Louis that comes up in an interview with Farrar a few weeks before the release of Trace, the band’s debut album for Warner Bros., due out September 19th. It’s one of several tiny burgs south of St. Yes, Farrar - population 90, Perry County, Missouri. “Windfall,” “Tear Stained Eye,” “Ten Second News,” “Out of the Picture” and “Too Early” take a turn down rambling dirt roads, where the dust of dobros and fiddles and accordions and steel guitars is carried off by a wind that takes your troubles away, way down into the streets of the smallest towns in America.įlat River. But there comes a time for quiet reflection. Sometimes it’s wide-open stretches of rural two-lane with the pedal to the floor: “Live Free,” “Route,” “Drown,” “Loose String” and “Catching On” burn rubber with the intensity of a desperate man fleeing the scene of disaster. It took some gumption for Tweedy to take the wheel and steer Wilco back onto the highway, but he’s done it.įarrar, meanwhile, has headed for the back roads with Son Volt. Jeff Tweedy and the other Tupelo members have found a new groove as Wilco, mining Tweedy’s more pop-oriented songwriting instincts to a fuller extent, yet still mixing in the traditional instrumentation and influences that made Uncle Tupelo the beacon of a dynamic and substantial country-rock revival. The band appeared to be poised at the brink of a commercial breakthrough when Farrar simply up and split, to the surprise of seemingly everyone except himself. It’s a fitting title for the debut album by Son Volt, the path taken by Jay Farrar after he left Uncle Tupelo in the spring of 1994. Definition number one: A way followed or a path taken. “Trace” - definition eight, Webster’s New World: a) the visible line or spot that moves across the face of a cathode-ray tube b) the path followed by this line or spot. The soft glow of the cathode-ray tube glimmering through cracks in the back of the old black-and-white, fading ever so slowly even after we had switched off the set and drifted into dreams. The flickering embers of a once-blazing fire at summer camp years ago. The slim needle of the AM radio dial in that old Chevy stationwagon, dimly lighting the dashboard as we coasted along the winding river road, heading home from another serene Sunday afternoon at the lake. It’s a warm, incandescent, comforting burnt-orange blur.
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