“I’m committed to using analog tape,” he says. “This time around, John Agnello suggested recording at 15 ips speed (which is more costly). I’m a big fan of that; you get more low-end response. Rather than add stuff later or cut the song apart in the digital realm — that’s what happens with most of what you hear on the radio. It’s been sterilized, chopped up Frankenstein-style, corrected.”
Though he may be devoted to old-school recording methods, Farrar isn’t opposed to working with the changes in technology that have inundated the music industry in recent years. Okemah & The Melody Of Riot came out on DualDisc, its flip side featuring a 30-minute documentary DVD that includes footage from the recording sessions originally broadcast live on Farrar’s website last fall. And an outtake from the sessions, “Joe Citizen Blues”, was sold on iTunes.
“It’s weird how musical format changes,” Farrar says. “You start out listening to cassette tapes, now you pick up a CD and it seems obsolete. I have an iPod, but I still like going back to my 78 player. I was on the road once and came across some old 78s in an antique store, Gatemouth Brown and Johnny Guitar Watson, and hearing that stuff on old 78s, it just sounds great, the whole sonic experience — the way it was meant to be.”
Okemah And The Melody Of Riot is its own kind of sonic experience, and is the most cohesive album Farrar has made since Son Volt’s 1995 debut Trace. “I didn’t go into [this album] with a preconceived idea of what it should sound like,” Farrar says, “other than whatever sound we could capture at the moment, without a lot extraneous stuff, or overdubbing or sampled sounds. The best way to capture the energy of what’s happening at that moment is just to do that.”
A large part of what was happening at that moment was a presidential election, then frequently described as the most important election of a generation. Though he is rarely considered a political artist, Farrar has always used songs to describe and analyze the political world around him: class divisions, environmental destruction, social hypocrisy, an insipid mass media. “Criminals”, “Looking For A Way Out”, “Second Hand News”, “Route”, and “Medicine Hat” are not “finger-pointing songs,” as Dylan once disparagingly described his own protest work, but they are fierce gestures.
On Okemah, the gestures become passions of the moment writ large — and, given Farrar’s typical style, shockingly literal, even topical. “Piecemeal solutions will only leave scars/Bandages for nosebleeds in this city of artificial stars,” he sings in “Bandages & Scars”. He addresses the conflict even more point-blank on “Endless War”: “When morning brings news of wasted life/When video brings footage of children dying/No moral face to the endless war.”
On “Jet Pilot”, he takes things a step further, identifying his subject with disarming directness: “Jet pilot for the day washed his sins away/Loves to see the Rangers play/His daddy has a job in Washington/Wants to raise a Harvard son/Junior liked to let his hair down/Only trouble is, word gets around.”
Although Okemah is suffused with radical invocations and blistering contemporary politics, Farrar insists that the revolutions are as internal as they are external. He would never be mistaken for an activist convinced of answers or a follower given over to a faith. The politics come across as deeply felt. Their expression in songs — in part because of the electric music surrounding them, in part because, even at his most literal, his language gleams — seem as much a part of who Farrar is as a living, thinking, acting individual as music is itself.
“I don’t know that I am,” Farrar answers when asked if he has become more politically conscious. “But as a parent, when you have children, you feel like more of a stakeholder. They have a whole future ahead of them. You want them to have an environment, have a full life. So I think about it more. But the songs were written in the six-to-eight-month period running up to the election. At this point I’m ready to write about something else.”
As for the 2004 election, “I was hoping for a different result,” he allows. “After a while, I think I looked at it from more of a historical perspective. This country has always been not very progressive, but still has managed to be benevolent in most ways. So hopefully things will turn around. Prior to the great depression and FDR, there was probably almost zero social consciousness. We’ve been fortunate to live in the last years of that phase; now the last vestiges of that legacy are being eradicated. But I’m mostly optimistic anyway. I’m not even speaking politically. It’s just where I am in my life. I’m a lot more comfortable in my own shoes.”
The Okemah of the album’s title is, of course, the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, who provided Farrar with an early model of the committed songwriter and informed his earliest experience of folk music.
“In my early teens I started to be aware that it was Woody I was hearing, when I started pulling records out of [my parents’] cabinets,” Farrar explains. “Probably when I first started playing guitar, when I was 11, and then when I started listening to Dylan, I just sort of made the connection. Here’s Woody Guthrie, here’s Dylan. Thankfully they weren’t playing ‘Puff The Magic Dragon’ or ‘If I Had A Hammer’.”
Okemah plays out as a song cycle. Beginning with a meditation on political wounds, Farrar finds catharsis in the history-stained Highway 61, refuses to close his eyes to the brutality of war, rejects the easy answers of knee-jerk medication, hears redemption in a dusty 78, and comes to a “turning point calm” in the “Chaos Streams”, a place where a wide-open world is still there for the taking. And, more importantly, for the restoring, as he declares in “World Waits For You”, the album’s final track: “Find strength from the words of those that went before/Take what you need, but leave even more.”
“From my perspective,” Farrar says, “just throwing ideas out there that might further some discussion is OK by me. But primarily it’s a way to release my own thoughts on certain subjects. I don’t think of myself as a political writer, and I don’t want to be. It’s something I will write about if I feel it.”
ND contributing editor Roy Kasten writes about music in St. Louis. He was born in 1965, the year Busch Stadium was completed. He remains in denial about its demolition.
