Jay Farrar, co-founder of the legendary Uncle Tupelo, is at Kilkenny with his successor group, Son Volt. He has a strained phone conversation with Tony Clayton-Lea
In the annals of American music - and, indeed, the anomalies - lies one band who are credited with pretty much inventing the damn thing we call Americana. Uncle Tupelo started off as a mistake: who on earth wanted to hear a band that mixed traditional country and punk?
While it's true that earlier bands such as Jason and the Scorchers lit the blue paper sticking out from a rocket called cowpunk, it was Uncle Tupelo that brought such a hybrid genre one step further into the 1990s and beyond. Their 1990 debut album, No Depression (a cover of a Carter Family song) even gave the scene, and its defining publication, its name.
Founding members Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar disbanded Uncle Tupelo in 1994, following four albums that twisted a new genre into shape. Tweedy went on to form Wilco, which has now attained an out-there status all of its own. Farrar formed Son Volt, which has continued in a far more stringent manner than Wilco to blend traditional American music forms with poetic dust bowl imagery and straight-ahead rock.
Farrar - who wouldn't be the most ideal interviewee even over a clear phone line, due to his renowned lack of verbal enthusiasm - has since combined a moderately successful solo career with various incarnations of Son Volt.
SV albums Trace, Wide Swing Tremolo and Straightaways forged a new rock/roots interface, while Farrar's solo work (including worthy additions to the Americana canon such as Sebastopol) managed to draw influences from as wide a range of acts as Gillian Welch, The Flaming Lips and Superchunk.
Country music for the disaffected and disillusioned? Farrar thinks so; his music is so far removed from the mainstream it might as well be off the chart.
"That's a bit of a problem for me, but it's not something I think about too much. There are media within certain radio formats that are supportive, such as college radio, and there's a format called Triple A that plays the type of music I'm into listening to and playing. But certainly, if you have aspirations of being the next big thing it's a problem.Thankfully, I don't have aspirations in that area.
"It's not that I want to consciously avoid the mainstream, it's just that I look at music and what I do in the long term. I'm not trying to make a quick success or buck. If I were, I'd maybe have had a few years of success and then spent the rest of my life presenting television shows. I've seen that happen to people."
Most things are cyclical, says Farrar; he allows that when things become diluted in mainstream culture there seems always to be a sub culture that springs up and pounces. "Which means" - and at this he even manages to raise a laugh - "at some point there will be a lot of shallow entertainers doing late night cable TV commercials."
For someone such as Farrar and the many people like him the impulse and compulsion to write songs is a mixed blessing. It made sense to commit to full-time song-writing, he says, after a period of playing other people's music. "It just made sense to start doing it. From that time, because it's something I take seriously and count on in a cathartic way, if I get away from songwriting for too long I get anxious to start back. Finding the right balance is important for me, because it doesn't work for me to do it all year round.
"I love doing what I do," he continues, thankfully offering information without being prompted by another question after an awkward silence. "I couldn't imagine doing anything else - writing and performing are essential to me. I've had some part-time jobs, but never a full time nine to five. I was lucky enough to have started music before having to commit to that kind of life.
"The other side of that coin is that once you commit for a number of years there's no turning back - there's nothing else I could do at this point."
Son Volt perform at the Carlsberg Kilkenny Rhythm 'n' Roots Weekend, April 29 - May 2, www.kilkennyroots.com
