Son Volt – Anatomy of an interview
Jay Farrar has a pair of canary yellow patent leather Hush Puppies. “Them’s my gardening shoes,” he mumbles, as we pass through the breezeway on our way to play darts in the den. He seems oddly detached about the shoes, especially in light of the way their visual presence dominates the breezeway, a dim passage framed in pale aluminum screens and gray cement paint. He does pause, however, to point out his prize-winning beet. He hefts the beet, and for just the fraction of an instant, I see something deeper, a flicker of repressed joy, a wink from the Sphinx. I scribble a note about the beet, and resolve to return later and weigh it. When I look up, Farrar is gone, the beet abandoned.
The result? Nothing less than classic Socratic irony: “Behold your behind-the-scene tidbits. Does their specious nature render them any less interesting? Do they make Wide Swing Tremolo any more interesting?”
But when the perspicacious editors of this publication pointed out that Socratic irony might be distributed via press clippings and misinterpreted as fact by journalists who weren’t paying close enough attention, I had visions of Son Volt being greeted at each gig with a fusillade of canned beets, a bruised Farrar finally forced to cancel the tour, hunt me down, and beat me senseless with a clunky yellow shoe.
I decided I’d just come up with some questions for the man.
The interview is initiated with those topics that are the least threatening to the patient and easiest to discuss.
— Jane Steinman Kaufman,
Medical-Surgical Nursing (Second Edition)
NO DEPRESSION: You’ve said that you thought of Trace and Straightaways as companion pieces. Does Wide Swing Tremolo fit within that context?
JAY FARRAR: I don’t think of it as a trilogy or anything like that. A lot of the songs were written for the previous two recordings during periods where we were on the road a lot. This one, most of the songs were either written in a period off the road, or written in periods of time where we were in the studio, because we spent more time in the studio this time than we had in the past. We spent eight weeks this time. The other [albums] were about half that. The songs on the previous recordings were written on the road; these songs were written in a period when the band was not on the road.
ND: Did that have an effect?
JF: Yeah, I think so. I think with the previous recordings, there was a tendency to kind of write songs that would translate well to the live setting. On the one hand, that was exactly what I wanted to do with Straightaways, but I guess with this one, there were instances of writing songs from having picked up an instrument that was lying around, like a dulcimer or starting off writing a song on electric piano, which I hadn’t done before.
ND: What impact did the new studio have? [Wide Swing Tremolo was recorded in Son Volt’s warehouse rehearsal space near St. Louis.]
JF: It’s a different environment. I think it’s an environment that’s hard to beat as far as just being comfortable and finding inspiration, because it’s an environment where you’re used to finding inspiration during rehearsals.
ND: Is it easier to capture, since you’re right there?
JF: I think so, yeah. I was more concerned about trying to get good performance this time around than being worried about any kind of sonic purity.
ND: I read the article in Musician magazine [September 1998 issue] that detailed the studio, right down to the model numbers of the cymbals hanging on the wall. What does that kind of article tell people?
JF: [laughs, pauses] Ahhh…[deep breath] I really don’t know. I think the guy just had fun putting little numbers on the dots.