^
Love this post,
@Old Uncle Toe. Music and work can be marvelously therapeutic as long as you don't live out your songs or through your work. For a variety of reasons starting with the departure of my secretary and ending with Covid-19, I haven't had a lot of time for long, introspective posts. But this album hit my radar recently and it's too good not to share in this thread.
Son Volt -
Trace (1995, Deluxe Edition 2015)
After Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy broke up Uncle Tupelo, Jay went deeper into the moody alt country vibe. I think an awful lot of us who were around at the time suffered such trauma from UT's demise that their later work suffered by comparison. 20 years after the fact, Rhino released an expanded version of Son Volt's debut and it is stunning. The 11 songs comprising the original album were a powerful declaration of independence from the crossover ambitions of Tweedy. In
a 2015 interview for The Boot, Farrar recalled:
"Ultimately, I was ecstatic to actually be playing with a pedal steel guitar and a fiddle. That instrumentation is what inspired me to write some of the songs for Trace. Actually getting into the studio and hearing the layer of sounds and the way those instruments fit together, that was inspirational to me. Leading up to that, the whole writing process was liberating: It was a liberating time for me, both creatively and personally. I was living in a new city, in New Orleans, and making long drives across the country and listening to a lot of country music on AM radio -- that sort of found its way into the lyrics, like on the song 'Windfall.'"
If the album seems a lot better than I recalled, the bonus material is revelatory. We get to enjoy 8 demos from the
Trace sessions that offer an intimate fly on the wall view of Farrar's creative rebirth. The second disc presents a complete show at The Bottom Line in NYC from February 1996, apparently recorded on The Rolling Stones' mobile truck if Jay's memory is to be believed. As someone who is terminally addicted to Uncle Tupelo live boots, I'm a very tough audience. But this concert comes damn close to matching the ferocious energy of the best Tupelo shows. Farrar even has the chutzpah to cover three songs from the same album by his former band (
Anodyne). As an encore, he rips through Del Reeves' trucker classic "Looking At The World Through A Windshield" just as Uncle Tupelo used to close with "Truck Drivin' Man".
Unlike, say, John Fogerty, Jay Farrar succeeded in making peace with his past from the get go. This collection documents exactly how he achieved that rebirth, at home, in the studio and on stage.
on the Sam-O-Meter.
