Son Volt’s new album is on the way next month and our over-excitement isn’t being helped by the drip drip of material from the record, including now a new video which focuses on the daily grind of being working musicians in their new video for the track ‘Devil May Care’, which premiered yesterday on Rolling Stone Country. RS describes the track as “Cruising along with breezy acoustic strumming, the carefree Americana tune soundtracks a montage of road scenes, featuring frontman Jay Farrar and his longstanding alt-country crew moving from gig to gig. The vintage-hued footage unfolds like a scrapbook of tour memories with shots of highway signs, stage time and laughs over backstage beers.
While much of Union examines the country’s current state of divisiveness, Farrar wrote “Devil May Care” as a respite from the discord. Lyrically, he has some fun with the minutiae of gear setups and other little observations that come with being a musical lifer, singing lines like, “Harmonic fidelity boost high pass filter on a balanced line, or a cigarette on a headstock, all the same just make it rhyme.”
“That is the essence of what a band is,” Farrar said in a release. “You remember, ‘Wait a minute, music is supposed to make you throw your burdens to the wind,’ so I tried to include that approach as well.””
To us the songs sound like classic Son Volt, more so than anything from their last record, as delightful as that was. Keep an eye out for a review on AUK next month.
