SON VOLT HEARTS AND MINDS VIDEO FULL
In addition, Angel Of the Blues is probably one of the best songs he’s ever written, although the arrangement does play a big part in making the song as good as it is – the pedal steel guitar is the most prominent instrument you hear, the song very slowed-down, full of melancholic longing, a heavenly, if dusty, ode to the American heartland of which the band clearly is a child. Especially good are Angel of the Blues and Down The Highway which both fall into this category.
Mark Spencer’s pedal steel guitar is all over the place on the album and the songs are mainly slow to mid-tempo (and quite short, some of them are barely over 2 minutes long), but I like the slowed down ones best, which make the pedal steel guitar sounds exactly as I like it – I always loved their sound, not so much because they are a staple in Country music, but for their otherworldly, dreamy sound characteristic. Gone are the occasional harder rocking songs found on the early Son Volt albums (such as Route from Trace or Straightface from Wide Swing Tremolo). Even the lyrics such as ‘… there’s more brick walls than bridges on the way to your heart…’ could probably be found on songs played on mainstream Country radio stations – a far cry from the lyrics of early Uncle Tupelo recordings such as Still Feel Gone or March 16-20, 1992. There’s even a song on here called Bakersfield which sounds exactly as you would expect, it’s the most Country-Rocking song on the album and probably wouldn’t sound at all out of place in a Honky-Tonk bar in, well, Bakersfield. The first question coming to mind is: Is this still Alt.Country? As the title implies, it is leaning pretty far towards old-school Country more than the contemporary Alternative Country style Jay Farrar helped to create and define with Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt over the past 20 years or so. I meant to buy the 2009 album Central American Dust, but didn’t manage to do so far, so that is still on my to-buy list.Īfter hearing only good things about Honky Tonk I bought it – and I don’t regret doing so. The first new record in which Jay Farrar was involved with after that time I bought was his collaboration with Death Cab For Cutie’s Benjamin Gibbard on the Jack Kerouac-themed One Fast Move Or I’m Gone, (which is a fantastic record and which I will be writing about on here at some point in the future). The excellent compilationĪ Retrospective 1995 – 2000 rekindled my love for their music when it was released in 2005, but I didn’t buy their next records Okemah And The Melody Of Riot and The Search. But I have to admit that I stopped listening to their new records after Wide Swing Tremolo. I have been listening to their records since their first album Trace came out back in 1995. Elsewhere, “Brick Walls” finds the singer talking through the anguish of a stale relationship (“There’s more brick walls than bridges on the way to your heart”).Son Volt and me go back a long time. The record is littered with weary, salt-of-the-earth references to diner jukeboxes and “hearts hung out on the line to dry,” and Farrar wastes little time in commiserating on opening track “Hearts and Minds” (“We can’t go wrong, we can’t go right / It’s the common thread between us”). What hasn’t changed so much is Farrar’s poetic, if sullen, lyrical bent. Tracks like “Seawall” and “Wild Side” best capture the record’s overall mood, that of a leisurely line-dance at a thinly attended VFW Hall. But Honky Tonk strips away any semblance of ’90s guitar rock sheen, leaving listeners with a rawer set of hard luck songs set to a symphony of acoustic and steel guitars and strings. Son Volt’s music has always drawn straight from the well, mining from yesteryear outlaw country heroes like Buck Owens and Hank Williams while coating it with more contemporary alternative rock influences. Through Son Volt, he’s managed to keep the hurt and anguish alive over the course of six full-length albums, but his seventh, the aptly titled Honky Tonk, feels more in touch with its broken-down country lineage than anything the band has done in years. In a career spanning more than 20 years, Farrar has never strayed too far from his beer-soaked country roots. Misery loves company, and Jay Farrar has always proven himself a suitable sidekick.
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