In the annals of Americana music, there’s no greater touchstone than Uncle Tupelo, the raucous, early ’90s country-punk band led by Belleville, Ill., singing/songwriting buddies Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy.
The story took a historic turn when the duo split and Farrar went on to form Son Volt while Tweedy founded Wilco. More than 20 years on, both bands continue as vehicles for the music of their respective leaders, even if Wilco has enjoyed more notoriety in recent times.
But after a four-year hiatus Farrar is back with a new incarnation of Son Volt and an exciting new batch of songs. “Notes of Blue” (Thirty Tigers) digs deep into the Mississippi blues of Skip James and Mississippi Fred McDowell, and finds stirring connections in the ethereal ’60s-’70s British folk of Nick Drake.
In Farrar songs like “Sinking Down” and “Static,” you can hear the churning echoes of McDowell’s Mississippi hill country sound. In others, like “Cairo and Southern” and “Cherokee Street,” there’s a palpable sense of the kind of darkness and longing that runs through the music of James and Drake.
This month, Son Volt embarked on a tour that will stop at Terminal West in Atlanta on March 10. Before he hit the road, I talked with Farrar about the origins and influences of “Notes of Blue” during a phone call from his home in St. Louis.
Asked to untangle the trinity of influences that went into making “Notes of Blue,” Farrar had a surprisingly simple explanation. It was all about guitar playing, and using different tunings, he said.
“One of the main areas I wanted to focus on with this recording was finger-picking style guitar, and that’s a common thread with all three of these musicians,” Farrar said. “I thought there was a commonality of purpose there, and ultimately a common aesthetic.
“On the surface, maybe, being inspired by American blues and English folk seems incongruous. But at the end of the day, it’s all folk music. I found in a lot of cases, the tuning itself definitely dictated where the melodic structure of a song would end up. And that sort of challenged me to sing in a certain way.”
While McDowell may be best known for his moaning gospel song “You Gotta Move,” covered by the Rolling Stones on “Sticky Fingers,” Farrar said it was McDowell’s guitar sound that captured his imagination.
“With Mississippi Fred McDowell, it was the power of his slide playing that really impacted me,” he said. “I could tell that his guitar voicing and tuning was different, and so that was a catalyst to dig a little deeper. I learned his tuning, and it was kind of a tribute and a chance to connect with somebody who’s an icon and hero.
“The slide playing on ‘Sinking Down’ is definitely influenced by McDowell. And I used his tuning on ‘Cairo and Southern.’ But that song actually kind of winds up sounding more like some of the English folk I was inspired by, like Nick Drake. Ultimately, there was some cross-pollination with the tunings and the styles.”
Farrar was drawn to James, who wrote brooding songs about the devil and murder, for his idiosyncratic style of playing and singing.
“As far as Skip James, his voice in particular leaves a haunting impression,” Farrar said. “So, again, I wanted to find out a bit more about him, and approach him from more of a student’s perspective. So I read a book about him, and learned that he was using this specific tuning called the Bentonia tuning, a D minor-based tuning, which supposedly had its origins in the Bahamas. That’s the tuning that I used on ‘Cherokee Street.’ ”
Like so many other musicians, Farrar became fascinated with how Drake, posthumously famous for his song “Pink Moon,” conjured moods with a compelling combination of odd tunings and time signatures.
“I started listening to Nick Drake in the early ’90s, when his reissues were coming out. On this particular recording it was his ‘Pink Moon’ tuning that I was inspired by. The first song on ‘Notes of Blue’ is ‘Promise the World.’ In a lot of ways it’s my favorite song on the record, because it incorporates some instrumentation from the previous Son Volt recording, ‘Honky Tonk,’ so it serves as kind of a bridge.
“Nick Drake was such a virtuoso at the finger-picking style of guitar playing. And that’s another common thread between the English folk guys and the American blues guys like Skip James and Mississippi Fred McDowell.
Summing up his work on “Notes of Blue” and the next phase of Son Volt, Farrar went back to the theme of learning and growing as a musician.
“This whole project kind of represented another challenge for me and a chance to be a student and to learn in the process,” he said. “The overall idea was to not be complacent and just make the same record over and over. It’s just trying to stay inspired along the way.”
Son Volt, March 10. $22-$25. Terminal West, 887 West Marietta Street N.W., Atlanta. 404-876-5566, terminalwestatl.com.
