This week, Son Volt shared the opening track off their new album, Honky Tonk, an 11-track set inspired by classic Bakersfield country records of the 1950s. Of the many artists oft-cited as an influence from that region in California’s Central Valley (from Buck Owens and Merle Haggard to 1970s greats like Gram Parsons), Jay Farrar took particular note of Ralph Mooney, whose pedal steel playing inspired the Son Volt frontman to revisit the instrument for the first time since “Windfall” on 1995’s Trace. An influential artist in his own right, it’s great to hear Farrar pay homage to a few forebears, and “Hearts and Minds” above should prove to any fan that dusting off the genre was a rewarding move. In this quote from Rolling Stone, he offered an interesting way to consider the track’s pair of fiddles:
“The sound of one fiddle alone is kind of a transcendent sound; it takes you back a couple hundred years, but you put two fiddles together and it creates this natural chorus effect because the pitch is just a little bit different on each one. It’s both transcendent and elusive.”
The LP arrives on March 5th, but also due next month is a memoir from the former Uncle Tupelo co-leader, titled Falling Cars and Junkyard Dogs: A Portrait of a Musical Life. Here are the record’s other titles:
Honky Tonk Tracklist
01. “Hearts and Minds”
02. “Brick Walls”
03. “Wild Side”
04. “Down the Highway”
05. “Bakersfield”
06. “Livin’ On”
07. “Tears of Change”
08. “Angel of the Blues”
09. “Seawall”
10. “Barricades”
11. “Shine On”