Son Volt :Straightaways

the new album - is a poetic road trip via ten original songs by Jay Farrar, songs that map out a ruined, elegiac American landscape, and touch on its tragedies and consolations.

Jay Farrar
The second Warner Bros. Records release from the band, Straightaways has a sound that ranges from loose country blues ("Creosote") to energetic rock ("Caryatid Easy," "Picking Up the Signal"). Lyrically, the album is a tour of this country's tumble-down motels and windswept plains, its caryatids and cemetery saviors. Straightaways channels the voices of passing highway miles ("Picking Up the Signal"), the wrecking ball ("Way Down Watson") and the murdered lover ("Been Set Free"), and wraps them in a music that's equal parts tradition and innovation.

"I'm not trying to shed a skin or anything," says Farrar, who wrote the bulk of Straightaways during two lengthy respites from tours behind the band's critically acclaimed 1995 debut, Trace. "I do feel this album is an extension of the last one." The main thrust of Straightaways, Farrar points out, "is to get on tape what the band's been going through over the past two years."

What Son Volt has become is central to each member's view of the new album, and the rich, lustrous sound that two years has yielded. There's more rock, more blues and more country on Straightaways, played with an even greater sense of melody, clarity and sense of direction. "Trace," jokes drummer Mike Heidorn, "was our first date. This band has only gotten better over the past two years." Multi-instrumentalist Dave Boquist concurs, "With the first record, we hadn't played live until it was finished. This recording was more relaxed, more natural."

Farrar observes that the title of the record is a reflection of that feeling: "Straightaways, I guess, refers more to the noun sense of the word - the straight part of a racetrack. This time, everything fell into place."

That starts, of course, with the songs. Whether meditative blues ruminations or jagged, crashing rock, Farrar's work is consistently shot through with a dark, yet luminous intelligence, and a native common sense. "I think it was more intuitive," says Farrar of the songwriting he did for Straightaways. "I didn't have to necessarily think about what worked where."

A number of experiences - lives in music, one might say - intertwine in Son Volt's pedigree as one of the most successful bands in its genre. Trace made the 1995 year-end Top Ten list in a number of American newspapers and magazines, including the Rolling Stone critic's Top Ten list of that year.
Mike Heidorn

Jim Boquist
The best-known experience, of course, is Farrar and Heidorn's time in the seminal country-rock band Uncle Tupelo. That band's four albums - No Depression (1990), Still Feel Gone (1991), March 16-20, 1992 (1992) and Anodyne (1993) - have become touchstones for contemporary rock and country artists. "We're proud of that music," says Heidorn, "and we're proud of the music that we're playing now."

Jim and Dave Boquist cut their teeth in Minneapolis' brew of rock, country and folk over the last decade, playing together and in impromptu combos with members of the Jayhawks, Soul Asylum and the Replacements. "It's been a long time doing music," says bassist/backing vocalist Jim Boquist. "Whether holed-up, or on the road, or wherever, it's come down to the same thing - making music."

The band and producer Brian Paulson (who produced Trace ) also played a bigger role in shaping the songs that appear on Straightaways. "The songs were a lot more raw this time," Farrar notes. "So the band worked them out together a lot more than on Trace." Jim Boquist says that the band is "intent on delivering what they can to the songs. It's a process of finding out what a song wants, and what it wants from you in particular."

Those particular moments abound on Straightaways: the twelve-string shimmer and gentle organ wash on the plaintive "Back Into Your World," the pedal steel by frequent Son Volt stage presence Eric Heywood that provides the fine etching on "Left a Slide," Dave Boquist's low-strung banjo on "No More Parades" and Mike Heidorn's easygoing shuffle on "Creosote." "It's finding a knack to decide, first, what instrument I hear for a song," Dave Boquist says. "You want to add, but you don't want to clutter a song up."

The result of Farrar's initial songs and the input from those involved in recording is a brighter, cleaner sound. "The melodies on this record have a certain sway and flow to them," Jim Boquist explains.

Straightaways also has the lyrical enigmas, the tricky crosscurrents and ghostly Traces of the past that Farrar explored on Trace and that make his songs consistently memorable and haunting. "Been Set Free," for instance, takes a look at the traditional ballad "Lilli Schull" (recorded by Farrar with Uncle Tupelo on March 16-20, 1992) from another side of the gender gap. The album closer, "Way Down Watson," is at first glance a stark ode to destruction and renewal, but it, too, has a real-life source. "That song actually relates to the Coral Court Motel," Farrar explains, citing a St. Louis deco/Route 66 motor lodge that was ripped down despite its historic and architectural value.

Farrar's songs, however, have a way of rippling past the source material into something broader and more evocative. "After trial and error," Farrar observes, "you develop a personal sense of whether a song has any lasting power. Sometimes, if I start out a song, and it only relates to one particular person or situation, I usually start over from there, and try to make it relate to multiple situations."
DAve Boquist

The songs on Straightaways possess a profound and moving poetry that resists narrow interpretations, and asks the listener to dig deeper and rethink suppositions, taking a fast and dead-on route to the listener's mind and heart.