Two years after releasing Union, roots-rock pioneers Son Volt will return with their tenth album Electro Melodier in July. The album features a new group of personal reflections and socio-political songs from frontman Jay Farrar, who originally set out to make a nostalgic record that paid tribute to the music of his youth.
“I wanted to concentrate on the melodies which got me into music in the first place,” Farrar said in a statement. “I wanted politics to take a back seat this time, but it always seems to find a way back in there.”
Farrar spoke to this tendency in his songwriting back in 2017. “I wake up everyday, read the news, and then ask myself, ‘What would Woody Guthrie say about these current times?’” he told Rolling Stone Country just a few months after the 2016 election. “I’ve been writing more songs than usual trying to make sense of what’s going on.”
The first taste of Electro Melodier is “Reverie,” an uptempo, hopeful reflection on persistence and hard-won perspective. “The whirl of time teaches all,” Farrar sings, his voice full of the world-weary optimism he’s preaching in the song.
Electro Melodier will be released July 30th and is rounded out by Son Volt’s current lineup, which includes Mark Spencer, Chris Fame, Mark Patterson and Andrew DuPlantis.
On Send a Prayer My Way, Julien Baker and Mackenzie Scott, who performs as Torres, are falling off the wagon and staring at its wheels; they’re reckoning with regret; they’re wrestling hateful mothers. Longtime listeners of the two artists know that they often lay their struggles at the forefront of their music, from prying at religion to coming to terms with queerness to looking up from a bottle’s bottom.
But here, they come at these themes from a new angle. About five years ago, Scott floated the concept of a country record to Baker, a la Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings—and was surprised when she said yes. “I was worried that Julien would say no, and I cannot stand rejection,” Scott told Garden & Gun. “So I framed it as, ‘Wouldn’t that be hilarious if we made a country record?’ And Julien was like, ‘Oh, hell yeah, I’m gonna send you some demos.’”
Country music played a formative role in both singers’ lives: Scott grew up in Georgia, surrounded by church music and ’90s country; Baker grew up in Tennessee on a steady diet of Merle Haggard and George Jones. (You can check out the duo’s “Cuntry” playlists to see some lasting favorites.) But for the length of their respective careers, they’ve stuck to the rock/indie nexus.
Send a Prayer My Way, the result of their country collaboration, is an examination of religion, drugs, and love set in working-class Southern neighborhoods—both a tribute to their upbringings and an effort to reimagine the genre. At times, the blend of their individual rock styles with country creates something fresh, but some efforts feel more pastiche than inventive.
The album’s obsessed with love, in every iteration—and how much you can make peace with it. Scott opens “Tuesday,” a slow-moving and tender paean to the titular woman, with adoration. But as the song reveals itself to be about queer desire, it also reveals the challenges its narrator faces: the hateful response from her crush’s mother and the mournful self-excoriation that results, all grounded by Baker’s accompaniment on a resonant dobro. “Sugar in the Tank,” meanwhile, is nothing if not self-assured. As Baker repeats “I love you” at the start of each line, underscored by banjo and a Hammond organ, the song ramps up in passion, insistent and rollicking. When it breaks into the chorus, the pair’s voices come together, their twangy vocals layering in an earnest and honest country-pop element with tongue-in-cheek sultriness (“Put a little sugar in the tank,” a nod to queerness too) that cools down cleanly on “I’ll love you all the way.” They thread classic imagery beside the love declarations: They’re “tied up on the train tracks,” “strung out on the drying rack,” and “sitting outside with the engine runnin’.”
“Sylvia," about Scott's beloved dog, is a portrait of stable, enduring love that’s honest, open, and all-encompassing (“A day for me is a week for you/And my life’s already halfway through”), buoyed in warm, adoring harmonies. On “No Desert Flower,” a slow-moving, folksy promise to weather hardships, a more tremulous version of Scott’s voice (often husky on this record) stretches over a soft-strummed, hollow-drummed production.
Certain tracks hark back to the darker hallmarks of Scott and Baker’s songwriting. On opener “Dirt,” Baker is raw in the face of depression and substance abuse; she wryly repeats, “Spend your whole life getting clean/Just to wind up in the dirt.” With its spare, fingerpicked opening that slowly layers in violin and piano and her gentle remarks about observing an unbreakable pattern, it feels like a classic Baker song—the pedal steel representing the only outlier from her usual work.
Despite moments of darkness, Baker and Scott also mix in humor—another country staple—to mixed effect. While the honky-tonk “The Only Marble I’ve Got Left” winks hard at listeners, making “losing your marbles” sound cute and hokey, “Tuesday”—a more serious track, with its discussion of religion-borne homophobia—ends with the music cutting out as Scott sings, “Tell your mama she can go suck an egg.” It's a jarring admonishment that hangs haphazardly over the song’s end. After a serious, introspective rumination, she spits out an unserious, childlike insult—it’s not funny so much as awkward. The same goes for the spoken introduction to closing track “Goodbye Baby,” in which Scott tells Baker a lewd joke (with a censored punchline). It feels like a classic setup: studio banter caught on the record by accident. It’s silly, and fine—except it’s utterly disconnected from the song itself.
Baker and Scott wanted to honor the genre that was entwined with their upbringing, but since that’s not quite the music they’ve spent their careers perfecting, the shoehorned-in motifs—like spoken-word-as-comedy—can come across less authentic. Maybe Baker and Scott will, inspired by this experience, incorporate more elements of country music into their songwriting going forward. Or maybe making this album will be a flash in the pan for them both, like a Stetson you try on that ultimately doesn’t fit. Still, their reimagination of the genre incorporates queerness in a way that traditional country music often bucks against—which makes it, warts and all, an important entry in the style’s expansion.
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