Son Volt Comes to 191 Toole

“Pandemic blues again, life in lockdown / Don’t let your hope, your driving force / Drag on the ground.” So writes Jay Farrar in “These Are the Times,” two years into a worldwide plague that, he adds, has us “walking backwards.” One of many highlights on the new Son Volt album Electro Melodier, the song speaks to Farrar’s guarded optimism that, as he puts it elsewhere on the album, “the worst will soon be over.”

Electro Melodier began as a classic Covid album, assembled, as so many are these days, with musicians recording in different studios, one Son Volt member from as far away as New York, most of the others closer to Farrar’s home base of St. Louis. But something was missing in the distance, he says, and as time went on and the album inched along, “we all masked up and played together.” There’s an agreeably live feel to the album, one that hits the ground running with the upbeat, aptly titled “Reverie,” which encourages its listeners not to “stop dreaming on a distant star.” The album continues in a similar spirit, though with a couple of more pensive moments, one of them the song “War on Misery,” which, Farrar says, “I wanted to sound something like Lightnin’ Hopkins, with a low-tuned guitar and some quiet spaces.”

In a sense, Farrar tells Zócalo, the pandemic was a boon, if in just one regard: by taking the band off the road and constant live performing, it gave him and his bandmates the time to work hard on crafting an album that holds together as a piece. Even so, he allows, he’s glad to be going out on tour again after nearly two years away, a tour that will see the band’s return to Tucson after several years on top of the pandemic-born hiatus.

Electro Melodier, says Farrar, came together well overall, though one song, he says good-naturedly, was a little like pulling teeth. A slow march with pensive lyrics about the big lies in the face of the “truth we all know,” it “started to veer off in a direction that was sort of like the band Rush. We had to dial it back a bit to keep it from going off into prog-rock territory.” It’s now safely back in the Americana pocket that Farrar helped pioneer, another standout in an album that never falters.

Son Volt at 191 Toole, Wednesday, January 19, at 8pm. $25 via Ticketmaster or at the door. Proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test within the previous 48 hours is required for admission, and masks must be worn.

Category: Arts, Entertainment, MUSIC