But if Honky Tonk‘s heart rests anywhere, it is on the West Coast, and not just in “Bakersfield,” one of the album’s better tracks. “Hearts and Minds” and “Brick Walls” also build from a double fiddle bed. The song “Seawall” mentions West Virginia and Kingman, Arizona, and features the double fiddle indicative of Texas. Honky Tonk draws its influences from across the American country music landscape. Honky Tonk is way more Jason Eady than Jason Isbell, featuring simplified, classic country stories, steel guitar and fiddle, and a revivalist spirit that champions the idea that the classic country sound will always be relevant as long as working-class people gather in beer joints for camaraderie, conversation, and commiseration. But instead of trying to figure out how to ride that popularity wave, Farrar and Son Volt release an album that is so doggone country, you could almost call it conceptualized. Maybe, just maybe, classic country is cool again.Īs one of the original members of Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt frontman Jay Farrar is one of the forebearers of the alt-country sound that now has morphed into the all-encompassing Americana behemoth that here in 2013 is enjoying a meteoric rise in influence. As the enlightened country music public was attempting to ingest all the recent offerings from a cavalcade of female artists doing their part to save country music like Holly Williams, Kacey Musgraves and Ashley Monroe, alt-country legacy band Son Volt released a fiercely classic country album themselves called Honky Tonk, proving that the resurgence of real country is multipronged, multisex, and multigenre.
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