Album: Wide Swing Tremelo
Year: 1998
. . .
In 1997 Son Volt followed up their stellar debut, Trace, with the very-much-nonstellar Straightaways. A quarter-century later, I don’t remember why I didn’t like it, I just know that I didn’t.
I might not have been the only one, because Son Volt instantly followed it up in 1998 with the much much better Wide Swing Tremelo, where they rocked things up a bit. So ironically, my favorite song on the record was a slower one, the atmospheric near-ballad “Blind Hope.”
“Blind Hope” is based around a funky-adjacent Michael Heidorn drum beat that could almost be a drum loop — naughty naughty — as well as swirling guitars more likely to be found on the previous year’s Time Out of Mind, a Jay Farrar is singing in his quietest voice as well.
Spend a million dream days
Shook the hand of time, served gods
Waited around the display
Saw no revelation
As guitars — and guest Eric Haywood’s pedal steel — drift in and out of the song, adding cool little hooks here and there, Heidorn doesn’t even for a second lose the plot, holding it all together as Farrar keeps piling on the verses.
Bring it down and break it in
Casting it out, reeling it in
Living on blind hope again
Casting it out, reeling it in
Living on blind hope again
In a weird way, “living on blind hope again” is one of the most optimistic things Farrar has ever sang, and he follows it up by muttering under the music what easily could have been a rap, though thank the gods it wasn’t. And that seemed to be the end of Son Volt, as well, as Farrar broke up the band and went on to start a solo career, which despite building from the formal experimentation of “Blind Hope” really didn’t do all that much for me.
“Blind Hope”
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