Amy Farris joins a rather elite group of female singer-songwriter fiddle players — including Alison Krauss and Farris’ Yep Roc labelmate Caitlin Cary — with her debut, Anyway. This CD does a good job of introducing the artist by showcasing the wide variety of styles in her repertoire. In addition to her own songs, she covers with aplomb acts as diverse as the Ames Brothers and X.
The classically trained Farris first came to my attention while playing fiddle and singing harmony with Texas alt-country crooner Kelly Willis, with whom she has recorded and toured. She actually met Willis while playing in the band of Willis’ husband, Bruce Robison, and she starts things off here with a cover of Robison’s “Driving All Night.” It’s a mid-tempo folky country song in which the protagonist is on the road to find a wronged lover. Farris’ soaring vocals on the dramatic bridge are nicely offset by her lovely viola break, something you don’t hear too often in country music.
She follows with another road song of sorts, her own number “Heading East,” propelled by her driving, Charlie Daniels-southern-rock fiddling.
Farris’ voice is as malleable as her selection of styles, from the nasal, Betty Boop affectation she employs on the swing standard “Undecided,” to the Kitty Wells-style twang on “Pretty Dresses,” to a husky contralto on her own numbers, like “Let Go.” And her fiddling also ranges from the near-classical style on the opening track and the Daniels-like sawing, to multi-tracked Texas swing in the Bob Wills style on “Pretty Dresses” and a Michael Doucet-like Cajun romp on her sultry, bluesy swamp-pop number, “My Heart’s Too Easy to Break.”
She turns the X song “Poor Girl” into a country shuffle, with producer and former X-man Dave Alvin tossing in some surf-style reverb-laden guitar; most interesting here is Farris’ double-tracked violin-viola break that effectively echoes the matched vocals of Exene Cervenka and John Doe on the original.
In addition to Alvin turning the knobs and playing lots of electric guitar, Farris has a top-notch crew of session players, including Rick Shea on steel and slide guitars (who throws in some nifty Red Rhodes-like “I Fall to Pieces” licks on “Pretty Dresses”) and Skip Edwards on keyboards and accordion. Alvin’s baritone guitar evokes James Burton on the country-rock title track, on which Farris sings lovely three-part harmonies with herself. And Shea cops a riff from the Sixties psychedelic hit “Heart Full of Soul” on Farris’ composition “No Exit,” whose lyrics quote none other than Sartre.
Farris herself completes this tour through American music genres with the lightly swinging jazz of “Hard to Say” and the slow, torchy ballad “Big Louise.”
In a couple of places, particularly on “Undecided,” Farris’ classical violin training seems to override her need to swing on the fiddle, playing straight sixteenths where there ought to be some syncopation. And Alvin’s hand is a little heavy in the production at times, particularly with the layers of echo on Farris’ vocals.
Anyway is an impressive debut. It’ll be interesting to see if Farris continues to employ such an extremely catholic approach to recording, or chooses to focus on perfecting a more limited number of styles.
(Yep Rock, 2004)
