![]() ![]() They worked out as a nice yin and yang with each other to kick off the album.” It’s more overtly uplifting and is about taking on adversity and being a shield against challenges on the horizon. That’s what I’m trying to do with ‘Promise the World.’ The song that follows it, ‘Back Against the Wall,’ is intended to be a rally song. It transcends your mood and your surroundings. “Everyone goes through a dark period and the message of the blues is that music can lift you up. Echoes of Drake can be found in the song’s melancholy lyrical slant as well. “Nick Drake may seem to stand in contrast to those guys,” Farrar continues, “but ultimately they all shared a similar aesthetic in terms of using a lot of finger-picking style guitar, which is one of the main areas I wanted to focus on with this album.” Farrar points to Notes of Blue album opener “Promise the World” as an example of Drake’s influence, citing that it shares the same alternate tuning as Drake’s signature song “Pink Moon” from 1972. “In studying them both, I got to be a student learning the tools of the trade from these classic blues heroes. More than just a creative exercise, it turned out to be an enriching musical education for Farrar. He found inspiration in the haunting minor key tunings of James and in the acoustic slide-guitar work of McDowell. It brings up a lot of different creative options.”īy breaking down how both men approached the genre, Farrar was able to hone in on exactly what he wanted to emulate throughout his own songwriting on Notes of Blue. “When you use alternate tunings, it requires different chord voicings and it sounds completely different from what you normally hear on guitars in standard tunings. “I’ve always been drawn to the tunings of Skip James and Mississippi Fred McDowell,” Farrar tells Rolling Stone Country. To facilitate that fresh approach this time around, Farrar found inspiration in a few seemingly dissimilar yet sonically complementary sources, most notably the work of two iconic bluesmen, as well as the moody acoustic folk ballads of English songwriter Nick Drake. “Over the years I’ve done a couple blues-oriented songs here and there, but this time around there was an opportunity to focus a bit more on it all the way through.” Finding its aesthetic anchor in the storied blues tradition, Notes of Blue is the eighth studio album from Farrar’s Son Volt, a band who often works to widen the fence posts of the alt-country genre it is often credited with helping establish. ![]() “The title is obviously a nod to the blues, which ended up becoming the framework of this entire record,” states singer-guitarist Jay Farrar about Son Volt‘s adventurous new album Notes of Blue.
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