“5 Songs” With John Faraone

There is not much I love more as it relates to music or musicians than sitting down with someone and figuring out where they are coming from. Either just by sitting and talking about a song or their influences or exploring how someone interprets music by playing alongside them. There is an intimacy to both of those things that is incredibly rewarding if you just take the time to explore it. I could listen to 20 records a day and write some sort of opinion about them, but its the digging into someone’s mind and heart that is where the real interest lays for me personally…so I give you a new feature here on Red Line Roots called 5 Songs. It’s simple, really, an artist chooses 5 songs. Songs that, at some point in their life (it could be yesterday or 15 years ago), made a profound impact on them as a music lover or artist. We then dig a bit deeper and talk about why.

Photo credit: Ryan Lang

John Faraone has an elegant simplicity to his songs. To have to materialize it, I would say there is a faded film quality in his words and melodies. They are curious and intriguing. Beautiful and haunting. His 2013 release, Houses, was a gorgeously poignant exercise in exploring human emotion and almost a meditation embedded into music. There is a sadness, but a light. 

“I never tire of listening to these songs despite the unhurried nature of the tunes, there is certainly an energy here…”

We asked Faraone to be our first in the 5 Songs feature and it was quite an adventure and eye opening experience into a fantastic songwriter who’s next release is just on the horizon. Stay tuned for that, keep an eye on his website out for more info and in the meanwhile, let’s get digging into 5 Songs…

JF: Okay, this was not easy. Here are the songs that I pick today, January 11, 2017. These could easily change daily, but this is today:

1a. Ryan Adams – Avalanche

1b. Ryan Adams – Strawberry Wine

(owing my entire musical life to the man, I could not pick just one song)

2. Tori Amos – Winter

3. Uncle Tupelo – Wherever

4. Songs: Ohia – Hold On, Magnolia

5. Neil Young – Out On The Weekend

Mind you, these are not necessarily my favorite songs – I don’t think such a thing exists. These are songs I can think of that are particularly significant to my writing.

RLR: In terms of Ryan Adams, I would think that a lot of artists falling under the “folk” umbrella would choose something from him (but perhaps something off of Heartbreaker or even Stranger’s Almanac form the Whiskeytown days). I personally really love the mood and kind of gloominess of 29. What is it about “Strawberry Wine” that drew you in?

Likewise, on Love is Hell, “Avalanche” isn’t necessarily a track that really ever stood out to me. It feels a bit more like a deep cut than say “House is not for Sale” or “English Girls” or the cover of that song…you know which one. Do you find it to be one of the standouts on a pretty lengthy record and why?

JF: Both great questions. “Strawberry Wine” was the first song I ever played live, back in 2011 or 2012 I think, at an open mic. “Avalanche” is definitely one of my favorite songs by him, maybe by anyone, but I put it on this list specifically because it’s the only song I’m aware of, for me, that from note 1 will immediately transport me to a specific time in my life, and more so a specific day in my life – not a particularly good time or day, but a relevant one. That feeling of being emotionally transported is uncanny and unnerving, but equally amazing.

RLR: Tori Amos was a surprise to me for you. But I guess a song like “Winter”, of longing and the changing of the seasons fits, especially now with actual winter setting in. Is there a specific line from that song that really speaks to you? I have one but am curious what it is for you?

JF: Winter was the first, maybe only song I’ve ever heard that physically makes my heart hurt. I didn’t know sounds and words could make you feel things like that, it damn near terrified me. The line that sticks out for me is “when you gonna love you as much as I do?” which is just like the most heartbreaking scenario for a human. She also does this flutter with her voice, not like her regular vibrato, on words like “sleeping beauty” and “you must learn to stand up” that sound like when someone is trying to talk and cry at the same time. It takes your breath away, but in almost a violent way, not in a sweet sort of way. I can only listen to that song occasionally, I think maybe once a year, like a prescription, then I have to go away from it.

RLR: ‘See the lonely boy, out on the weekend…’ that to me elicits a real specific image in my head and it’s songs that do this that really draw me in. But perhaps that one image in my head is MY image of that song and someone else’s is a different one….it’s still magic to me how that happens. Your words “She gets sick when she drinks whiskey, but she has a good time / she only smokes cheap cigarettes and loves expensive wine” does something similar for me without painting a blatant and obvious picture with something like “she is sitting in a blue room and wearing a red dress and its hazy” I have a vivid image of this woman. You nail that in your lyrics for me. Obviously Neil is one of “the greats”, what kind of influence has his writing or his musical aesthetic played on your own tunes and writing style (if any)?

JF: I self-recorded as much of my new record as  I could, and I spent an ungodly amount of time obsessively researching the processes of albums that I love. Harvest was one that I was actually able to find a lot of information on, more than I thought I’d find. Aside from the great songwriting, everything about that record is a masterpiece, even the mistakes. The color of the cover and the artwork, I have it on peach colored vinyl, the first edition from Holland, I think, which is just bananas cool. That package of songwriting and art and content was a huge influence for my new record. It really got me into the record as artifact mentality. It just makes me happy to hold it and look at it while I listen to it, and I want to make something like that. The opening song, Out On The Weekend, with a good pair of headphones is just the  coolest. I think it’s actually the last song they recorded during the sessions, but in my opinion, it’s one of, if not the best album openers of all time. I played a lot of the instruments on this new record myself, but I had some other more talented friends play the things I couldn’t. Everything was overdubbed, and I think that will be one of my biggest regrets about this record. There’s something missing when you don’t have a band just playing all together at once.  On Out On The Weekend, you feel like you’re in the room with them, if you close your eyes, you can see Neil’s harmonica holder hit the windscreen after the first chorus. It might sound crazy, but I feel like I can see them all looking at each other for changes. Neil would show them a song, and then they’d record it, and that was it. One, maybe two takes. Just an absolutely brilliant song and record.

RLR: ‘Hold on Magnolia’…how old are you, where are you and what is your mood when this song makes an impact?

JF: I discovered Jason Molina way too late in my life. Had it been earlier, I can certainly say it would have changed lots of things. He died right around the time I started playing music live, around 2013 or so. Since the day he died, I’ve played ‘Hold On Magnolia’ in every one of my live sets. I read somewhere, and it may not be true, that he wrote it during a tough time in his life, and somewhere on the road seeing this magnolia plant getting whipped around by wind and rain and wanting to save it but knowing he couldn’t stop the storm. I think it’s a genius anthropomorphic examination of his own life, and when I sing it live, I’m singing it to myself. Lines like “no one has to be that strong, but if you’re stubborn like me, I know you’ll try to be,” really hit home. Curiously, on the album version, he sings “but if you’re stubborn like me, I know what you’re trying to be,” but in the demo version, he sings “but if you’re stubborn like me, I know you’ll try to be.” I prefer the rough demo version, which is included on the reissue of Magnolia Electric Co. As a songwriter, Molina is one of my biggest influences.

RLR: Uncle Tupelo is pretty much synonymous with the genre of Americana before it was even called Americana music. The band is a bit symbolic of a lot of us who are maybe to country for rock or too rock for country or maybe trying to find out fit between genres. I look at lyrics like:

You say, “Hey, what’s that mean”

Make it sound so simple

And you say, “Hey, what’s that mean”

Don’t make it sound so simple

in that tune I am kind of like “what the hell is Tweedy even talking about” do you find it to be a tune that you know exactly what the writer is trying to say or is it a feeling of discombobulation that speaks to you? Is it the words or the sonic aesthetics of the band that made you choose it? Or perhaps that relation of finding where you fit?

JF: The song Wherever by Tupelo has a lot of history in it for me, history that precedes me first hearing the song. It took a very long time for my wife and I to go on a date, quite literally a decade. We’d been friends for that length of time, but she lived in so many far away places that we just never connected at the right time. She lived in Argentina for years, and Spain, among others. When I first heard that song, it was everything I felt for all of those years. When we did cross paths, I always wanted it to be more than it was. A coffee was always just a coffee. It had to be, because she’d be leaving the next day for who knows how long. There’s a line in the song that stands out to me, and what’s interesting about it is that it changes the entire dynamic of the song depending on where you put the quotation marks. Every secondary source I’ve seen lists it as:

When you say “Hey what’s that mean?”

Don’t make it sound so simple.

The placement of the quotation marks renders it pretty meaningless. But I hear it as:

When you say “hey,” what’s that mean?

Don’t make it sound so simple.

That, to me, is one of the more heartbreaking lyrics I’ve heard. I know what a simple “hey” or “hi” sounds like, when you want it to mean a hell of a lot more.

Since it’s a B-side, I don’t know that official lyrics exist, I’ve always been curious, which, as I now write that, sounds a little too nerdy fanboy. But really, it doesn’t matter. That’s what’s great about art, we get to make it mean what we want. Death of the Author, and all that stuff…

Anyway, I became pretty obsessed with that song, and I may be mistaken, but I think it was the first song I ever recorded. Early Garageband in my parents’ basement, I’m pretty sure I played all the parts, though I don’t think I had access to a bass, but maybe. I know I did drums and acoustic and electric guitars. I wonder if it still exists? It’s probably quite terrible, but that was my foray into home recording. I showed it to my wife, though many years after the fact…