Rant-Rave-Revue: Son Volt, American Central Dust (2009)

Son Volt

American Central Dust

Rounder Records

Produced by John Agnello, Mark Spencer, Chris Masterson and Jason Hutto

Street Date: July 7, 2009

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Son Volt has been around a lot longer than Jay Farrar’s original act, Uncle Tupelo, so I think it’s about time (music) journalists stop namedropping Jeff Tweedy whenever a new Son Volt album finds its way onto record store shelves. Promise? There will always be that tug-of-war between Son Volt and Wilco fans, the “who’s better?” argument that seems to have already been solved by the greater media: Son Volt had the potential—Trace was 100 percent better of an album than A.M.—no denying it, but after that, Farrar was led astray; and Wilco, as it goes, is better, they say, because after A.M. (ironically) came the dawn of a new era, that in which Wilco ruled the world, put out records that people cared about (even if their record labels didn’t) and enjoyed that underground success that all but vanished from Son Volt like a rug pulled from under a babe. And, they say, Wilco markets to a mass audience, and they [Wilco] understand it. They’re in commercials. They headline all the big, cool festivals. They’ve got the same artistic clout that a master impressionist painter has with his paintbrush—yet they’re doing it with their guitars and ambient computer sounds and krautrock sensibilities and absurdist lyrics. Somewhere after A.M., there was this Holy Shit! moment, during which Tweedy put the words “impossible” and “Germany” in the same song title, and by G-d, it’s so weird it’s cool. And the papers and blogs eat it up. In fact, the Chicago Tribune‘s got its own Wilco-ist, Greg Kot, who is like the band’s private critic—who never really ever criticizes the band. He’s their historian, their biographer, their friend.

I saw Wilco several years ago at Skidmore College in upstate New York, shortly after the band had put out A Ghost Is Born, one of those albums that you’re not sure whether to love or hate. Let’s call it Wilco’s “black period.” Sure, there are some fantastic songs on it that just stand right out (“Muzzle of Bees,” “The Late Greats”), but all in all, it’s one of those albums that I’ve tried hard to enjoy but just can’t.

Well, anyway, the show was pretty much tracks from that album, which at the time, I admit, I was really into; and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Being There, two generally fantastic albums. I had been hankering to see the band for a long while, and by golly, I enjoyed the concert but wasn’t blown away. There was something, well, impersonal about it; Tweedy had really little interaction with the audience, and when he did speak to us, it was sort of in a grumpy way. Maybe he was still getting over the pill addiction he had publicly kicked at that point or maybe that’s just how he is, but I remember thinking, “Well, OK. Now I’ve seen Wilco. What next?”

Now, I’m going to come right out and say that I don’t agree that Wilco is a better band than Son Volt. In fact, I’d argue the opposite: that despite what all the young dudes at Rolling Stone and the Trib‘s Kot will have you believe, Son Volt is actually the better of the two. Sure, they don’t market as widely as Wilco (they did show up covering the Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye” on an ESPN ad campaign awhile back) or write long art-rock songs. And there’s very little name recognition behind the band—well, that is, save their “moment in the critics’ sun,” directly after Trace. I assume they don’t look at themselves as a “brand” or something corporate like that. But I would argue that there are several factors working in their favor that often go overlooked.

(a) Jay Farrar is a shy, quiet, soft-spoken fellow, who seems to be clean, decently nice and has a pretty simple fashion sense. I’ve seen the band countless times, and the closest Farrar has ever come to a Nudie Suit is a country-Western-style shirt (you know, the ones with the white-on-black stitched patterns) and plain black pants. He shows up to work looking like an everyman, because that’s who he’s trying to reach.

(1a) Now, the Wilco-ists might argue, here, that because Farrar plays for the everyman and rarely shows “stage presence” at his shows, that he, in fact, is trying to avoid interactive shows, but I’d say that this is the product of his shyness more than anything—it’s not that he doesn’t want his fans to know he cares; it’s just that he can’t say it, because he doesn’t know the right words to say it. If you truly believe, as I think Jeff Tweedy does, that he is special, you get grumpy, like that moment on Four-Way Street, where fucking Graham Nash starts shushing the crowd, so they will listen to the four men on stage with the acoustic guitars. Big fucking deal, Graham. Same thing goes for Tweedy, I feel. Farrar would never shush a crowd.

(b) The band has pretty much only had two derivations: The 1995–1998 version (Trace, Wide Swing Tremolo and that one song on the Alejandro Escovedo tribute album [a cover of "Sometimes"], before lawyers came in and things went South); and the 2005–2009 version, which has had a revolving cast of lead guitarists, but other than that, has featured Andrew Duplantis (bass), Mark Spencer (guitar) and David Bryson (drums) repeatedly. This, I think, demonstrates the stick-to-itiveness of Farrar, and his want for something stable; he needs stability for the magic to happen. Whereas, I think Tweedy needs a fight. Read on.

Wilco, on the other hand, has been all over the place, which means its leader, Tweedy, has had to beat back egos more than once. Ken Coomer, the original drummer, was replaced before the making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Co-songwriter Jay Bennett, part-founder of the modern Wilco, was fired during the making of the album (he recently lost his life after a brief battle with, somewhat ironically, painkillers).

As far as I can remember, Jay Farrar has never fired anybody from Son Volt. Sure, some shit went down around the Alejandro Escovedo reunion thing, but nobody was fired.

(c) Son Volt still plays country-rock and folk-rock music, the brand that got them the initial exposure by a national audience. Their critically acclaimed first album, Trace, is a classic—Wilco’s first, A.M., is decidedly (by many) not, as was previously mentioned. Something is to be said about brand loyalty in this day and age. When critics judge you on how much your sound changes, it’s a testament to the strength and conditioning of bands like Son Volt that only make minor tweaks here and there. After all, this is Jay Farrar’s vehicle, just as Wilco is Tweedy’s. But whereas Tweedy has taken the vehicle and allowed others to pimp it out, Farrar is still driving the same ’90s Honda Accord he had back in 1995. It runs just as well as Tweedy’s Prius, and may not get as good of a mile-per-gallon ratio, but it has just as much (or, as I continue to argue, more) character.

(d) Jay Farrar can still write decent songs about historical events and subjects, whereas Tweedy has long since pitched these ideas (he did do that series of songs with Billy Bragg, but to be honest, I could get into any of them—even “California Stars,” which always seemed the most likable). Take “Sultana” on the forthcoming American Central Dust. I was recently talking with a friend in the music business, who will go unnamed here, and he complained that “Sultana” was another example of Farrar “reading a wikipedia entry” and calling it a song. I beg to differ. Sure, it’s a little clunky in the sense that it doesn’t have a rhyme-scheme, but that’s how songs used to be—you listen to Woody Guthrie or early Bob Dylan, and you get these sort of generic story-songs, which are just meant to relay information, pass it down from one generation to the next. It might as well be a guy reading a primitive version of wikipedia, whilst strumming a guitar. And you know what? There’s not enough of that around anymore. Ever since music became a commodity, musicians lost sight of what it meant to be a musician. You have to tell a story with your song—not literally, all the time, tell a story, but it should be on your mind more often than not. Oftentimes, you’ll hear drivel that just screams “I wrote this to make a buck.” And while I don’t hear a lot of that in Wilco’s music, I certainly do hear a lot of throwaway lyrics and jams that are too long for their own good.

This is not to say that Son Volt hasn’t been guilty of the throwaway track—2007′s The Search would have been a hell of a lot tighter without that lead track “Slow Hearse,” leading things off. Come on, Farrar. Did you really need that on there? And who can forget the ear-splitting harmonica solo “Jodel” from Wide Swing Tremolo? That’s not sonic experimentation; it’s sonic irritation.

But more often than not, you hear an attention-to-detail in Son Volt’s music that you don’t in Wilco’s. It’s like the latter just jumps headfirst into a studio session and “writes as they go along.” Son Volt, on the other hand, have it all planned out and do a professional job of creating their best version of what came out of Jay Farrar’s head.

(e) This, I think, is the most important positive in Son Volt’s court: They write/sing for the everyman. The car companies have picked up on the fact that Wilco writes songs for the yuppie and crunchy jam-band crowd and that’s why they use Wilco songs to market their cars. As I mentioned before, Jay Farrar’s music appeals to the used-car set, and right now, that’s the type of guy we need helming music. There are too many people who have lost their jobs and hate life to need another fucking band that wants to shove their bourgeois bullshit down our throats like Wilco. Wilco might as well be Daughtry for all I care.

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So that brings me to my assessment of Son Volt’s latest album American Central Dust.

I’m not going to compact my review into 150 words as I did for American Songwriter. However, I will be true to my original assessment—I really think this is a sparkling gem in the Son Volt canon. I went as far to say that this is Farrar at his “songwriting peak”—and I believe this, wholeheartedly.

First, to the album. I’m taking each track in order and will give a fair assessment to each:

The album starts out with “Dynamite,” which I mention in my review is “wittily ambiguous.” I didn’t have enough words to explain what that meant. In the chorus, “This love is like celebrating/the Fourth of July with dynamite,” it is unclear whether the narrator is saying his love is an amazing explosion of goodness—or a volatile, explosive disaster. I’ve spent the last few 4ths at Congress Park in Saratoga Springs, NY, and let me tell you, when they light off those first few fireworks, it rattles you to the bone. As part of the American lore behind fireworks’ use on the 4th, I believe it’s to signify the “bombs bursting in air,” etc. that we had to deal with, suffering hard to get our independence from England. (Certainly, the War for Independence, as the Brit’s like to call it, probably didn’t play into the songwriting process for Mr. Farrar. I was merely explaining my case for “dynamite: good” vs. “dynamite: bad.”

My evidence for “dynamite: bad”: “There were diamonds, there was gold in your eyes/now just silence and broken words on the side.” What are we supposed to think of that statement? I don’t think there’s any other way of looking at it than in a bad connotation. i.e. “Everything was great/now it pretty much all sucks.” Hence, “dynamite: bad.”

It’s a sad song, as far as I’m concerned, but then again, I’m not sure. Because I sat across a bar table from Jay Farrar several years ago and tried to bounce my analysis of his songs off of him, and he just shot me down, time and time again. “So that song ‘Jet Pilot’ is about George W. Bush?” I remember asking. “No,” said Farrar, although at this point, I’ve heard the song enough to know that he was, in fact, talking about GW. There’s no other answer. “His daddy has a job in Washington/wants to raise a Harvard son.” Come on, Jay. Give the old, young journalist me a break, man.

But as your high school English teacher tried to point out one time or another, I’m sure, the narrator isn’t always the author’s own voice—sure, it might have shades of the personal intermingled in it, but that’s why writing a good book is so hard; it’s imagination in third gear. And that’s what I guess I was missing about Farrar’s songs.

As for how good the song is, I think “Dynamite” was positioned up top this album, because it’s strong. It’s definitely risky throwing a potentially depressing song in at the top, but let me tell you, Farrar’s fans know what they’re dealing with when they pick up his albums. He’s full of emotional surprises, and this is no exception.

“Down to the Wire,” the second track on Dust, I’ve noticed, has been singled out in many reviews of American Central Dust as one of the album’s best. I think it’s OK; I’m not overjoyed every time I hear it. There’s some socio-political commentary in there somewhere—as well as a decent backbeat and nice melody. But it’s nothing to write home about, in my opinion. It feels like not-as-handsome younger brother of The Search‘s “The Picture.”

“Roll On,” however, is fantastic. Classic Jay Farrar country. This is the type of highway ballad he’s been writing since the early days that Jeff Tweedy’s Prius would look ridiculous driving down. It’s also one of those songs, I think, only Farrar can churn out; Tweedy is incapable of writing a tune with such authentic dust-caked grit. Maybe it’s the timbre of Farrar’s voice, maybe it’s the simple shuffle beat. Which reminds me of a new theory I have, and bear with me, because this one’s going to be a bit of a Rant.

The album opener on Son Volt’s Trace is one of Jay Farrar’s greatest songs—”Windfall,” which is told from the point of view of a man driving down a lonesome road, telling himself everything’s going to be all right. “May the wind take your troubles away/May the wind take your troubles away/Both feet on the floor, two hands on the wheel, may the wind take your troubles away.” Amazing. Now that song came out in 1995, and was surely written near or at the time when Uncle Tupelo dissolved.

It has since been told, most thoroughly in the September/October 2005 Relix, at least from Farrar’s point of view, that the breakup happened because Tweedy was, in a not-too-subtle way, hitting on Farrar’s future wife. Certainly, other factors played into it, but on that personal level, that was where it ended. Here, I am reprinting (without breaks) Anthony DeCurtis‘ interview with Farrar:

“The most divisive incident occurred one night after a show. I [Jay] was driving. My girlfriend of seven years [Monica Groth, now Farrar's wife] was in the van, and another friend of ours was in the front seat. My girlfriend was sleeping in the back seat, and Mike [Heidorn] was sleeping on the floor or something. Jeff [Tweedy] went in to get paid and came back out. Then we were ready to go home. As I was driving, Jeff woke my girlfriend up and I saw a situation develop that I’d seen before. It was common knowledge that Jeff’s pick-up routine was to start crying to elicit sympathy from whatever female he was attracted to. To any outsider it would have been a tragicomedy, because I’m punching on the brakes and punching the gas. I found out later that he was telling her stuff, like, he loves her. He’s always loved her. He thinks she’s beautiful. In the rear view mirror I could see him stroking her hair. It was a nightmare.”

Now, if that doesn’t change your mind about Jeff Tweedy (and Wilco), I don’t think anything ever will. When I read those words back in 2005, I guess it was sort of like “an answer” in a call-and-answer musical figure. For years, I’d been a bigger fan of Son Volt and had heard all these rumors about why Uncle Tupelo broke up. It all lead to Jay Farrar firing Tweedy, or Jay Farrar quitting the band; Jay this, and Jay that. And here was an answer. Not “the” answer, but “an” answer. Certainly, there is Tweedy’s side of the story somewhere lost in the ether—and hopefully Greg Kot or some other Wilco-ist will squeeze it out of him someday. But for now, this is “an” answer. Thank you, Mr. DeCurtis, for helping Farrar excorcise his demons.

Now, to the point of this side-tracking Rant, I recently noticed that on the 1998 Weird Tales album by Golden Smog, which, in part, features the songwriting of both Jeff Tweedy and one of my all-time favorites Gary Louris (of The Jayhawks), there is a track written by Tweedy called “Lost Love.” Now, by no means do I think this song has anything to do with the aforementioned incident between him and Farrar in the van, but there is an interesting twist. In the first breakdown in the song, which occurs nearly a minute in, the guitar sounds very, very similar to the signature riff that opens “Windfall.” Coincidence? I think not. Which opens up a giant new can of worms in the Tweedy vs. Farrar legend. This means that Tweedy had listened to Trace and was either lifting that riff as a nod to his old buddy Jay, or lifting it as a kiss-off. I would like to think it’s the former, but given Tweedy’s flare for the dickishness, I would have to go with the latter.

Now, back to the review.

“Cocaine and Ashes”—how has this track been overlooked in most of the reviews I’ve read for this album? (Possibly, because it was noted prominently in the press release, but sometimes, and I’m not saying all the time, but sometimes publicists get it right; sometimes they understand what the gem track on an album is, and us journalists just have to write about it.) This is by far one of the most advanced Farrar ballads ever. The addition of the fiddle in the background just pulls at your heart strings, and the piano doesn’t seem too forced, as it has on other Farrar/Son Volt tracks. It’s obviously not Farrar’s first instrument, but he’s gotten better at it over the years. The piano melody on “Dent County,” for example, a sad one about the death of his father on Farrar’s solo album Terroir Blues, sounds like a cross between Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do (I Do It for You)” and Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting.” Not one of my favorite Farrar tracks. But “Cocaine” is just fantastic.

“Dust of Daylight” is another top-notch Farrar country ballad. “Love is a fog and you stumble every step you make.” These are words out of the book of life—and out of a guy who enjoys a good metaphor from time to time. A reviewer whom I recently read, first ridiculously called Farrar a “nasal” singer (nothing nasal about Farrar, honey), then scolded him for these throwaway lyrics: “There are ways to buy trouble/like a bail bondsmen finds friends in jail.” Sure, they aren’t the greatest set of lyrics in the world, but are you really going to single out a set of lyrics and damn the entire song because of them? Come on. Good song—some shit lyrics, I agree.

“When the Wheels Don’t Move” questions what will happen when gas runs out for good—more socio-economic/political commentary, which I think Farrar does a decent job of getting across. I’ve found, though, that it’s his songs written in times of struggle—i.e. after the breakup of Uncle Tupelo or shortly after the first phase of Son Volt was complete—that are the best. Not the ones that are sort of “already written on the Huffington Post.” I guess we’ll have to all be driving a Prius soon. Well, shit. This track’s melody is a little repetitive (no, actually a lot), but it’s got that DADGAD tuning (or something like it), which works so well with Farrar’s deep, melancholic voice. I like how Dave Bryson’s drums echo that downward-pull of the chord, each time it drops. It’s a good Son Volt song.

“No Turning Back”—jury’s still out on this one, but I think it’s an above-average song. The first thing that came to mind when I saw it on the tracklisting was “No Rolling Back,” a similarly named song on Farrar’s solo effort Terroir Blues. “No Rolling Back,” the album’s opener, could be seen as either a nod to Farrar’s father, who had recently passed away; or, as I saw it at the time, a warning for post-9/11 livers. “Who do you know?/Who do you trust?/Who keeps you sane?/And who cleans off the dust?” It’s a real icey-cold song, another depressing track starting off an album. But it’s one of the strongest tracks of the set.

“No Turning Back,” on the the other hand, falls, in my opinion, into the “Windfall” category of songs: It’s a guy telling himself “even when times are tough, this is what you do for a living; it’s your dream and ‘there’s no turning back.’” In a way, this a really positive song, but I feel that it has some negative connotations attached to it. “So much promise, with so much pain,” the song starts off with. And then it goes into a detailed description of “the road,” or being on it. Not in the Keruoac sense—in the Farrar sense. This is told from the point of view of a touring musician. And while this is definitely a subject only Farrar can wax poetic about, at least from his point of view, it’s one that shows up in his body of work quite often, some done better than others. This one is like a B-.

“Pushed to Far,” starts off with “Memories of Crescent City,” which I would assume is not referring to the place in California called “Crescent City,” but in fact, refers to the nickname of New Orleans. He talks about seeing a live show, which is “pure gasoline for the soul.” Then he delivers, “Take me back to Mound City,” a place in Missouri, nearby where Uncle Tupelo started and where, I believe, Farrar presently lives on the offseason. (He also mentions these “mounds,” which I believe are Indian burial mounds, in his solo song “Cahokian”—”building our mounds out of control/full of our finest throwaway things.”)

This one is another Farrar country song, but rocks much more gently than the previous ones on the album—and is absolutely glazed in a yearning for someplace better than the present. Maybe Farrar wrote it when he was homesick on the road, or maybe it was written at home about being homesick on the road. I wonder who “Mother Theresa to the Animal Kingdom” is in the chorus? That’s a lyric you’ll never get from Tweedy.

“Exiles” is a weaker-than-usual melody, with solid lyrics. I guess you can’t ask for a great melody on every song. The chorus, on the other hand, is decent, but feels like a half-realized idea. “We’re exiles now/pulling out of this place,” sings Farrar. Another road song, I would assume. Definitely not one of my favorites, though.

“Sultana” is the song that I argued with my friend in the music business about—remember, he said he thought it sounded like Farrar reading a Wikipedia entry into a song. And I argued back that it was this type of song that doesn’t get written anymore—because songwriters have lost their way. (At the time, too, I believe I argued that it was a song Farrar “could write” now that he was on in his years a bit, and had already proven to critics that he wasn’t a bullshit artist.) I like the fact that this is the type of song a social studies teacher would be able to teach a class about in a high school. Where’s your social studies song, Tweedy? Not to mention, this one is completely out of place on this album—it could’ve been one big social studies lesson, but Farrar decided to only include one historical nugget. And this is a strong one.

“Strength and Doubt”: This waltz-y number could be filed under “contemplative”—and is typical of the latest Farrar albums. There’s really not much to the song’s melody; the focus here is on the strength of the lyrics. None of these lyrics strike me as throwaways. Mark Spencer’s solos were much better realized on Farrar’s solo albums and this song is a perfect example. The two noter he plays near the end just shouldn’t be there. His presence on this album is a little suspect. I don’t know, maybe Jay just missed having Spencer in the mix. But his solid solo work doesn’t seem to mesh well for the non-country songs.

“Jukebox of Steel”: I think I mentioned in my Songwriter review that this song is a close relative of Okemah and the Melody of Riot‘s “Gramophone,” because it’s quite pop-y and is not entirely in character for Farrar. By the latter, I mean Farrar is best known for his moody, contemplative type pieces—when I think of classic Farrar, I roll it back to the Tupelo days with “Whiskey Bottle” and “Still Be Around”; “Windfall,” “Tear-Stained Eye” and “Catching On” from the Trace days; etc. “Jukebox” and “Gramophone” sort of strike me as songs written with a more modern Nashville country pop station in mind—i.e. Farrar maybe being interested in breaking onto mainstream radio again and/or making a few extra bucks from the massive exposure. He’s never struck me as an exposure junky, though, so I would have to say that these songs are fluke-ish at best.

To the song: It’s under three minutes, it’s catchy and, although, I don’t think the chorus is sing-along-able, the melody is definitely remember-able. I also dig how the opening riff mimics that of a train: “Choo-choo/choo-choo.” Not sure if that was meant to be onomatopoeic—or whether the “jukebox of steel” is in fact a metaphor for a train. I would doubt it. I think it’s just an ode to the jukebox and the great songs that it often plays in great bars. A few jukeboxes of steel in the New York City area: Hi-Fi (East Village: the things electronic, but it’s one of the lone jukeboxes with Son Volt/Farrar tunes on it), The Corner Bistro (West Village: great hamburgers, cheap beer and eclectic jukebox) and Spike Hill (Williamsburg, Brooklyn: great hamburgers, decent decor, amazing jukebox)

As out of place as “Jukebox” seems on this record, it’s a welcome addition to the Farrar portfolio. Maybe he wrote it for his kids?

Parting Thoughts:

While I’ve given some of album reviews on this blog “grades,” I’m going to leave this one to the listener to decide. I already gave it four stars in American Songwriter, and have noted that I’m sticking to my guns. This post was just meant to elaborate on why I thought it was special (and touch upon some of its flaws, so you know I’m not just turning around and slapping a bunch of stars on it). You really don’t hear a solid, eclectic group of songs like these anywhere other than Son Volt/Jay Farrar. Not even with Wilco.