Son Volt – Conducting electricity
Given the circumstances, Farrar’s impulse to pursue the spontaneity of a live, minimally overdubbed recording could well have been disastrous. “Letting the mistakes fly, being spontaneous, not much rehearsing — that was a surprise to me,” Bryson says. “That was refreshing, and somewhat daring to me, to just go and start recording with someone a few days after meeting them.”
Not everyone from the Okemah sessions has stayed with the band; in fact, the guitar slot has already gone through two subsequent changes. When Rice opted to continue playing with Merritt last spring, Farrar brought aboard Englishman James Walbourne, known for his work with Peter Bruntnell, to play at Austin’s South By Southwest conference in March and a few adjacent shows. A few weeks later, Walbourne was replaced by Nashville guitarist Chris Frame. (A limited-edition six-song EP released in June includes four live tracks taken from a May concert in Philadelphia that featured Frame in the lineup.) A new addition for the band’s upcoming September dates is another Canyon member, keyboardist Derrick DeBorja.
All of which has led to some uncertainty as to how this revamped Son Volt will be received by longtime fans. “When we went out to play the first couple shows,” Bryson says, “I sort of wondered if there’d be people saying, ‘Where the hell’s Jim and Dave and Mike? This isn’t the band!’ And people definitely want to hear the old songs, but the reception has been great.”
As for those who still question a fluctuating lineup of a band that once had such a singular, collective voice, Farrar offers only bemused pragmatism.
“It’s interesting. That’s their association with the original lineup,” he acknowledges. “But before there was Son Volt, there was just me. I was on Warner Bros. at the time. They wanted me to do a solo record, but I said no, I want to do a band record. So I came up with the name and called the original guys to help out. I never envisioned that it would last forever.”
He laughs, softly. “Maybe there’s a degree of it being a sports team in a way. You’ll never have all the same faces.”
Though Bryson was filling a slot vacated by the best drummer Farrar has ever worked with, he took the circumstances — entering Son Volt to record fifteen songs in two and a half weeks — in stride. “At the end of the day, it’s just pop music; if you take it that seriously you’re always going to be disappointed,” he figures. On the other hand, he adds, tellingly: “I would feel differently about it if we didn’t make a compelling album.”
They did. You can hear it in the first raw guitar chords and the sudden, sonic punch of the rhythm section, the kind of tightness that only a group wanting to realize a singular spirit and singular songs will find. Along the way, the musicians, aided by the wise, loose guidance of engineer John Agnello, found out if they could go beyond the past and push the story into fast forward.
“I don’t really sit around and think, ‘What does Son Volt mean to me?'” Farrar quips, and then qualifies, “other than the differentiation between the solo records and the band records. When you record with a group, it really is a more collective experience, and you get a more collective result.”
“Jay doesn’t crack the whip much,” Bryson says. “He’ll make simple suggestions. He has ideas, but he’s really receptive to how people play on their own, how their own personalities come through in the music. We had a fifteen-song demo, but we only had it a day before we started recording. Some songs had five to seven takes, but it was almost always the early takes that were the keepers.”
While Farrar’s own understanding of recording has evolved over the years, as he has become more and more involved in the making of records and accumulated more and more gear, his songwriting process hasn’t changed dramatically.
“I still approach songwriting from a pretty organic direction, which is just using a cassette or walkman and an acoustic guitar,” he says. “It just seems to leave things more wide open; the song can go in any direction that way. On a couple songs, I started getting into the four-track, in terms of how I wanted to construct the song, the kind of instrumentation, early on in the songwriting. But mostly I’ve gone back to the more fundamental method of a walkman and an acoustic guitar.
“Over the years, I fell into a method of getting away from songwriting,” he continues, “and…getting into a period or a jag of doing a lot. That’s just the way I found that it worked. Gradually I’ve tried to get more into doing more of it all the time, which lends itself to the way I like to work anyway, in a fragmentary style, getting pieces of lyrics, pieces of melodies, and then assembling it later.”
The realization of those songs, however, was precisely the inverse. On Okemah, ProTools was used only once, to add harmony vocals to an already mixed and mastered track, and Farrar still has no plans to record digitally.