By Paul Singh Kahlon
Daily Bruin Contributor
As Jay Farrar jammed through the Beatles’ “Love You
To,” and walked offstage to conclude their second encore
during last Saturday night’s show at Hollywood’s
Knitting Factory, the audience, naturally, began to leave.
The house lights, however, remained dim and those that began
making their way to the exits found themselves stopping in the back
of the small room and joining the remainder of the crowd in an
intense pounding and clapping session, wildly encouraging the
musicians to come back for yet another encore.
Not only did Farrar and versatile guitarist, Mark Spencer of the
“Blood Oranges,” come back for a third encore, they
returned for both a fourth and a fifth time as well.
And those that stayed were in for a strange, yet memorable
musical treat.
Farrar and Spencer seemed to grow with eagerness and intensity
as the encores unfurled, subtly breaking from their initially
mellow shells and taking the show in an entirely unexpected
direction.
The duo became a trio, as opening act Brian Henneman from the
Bottle Rockets stumbled out with whiskey in hand and an excited
fatuousness on his face.
The trio spiritedly performed Neil Young’s “Roll
Another Number (for the road),” and the crowd responded
ecstatically to the musicians, as the three in a sense simply
became ““ like the audience ““ drunken music lovers.
During the Neil Young cover, the equipment began to short out
and Henneman, in between verses, humorously proclaimed, “The
equipment always seems to break when I come on the
stage.”
In spite of the technical difficulties, the spontaneous trio
kept on rolling.
They returned yet again for their fourth encore, in which they
continued to pay tribute to their inspirational Southern ancestry.
They played traditional blues ballads with Farrar grasping a
harmonica and an inebriated Henneman picking his electric guitar
with refreshing soul.
The show, which began as a mellow and modestly emotional
performance by Farrar and his versatile accompanist, evolved into a
sincere dialogue between the musicians and the audience.
Touring in support of the release of his first solo project,
“Sebastopol,” Farrar sings songs whose lyrics
predominantly stray from traditional norms. Instead of saturating
his songwriting with specific personal emotions, he paints
expansive pictures of rich atmospheres and concrete landscapes.
Farrar is clearly not enslaved by the oftentimes stifling
process of finding the perfect words or the exact emotions to tell
the listener how to feel. Farrar keeps his distance and writes with
a palate of concealed subjectivity, one that more often than not
becomes more expressive as a whole.
Farrar’s distinct style of songwriting encourages
introspective listening.
Moreover, the musician’s calculated movement in and out of
his two distinct lyrical styles kept Saturday’s crowd engaged
and intrigued.
He mixed the soft sincerity of his new songs from
“Sebastopol,” with the angst that emerged in many of
his older songs, including Saturday’s crowd favorites,
“Tear Stained Eye,” and “Route.”
The L.A. audience appeared to be relatively familiar with
Farrar’s songs, which may be surprising considering
Farrar’s lack of mainstream play and the critical urge to
exclusively bunch him in with the ambiguous southern and midwest
“alt-rock” scene.
Those that weren’t familiar with the music in the
beginning, however, seemed to respond to the purity of the guitar
driven show. Although the songs in the first set remained
meditative and even-tempered, the audience seemed to stay with it
and was rewarded in the end with upbeat and familiar melodic
encores.
In addition, those unable to remain focused on Farrar’s
expansive lyrics found solace in Spencer’s versatile and
majestic playing of several styles of guitar (including the lap
steel) and also his turns on the piano. The changes in
Spencer’s instruments helped keep the show interesting and
entertaining.
The surprising performance proved that those searching for
something different, something that doesn’t provide an
instant answer, can find comfort in Farrar’s songs. There are
no empty similes (with the exception perhaps of a few mislaid
choruses) and, in essence, Farrar puts his artistry out there in an
interesting, sometimes flawed, yet often delicate way, to produce
live music that feels refreshingly free.