NEW MULTITUDES

Jay Farrar, Jim James, Anders Parker, and Will Johnson celebrate Woody Guthrie’s centennial

By Matt Ashare

New Multitudes, New Multitudes (Rounder)

It’s hard to imagine that Son Volt singer/guitarist Jay Farrar and My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James (a/k/a Yim Yames) weren’t at least thinking about the current state of affairs in this country when they were invited, along with Anders Parker (Varnaline) and Will Johnson (Centro-matic), to cull through the vast archive of unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics by his daughter Nora. The idea was for the four alt-country fellow travelers to join forces on an album that would bring those lyrics to musical life to mark the centennial celebration of Woody’s birth year.

         That year has come. And the album, New Multitudes, has arrived with fairly minimal hype at a time when Occupy Wall Street is still going strong, during a week that began with seemingly tone-deaf Republican presidential hopeful making news with a rather bone-headed remark at the Daytona 500. In case you haven’t heard, when asked if he followed auto racing, Mitt Romney responded, “Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans. But I have some great friends that are NASCAR team owners.” Maybe he was just kidding. But given the size of his bank account, not to mention his Super PAC, it’s not all that funny.

         So whether or not Farrar, James, Parker, and Johnson, who are touring under the moniker New Multitudes, meant to drop a populist smartbomb in the midst of a our on-going recession and one of the nastiest political climates in recent memory, they’ve succeeded. Because, while the real Woody Guthrie was a complicated artist who wrote all kinds of songs, the mythical Woody Guthrie lives on as the activist Dust Bowl Troubadour who penned “This Land Is Our Land,” scrawled “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar, and, in contemporary parlance, trumpeted the cause of the 99%.

         Farrar and his crew aren’t the first songwriters to be given access to the Guthrie archives. Jeff Tweedy, Farrar’s former bandmate in Uncle Tupelo, and his band Wilco, joined forces with British punk-folkster Billy Bragg on two albums that set unpublished Guthrie lyrics to music, 1998’s Mermaid Avenue and 2000’s Mermaid Avenue Vol. II. And Guthrie’s been a major influence on socially conscious artist since Bob Dylan first coopted the Dust Bowl Troubadour mantle back in his freewheeling folk days. Clash rabble-rouser Joe Strummer originally dubbed himself Woody Mellor in Guthrie’s honor. And Bruce Springsteen, an avowed Guthrie acolyte, has been known to pull out “This Land Is Your Land” from time to time, most memorably on his album Live 1975-1985.

         But New Multitudes, through no fault of their own, have arrived at a time when simply invoking the legacy of Woody Guthrie carries a moral weight that would be difficult to quantify. To their credit, though, they don’t get mired in anything too heavy handedly dogmatic or overtly preachy. Farrar kicks off the album with the meditative “Hoping Machine,” a slow building rocker he delivers with characteristic world-weariness as he winds his way through lyrics like “Word is the music and the people are the song” until his fellow singers join in on the open-ended punch line “Out of order,” a sentiment that could apply to just about anything in the broken-down world the song inhabits.

         Elsewhere, Parker, who played with Farrar in the band Gob Iron, takes the lead on the acoustic “Fly High,” a straightforwardly folky, poetic rumination on a troubled romance sung from the window seat of cross-country flight. And, Johnson is at the helm for the album’s hardest hitting number, the unmistakably Springsteen-styled “V.D. City,” a place populated by skid row denizens where “nobody knows you by name,” harmonicas blare, and overdriven guitars tangle a friendly fight to an anthemic finish.

It’s James who tackles what might be the album’s most outwardly partisan tune, the spare, fragile, and bluesy “My Revolutionary Mind,” a forlorn love ballad or sorts that culminates around a gently sung, if somewhat bemusing chorus: “I need a progressive woman/I need an awfully liberal woman/I need a socially conscious woman/To ease my revolutionary mind.” And Farrar manages with relative ease to invest the disc’s simple title track with a solemnity of a secular prayer. Against a backdrop of strummed acoustic guitars, he intones “Gonna win my battle for peace,” “Gonna build my world over,” “Gonna build my world with love,” turning what sound like scribbled thoughts into a coherent and powerful statement of purpose.

That said, the real strength of New Multitudes is the balance Farrar, James, Parker, and Johnson bring to the project, both in terms of the music they’ve set Guthrie’s words to, and the glimpses we’re given into Guthrie’s world. There are deep thoughts, dark images, and serious moments here. But there are also bright spots like R.E.M.-ish jangle of “Old L.A.,” an ode to an oft maligned city sung by Parker in a manner that brings to mind Michael Stipe. And just having the opportunity to hear Farrar and James spar on guitar should be enough to bring a smile to the face of contemporary Americana fans.

It’s hard to know exactly what Farrar, James, Parker, and Johnson went digging for when Guthrie’s notebooks were open to them. But they appear to have found it.