Jay Farrar has always stood up for the Little Guy in America. Most of his songs are about regular folks facing down some challenge, whether it’s a powerful corporation, a corrupt politician, or simply hard times. With Uncle Tupelo in the early 1990s, he wrote paeans to anonymous laborers and pitiable drunks, although the ensuring alt-country movement borrowed the romanticism and ignored the radicalized politics of March 16-20, 1992. In the 2000s, he discovered Woody Guthrie and recorded a few albums of languid agit-folk-rock that were heavy on vague outrage and light on sense. Okemah and the Melody of Riot, named after Guthrie’s birthplace, had all the passion of a thesis paper, as though Farrar admired his idol’s righteous anger but had no idea how to duplicate it. Even on One Fast Move or I’m Gone, his 2009 book report on Kerouac, Farrar lost himself in unquestioning idol worship of the Beat Poet.
If those albums depict the American everyman laboring and traveling, Son Volt’s latest, Honky Tonk, shows the Little Guy at leisure. As the title suggests, the milieu is the roadhouse full of people nursing beers and broken hearts while wearing ruts in the dance floor. Instead of Okies or Beats, Farrar’s inspiration is Bakersfield, the California crossroads that figured so prominently in the country of music of the late 1960s. Acts like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard emphasized electric guitar and drums, steely riffs and solid rhythms, and that harder sound distinguished them from the more traditional strains of country emanating from Nashville. For Son Volt, that means a constant two-step rhythm, a fiddle that swirls in and out of focus, pedal steel that sheds a tear in everybody’s beer, and an electric guitar that bounces around some of the faster tunes like “Bakersfield”.
It may be the best Son Volt has sounded in a decade and the most engaged Farrar has sounded in longer, but that’s not really saying much. As a singer, his voice drifts into a muddied, low monotone that favors an unhurried midtempo and tends to flatten the melody; as a songwriter, he tends to favor obtuse wordplay that obscures rather than illuminates his subject matter. On Honky Tonk, he makes the most of those limitations, more or less. His voice sounds positively animated on “Seawall” and “Barricades", and he lovingly draws out the long vowels of “blues” on “Angel of the Blues”, as though reluctant to actually part with the word.
To adapt to the roadhouse setting, Farrar’s songwriting has grown more straightforward as well, even if he favors the same theme on almost every tune: “Don’t let the barricades of life keep the wild spirit still.” But some of his attempts to evoke actually do evoke; some of these songs sound like they have thousands of highway miles between them and are coated with dust. “Down the Highway” may be his best roadtrip anthem since “Windfall” on Son Volt’s ’95 debut, Trace. “There’s a world of wisdom inside a fiddle tune,” he sings. “Throw this love down the highway/ See where it takes you.” The scale is less ambitious, but writing about the travails of the heart is just as righteous as building a machine to kill fascists.
The problem with Honky Tonk is that it’s more suited to the road than the roadhouse. The pacing is so languid, the dynamics so muted that I doubt this iteration of Son Volt would last very long in a real honkytonk. They’d clear the dancefloor and possibly get drowned out by chatter. While the Bakersfield sound is not strictly dance music, it is by its very nature social music, meant to be experienced and enjoyed communally. Yet, Farrar’s songs sound introverted instead of extroverted, suited more to his own idiosyncrasies as singer and bandleader than to the needs of his perceived audience. In other words, you can’t scoot a boot to this album. Farrar continues to sing about regular folk, but still hasn’t found a way to sing to them.
