Faces/Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood once said the blues is “part of the makeup of modern music. You can’t turn your back on the blues.”
And so it goes with Jay Farrar, whose group, Son Volt, recently released Notes of Blue, a collection of originals very much indebted and influenced by this most American of genres. It’s an interest Farrar says grew out of a desire to work on guitar-playing technique and a yearning to plug in again.
“For a couple of years, I wanted to concentrate on more fingerpicking style guitar. In this case, it meant that was learning the tunings of Nick Drake, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Skip James,” he explains in a recent phone interview. “That was a common thread with all of those performers. When I was learning all of their tunings, it was kind of like learning a new instrument. So that opens creative doors to challenge yourself. The other thing that I wanted to focus on was playing more electric guitar. It’s been a while since I’ve played solos on our recordings, so this time around I did more electric guitar and brought out an old amplifier that’s pictured on the first album, Trace. I brought that amp out again to commemorate 20 years.”
On the 10 songs on Notes of Blue, Farrar continues to mine the somber and ethereal timbre that’s resonated throughout his band’s canon to great effect. His touch ranges from the light and delicate picking and melancholy slide guitar of “The Storm,” to the floating-through-the-ether feel of “Cairo and Southern,” to dropping a hammer of distorted riffing on the sledgehammer delivery of “Static” and the grinding shuffle that is “Sinking Down.”
Not unlike fellow insurgent country visionary Steve Earle, who doled out his fair share of the blues on his mesmerizing 2015 outing Terraplane, Farrar’s path to the blues didn’t necessarily come straight from genre icons like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon. While Earle’s early touchstones came through the psychedelicized prism of Johnny Winter and Canned Heat, Farrar’s springboard went through the British Invasion and classic rock.
“My first exposure to the blues would have been through The Yardbirds and The Rolling Stones, before I was old enough to go out to the clubs,” he recalls. “Even though I was learning those tunings [associated with] Mississippi Fred McDowell and Skip James [for this album], it filtered through my other experiences of listening to Tom Petty and ZZ Top on the radio. Ultimately, that’s where the arrow landed [for Notes of Blues].”
That collision of blues and folk (and a good bit of punk rock) first surfaced when Farrar teamed up in 1987 with Jeff Tweedy in the band Uncle Tupelo. That group helped shape today’s Americana genre over the course of four albums before the two songwriters split, with Farrar forming the original edition of Son Volt and Tweedy moving on to start Wilco.
Over the course of eight studio albums, Farrar has piloted Son Volt through several different lineups, but retained the group’s distinctive sound. The musicians behind Notes of Blue are singer/guitarist Farrar, keyboardist/bassist Mark Spencer, drummer Jacob Edwards, pedal steel player Jason Kardong and fiddle player Gary Hunt.
With Son Volt just past the two-decade mark, Farrar has a deep well of music to draw from for the band’s live shows. Although a chunk of material for this tour is drawn from his newest release, the Illinois native is trying to include songs from every stop of Son Volt’s journey. He’ll even weave in some solo material (Farrar has released four solo albums between Son Volt’s activities and other side projects) and reach back to Uncle Tupelo’s catalog in Son Volt’s live sets this spring and summer.
“The set list is comprised of pretty much a song off every recording,” Farrar says. “I try to pick songs from throughout the catalog to represent those different time periods. I think the set that we’re going to be doing for this upcoming tour, there will be several Uncle Tupelo songs. I tried to pick ones that still have relevance to me. It’s not easy going back and confronting your 21- or 22-year-old self and identifying what was going on then. I’m finding some songs to take out on this tour.”
On the Bill: Son Volt at Oskar Blues Burning Can Festival. 8:30 p.m. Saturday, June 2, Bohn Park,199 Second Ave., Lyons, oskarblues.com/event/burning-can-colorado/
Burning Can Beer Fest tickets are $45, VIP tickets are $65. General admission tickets to the Lyons Outdoor Games and concert are $10 for adults, $5 for kids (ages 5-12).
