I’ve been thinking about Folk Music a lot the past few days.

What is considered Folk? What is Folk? For most people, the sole qualification of Folk is: no electricity. Like most categorizing, I think that’s too narrow (and too wrong) of an assessment. Most Folk Music, regardless of the country of origin, is still essentially what I consider to be Pop Music: a catchy melody, verse, chorus, verse. Pop music is safe. It’s one big safety net that transcends culture and time itself. People know what to expect and that’s part of the reason why they like it. I was in an Irish Pub the other week on a Friday and there was a fella playing what he called ‘Irish Folk Music’. Yet what I heard instead was Pop Music: a catchy melody, verse, chorus, verse…but with the distinguishable feature of being sung with an Irish Accent.

Red Collar is of course just Pop Music too. It’s loud, yes. But it’s essentially a melody with verse chorus verse. I like Pop Music. I like the confines of Pop Music. Isn’t most music that you know of just Pop Music but maybe with degrees of loud and soft? I bet most Folk Music is really just Pop Music even though fans of folk music pride themselves in appreciating it because they attribute other characteristics to make it something more than it is like “It’s earthy” or “It’s true” or “It’s traditional”. I would argue that the traditional songs, the foundation of folk songs, only survived without the modern convenience of recording because they are/were ‘Pop’-ular or Pop Music: Pirate songs, Irish Folk Music, Sailor Songs, Slave Songs, Roots Music, Religious Music, Work Music.

Beth and I went to a party a few years ago and the people at the party were passing around the acoustic and playing songs, all having a good time. I got to talking with the ringleader of this group, an intellectual type (goatee’ and beret…I’m not making this up), and eventually Red Collar came up. He asked me about the band and also asked why, if I played guitar and sang, did I not play for everyone in the circle. I jested about liking the safety net of feedback and a distorted guitar and he shrugged and rolled his eyes:

“I don’t need any of that. Just me and this guitar”

I think that a lot of people who play or appreciate folk music kind of have that attitude: that it’s for and by folks with some higher consciousness, that they’re braver or something. Cause folk music is truth. Folk music is pure. Naked and honest, man. No safety net.

I’d argue that the safety net of Pop Music is awfully big and most folk heroes that I know of do their balancing act directly above that very big cushy net. You can talk to me all you want about Dylan this and Dylan that but the man played what boils down to Pop Music. Just like Red Collar. Just like Brittney Spears. They may not have any bells or whistles and distortion and feedback but the kind of Folk Music people play is not Truth. It’s not Pure. It’s not Naked. It’s contrived and safe and still based on the confines and shackles of verse chorus verse and some catchy melody and probably some unchanged chord arrangement that is literally hundreds of years old.

Honest? If only Truth and Purity were so easy.

To actually play folk music, to commit to the idea of Earthiness, to commit wholeheartedly to what Folk Music means and implies: the music of ‘folks’ not machines. Instruments only available or affordable or created by poor folk. Voices in harmony, strengthening one another because there simply is no Public Address system. No microphone. No safety net. Earthy and traditional. Pure. No blueprint. Before food came from a can. Instruments created without machinery. Hand-crafted. Before we forgot how to walk. From the roots. Grown. Organic. From the earth. Truth. Naked. Honest. To really play this music of the earth through and through…

Well…in the end for me to just hear what boils down to Pop Music after all this hippy dippy horseshit rigmarole is just a disappointment because I think people are plain cheating me.

I only ever want bands to do one thing: keep it honest. Or save my mortal soul. Whichever comes first.

Let me tell you about a band that did both.

I saw a band in Austin and it greatly affected me and I’m still thinking about it. I hope not too much. It was one of those situations where it’s the right band and the right time and the right venue. And I was anything but cheated.

Red Collar played for a North Carolina Band Showcase organized by Wendy from Felix Obelix . The event, like most of the better shows at SXSW, was held at someone’s house. Annuals, Lonnie Walker, Felix Obelix, The Physics of Meaning and Red Collar were on the bill. But it was the band that started the day that really affected me.
Megafaun.

I’ve seen them more than a handful of times before. In fact, I saw them the day before at another venue. Now here they were in someone’s backyard on a perfect spring day. Acoustic instruments. Gorgeous harmonies. What they do is not some limp form of Pop Music with acoustic instruments but what I think may be True Folk Music and when I listen to them, I get the impression that they are fulfilling the potential of Folk Music and all the baggage of Folk Music that I mentioned before. It’s not just verse chorus verse. Sometimes it is, sure. But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it wanders. And sometimes they improvise, at least it seems that way. And you get the impression that what one person does effects the other people in the band, that it’s just not the INSERT SOLO HERE type of playing and that each time that they play, it’s not the same. Maybe it is. I don’t think so.

Sometimes after they wander, it comes back together in harmony. Sometimes they get the crowd to sing along in harmony as well. Songs don’t always end when you think they should. Joe, the drummer, doesn’t always play with drumsticks. Sometimes he just rattles springs on the underbelly of the snare.

Mike described Megafaun once as ‘having soul’. Great bands have that. You can’t be one without. And as I listened to them under a cloudless sky, I thought it was perfect. I thought that they were the soundtrack of the earth moving and growing, where it doesn’t always grow in ways that you expect, where if you look at the bark of a tree it’s not orderly and neat and neither is where trees decide to plant themselves or how those trees decide to grow and where their leaves fall. Everything depends on everything else. But when you step back, there is an order, some kind of order anyways. There’s a point where the trees stopped populating and the way that the creek beside that line curves, well I can’t imagine it being any other way. Let me say it again, everything depends on everything else. This is the sound I want to hear before I pass on to somewhere else and the sound I want to hear when I come back.

Everything depends on everything else.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Jason