It's been over 15 years since
Uncle Tupelo broke up, and playing compare and contrast with
Jay Farrar and
Jeff Tweedy's subsequent work has ceased to be a rewarding pastime, but it's hard not to be amused or intrigued with the nature of this particular project. In 1998,
Tweedy and his band
Wilco teamed up with
Billy Bragg to create
Mermaid Avenue, an album in which they composed and performed music set to unpublished lyrics by legendary songwriter
Woody Guthrie.
Mermaid Avenue was a critical success that helped solidify
Wilco's reputation as one of the best bands to emerge from the Americana movement, and since then, the
Guthrie estate has worked with artists as diverse as
the Klezmatics,
Rob Wasserman, and
Corey Harris to marry
Woody's words to new melodies. In 2011,
Farrar was approached to create an album around more of
Guthrie's unseen verses, and just as
Wilco worked with
Billy Bragg,
Farrar has teamed up with three other musicians with a rootsy bent to write and record
New Multitudes. Along with
Farrar,
New Multitudes features
Yim Yames (less pretentiously known as
Jim James of
My Morning Jacket),
Will Johnson (of
Centro-Matic and
South San Gabriel), and
Anders Parker (of
Varnaline and a previous collaboration with
Farrar,
Gob Iron), and not surprisingly, each track reflects the personality of the man who sang it and set it to music, despite the consistent themes and rhythms of the lyrics.
Yames sounds like the rumpled romantic of the group on tunes like "Talking Empty Bed Blues" and "My Revolutionary Mind" (the latter of which finds
Woody asking the fates for a good Leftist woman),
Johnson brings a road-worn sincerity to "No Fear" and "Chorine My Sheba Queen" and a sense of tragedy to "VD City," and
Parker's guitar work is as potent and as eloquent as the lyrics on "Angel's Blues" and "Old L.A." As for
Farrar, the force of his vocals and angular melodies is so strong that he manages to strip
Guthrie's personality almost entirely from his tunes -- the cadences, wordplay, and homespun intelligence of
Guthrie's lyrics shine through the nooks and crannies of
Yames,
Johnson, and
Parker's performances, but
Farrar sounds like he's singing
Son Volt outtakes, enough so that without reading the liner notes, you'd never guess one of the greatest and most idiosyncratic American songwriters of the 20th century had a hand in them.
Mermaid Avenue captured many facets of
Woody Guthrie's creative and personal life in its songs, but always with a very human sense of joy and commitment.
New Multitudes, on the other hand, aims for a darker and more introspective tone, and when
Farrar takes center stage, he unwittingly reveals his Achilles' Heel -- no matter who he works with, he insists on dominating the musical conversation, and when his co-writer has been dead since 1967, there's not much hope for any real balance. ~ Mark Deming
