Robert Connely Farr fires up the hearse and takes you on a midnight cruise through the graveyard in his haunting and cathartic new album Live At Green Auto — premiering exclusively on Tinnitist.
If there ever was a time for the blues, it’s now. And as we all teeter on the precipice of the abyss, B.C. singer-guitarist Farr delivers a soul-baring, life-affirming soundtrack for our freefall into chaos and cataclysm: 11 grim, haunting blasts of pure primal blues coming straight from the Delta headwaters — and from the depths of his personal cataclysm and grief.
“Last year was incredibly hard for me to play anything,” says the Mississippi-born, Vancouver-based bluesman. He spent the early part of the year in his home state down south, tending to his father, who was terminal with Leukemia. “I felt like my father’s death — how he died and walking him through that process — just kind of pulled the rug out from under me. But music has this way of saving me when I’m at my lowest. So I took a few shows just because I knew it would help heal my spirit.”
Farr only played three shows in the wake of his father’s passing. The most recent was an early December supporting slot at Green Auto, an obscure venue in the heart of East Vancouver. “Green Auto is one of our favorite venues,” he says. “It reminds me of the underground back in the day venues you had to find off an alleyway.”
With longtime bandmate / co-conspirator Jay Bundy Johnson (Blue Shadows, Herald Nix) on drums, Farr ripped through a blistering set of Delta and country blues. Along with a slew of originals, he played the new singles Mississippi Mud and Hoot Owl Blues, alongside a few covers from lesser-known Mississippi bluesmen.
Raw and rollicking, loose and rangy, the mesmerizing results of Farr’s dozenth album speak volumes for themselves. Pushed and prodded by JBJ’s ramshackle grooves, Farr’s ruggedly muddy drawl and craggy, rumbling guitar lazily flow like lava — slowly advancing, engulfing and bulldozing everything in its unstoppable path. But like all destruction, it serves as both an end and a new beginning. A rebirth. A cleansing. Perhaps even an exorcism. And in the hands of a no-bullshit practitioner like Farr, the blues are both a relentless reflection of the darkness that pursues us all and the first glimpse of a light that awaits just over the horizon.
“The set was so fun for me,” Farr shares. “I have a lot of anxiety performing live and it’s one of the reasons that I don’t play live much. This night I remember being really anxious — having a hard time even saying hey to people before the set. But as soon as we hit the first song Train Train, I knew we had something fun going on. I really excited to get great takes of our new singles Mississippi Mud and Hoot Owl Blues, that I wrote when I was in Mississippi with my father. Those songs are special to me because he was the first to hear them.”
Now it’s your turn. Crank up Live At Green Auto and let Farr lead you back from the precipice. Sure, it may only be for now. But so what? Ultimately, now is all we have.
