by media conglomerates hawking divisiveness. It seems like there needs to be a counterbalance somewhere.

You’ve written topical songs in the past, with Uncle Tupelo and on 2005’s Okemah and the Melody of Riot. How different is it to write this kind of song in 2019 than when either of the Bushes were in office?

It’s not the process itself that was different, although I will say I was more focused this time. I had a block of time and was thinking about these issues, so I could be more focused on getting these songs written, maybe more so than I had been in the past. A few topical songs wound up on records in the past, maybe one or two. Okemah had a good amount of them. I guess I’ll keep cranking them out.

Photo credit: David McClister