Jay Farrar and Anders Parker roll on in a Life worth livin'

It's not that Jay Farrar doesn't like what he does. It's just that the wear and tear of it all can become a bit much. Farrar, former leader of alternative-country ring-bearers Uncle Tupelo and his own Son Volt, is only a week into his month-long East and Midwest tour with Anders Parker, the man behind the more independent alternative-country outfit, Varnaline. And it's clear Farrar is not reveling in the tedium of touring and promotion. Unfortunately, he has a long way to go.\n"(This tour) will run at least through December," Farrar says in his signature laid-back monotone. "We'll probably be doing some West Coast touring after that and some European touring after that. So probably through the summer we'll be touring on and off." \nSpeaking on a cell phone from the road, just a few weeks before he will roll into Bloomington on Tuesday with Farrar, Parker can relate.\n"Touring can be grueling," Parker says. "The actual in and out of the truck and hotel rooms and stuff like that, it wears thin after a while, to be perfectly honest. But it's part of the game."\nThis is no doubt -- music is these guys' profession. It's what they do and what they will continue to do. For Farrar, this time it's a bit different. For the first time in his music career, dating back to his first LP with Uncle Tupelo in 1990, he is on his own out in support of his first solo album, Sebastopol (Fellow Guard/Artemis). \nThe album, while remaining true to Farrar's down-home songwriting and old-school-country with classic-pop sensibilities, presents Farrar surrounded by a multi-instrumental, collaborative ensemble. His desire with Sebastopol was to spread his musical wings and incorporate more than the traditional guitar, bass, drums and occasional slide-guitar of his past work. And he's done that successfully with collaborators such as Lou Winer on saxophone, his brother Dade on bowed stand-up bass and the Flaming Lips' Steven Drodze on piano, sythesizers and melodica.\n"I knew that I wanted to try some different instrumentation and different arrangements," Farrar says. "But I don't think it's a shock for anybody who hears it. There are elements in there that you could probably find on a Beatles record from the 1960s or something."\nAdd to this his use of slack guitar keys (appropriated from Hawaiian slack key guitarists and blues players) and the alternate tunings he made up from either letting his guitars find the tunings themselves "just from getting banged around" or from "experimenting until something sounded good," and what you've got is a set of songs that run the gamut from the traditionally bluesy to the synth-driven.\nParker, on the other hand, already comes from a more experimental, independent mindset. His albums vacillate between a solo, home-recorded style and a fuller band sound. \nHis latest album, under the band moniker Varnaline, is essentially a solo effort, with Parker incorporating extra players only where the songs need them -- a pump organ or a trombone here, an extra vocalist or acoustic bass there. But all in all, Songs in a Northern Key (E-Squared/Artemis) is a vast collection of images and nature symbolism. The overall feel seems to be one of quiet solitude and introspection. And even for a man who's invoked the famous quoted line that writing about music is like dancing about architecture in the first sentence of his album's press release, Parker does believe Songs in a Northern Key is held together by some conceptual glue, possibly exemplified by the album's opener.\n"To me, the first song, 'Still Dream' is about (how) in the face of whatever hurdles you may encounter in life or however things change, you still have that desire for magic," he says. "Things that were important are still important …To me, it's about moving and transforming and leaving things behind. That, to me, is the conceptual thread."\nThere are a lot of similarities in the respective works of Parker and Farrar. Both have an affinity for cozy down-home textures and both are very passionate about their art. Both are also consistently lumped into the alternative-country, or alt.country, categorization. But don't ask these guys to justify the use of the label.\n"It's just another sort of musical ghetto name," Parker says. "It seems like some people are content to say, 'Oh, it's an alt.country thing'…To me, it all goes back to, 'Hey, is the song any good?' And whatever style it's written in is secondary."\nBut Farrar, with Jeff Tweedy (now of Wilco), has probably been the key figure in the labeling's conception. Their band, Uncle Tupelo, came along in 1990 and blew the doors off country music with its punk-inflected tunes and liberated writing style. Now that first album, No Depression, even gives its title to a mainstream magazine lauding the alt.country style. The man almost single-handedly created a genre. But he'd sooner side with Parker.\n"It's unfortunate," says Farrar of the much maligned moniker. "I understand why people feel there's a need for a label. But from a musician's perspective, it's more often than not undesirable."\nBut for whatever animosity these two might have toward alt.country, it hasn't shown in their work. These are two men who have never let their artistic vision be compromised. \nAsk Joe McEwen, head of Fellow Guard Records and Farrar's A&R man of eight years, who was incidentally also responsible for signing both Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt to Warner Brothers Records. \n"(Farrar) has a pretty good sense of what he wants to do, and he's open to some suggestions. But basically he has a vision, and he follows his vision as all real artists do," McEwen says.\nNo matter, his style is unique and distinct. McEwen describes it as the salt-of-the-earth. \n"It's a very American voice," McEwen says. "And it's not particularly attached to any one era of rock and roll. It could have happened in 1971 or in the 1960s and it would have fit in."\nTalk with John Agnello, who has worked as engineer, producer, recorder or mixer for such artists as Dinosaur Jr., the Breeders, Mark Lanegan and Buffalo Tom, among others. Agnello both co-produced and mixed Sebastopol and he has worked with Parker and Varnaline in the past. Having just caught the Farrar/Parker show in New York City, Agnello cannot even contain his enthusiasm -- mostly for Farrar's set of pipes.\n"It's just awesome," Agnello says. "As soon as he opens his mouth it's incredible. He could bang on a tin can and sing along and it would be great."\nWith such glowing endorsements from a couple guys who have been around the musical block themselves, you'd think Farrar, and Parker by association, would have heads the size of watermelons. But once again, it's not so. Parker's future sees more writing and recording. \n"I feel like there are so many records to be made and things that I want to do," Parker says excitedly. "I guess the immediate thing is that I want to get better at playing piano. But other than that, I have a 60-record discography coming up in my head so there's a lot of work to be done. And other than that, I guess the biggest thing is that I'd like to hike the Appalachian Trail sometime in my life."\nFarrar says he held some tracks from Sebastopol to be included on an upcoming EP. He is also currently going through the Uncle Tupelo archives for a forthcoming anthology CD. Nevertheless, he too seems grounded. So what's next for Farrar in terms of musical aspirations or other?\n"I don't know if I even have musical aspirations," Farrar says. "Other than that it's something that I've been doing for a long time and probably will continue to do. But yeah, I probably would like to do more fishing"