Video: Son Volt – “Devil May Care”
From Union, out March 29.
How great is Jay Farrar? He’s been writing consistently good songs for thirty years now. It’s pretty crazy if you think about how long and how consistent his career has been. Even heroes like Neil Young went through a dicey phase 20 or 30 years into their careers; Jay Farrar has rarely slipped up.
And now he’s written a song about the nuts and bolts of making music and how it helps to keep you focused when the world around you is crazy.
No artifacts just melody rings
Compression drivers pushing air
Phantom power and faders up
Keeping time, keeping sane
Farrar told Billboard that he wanted a song for the thematically political album “to embody a more regular rock ethos… I was thinking about bands like the Replacements, who would fall off the stage in the first chords of their songs, the Stones, the Who.” Lyrically, the song channels “the flowery language put on a lot of music equipment packaging–’stellar magnetic winding’ from string packages or something, that kind of Guitar Center reality.”
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Audio: Son Volt – “The 99”
From Union, out March 29.