Unlike most artists who plant their roots in Music City, artist and songwriter Josh Farrow didn’t move to Nashville chasing the song. “I met a girl on vacation in Florida, and four months later I moved in with her in Murfreesboro, Tennessee,” the Illinois native says. “I was playing music at the time, playing in different bands and stuff – punk music, I played in a hippie band for a little while – and I didn’t really move here with the thought of like, ‘I’m going to move to Nashville and play music. I was just starting to write songs, and figure out what I was even doing with myself.”
It’s a story that ends well on all fronts – Farrow and she are now married. Meanwhile, the city’s disparate characters and ubiquitous superb musicianship began to impact him creatively. “I was so involved, so interested in [the south],” he says. “I was obsessed with it ’cause I had never been around it – just strange dark people living in the country in Murfreesboro, and going to a gas station and seeing people I’d never seen before. Just totally different lives. So I just started writing songs that felt southern to me, that fit that vibe of like, I have no idea who this guy is but he’s creeping me out, he could be a serial killer, he could have killed somebody, he could have a total different identity.” ‘Southern Gothic’ is a genre that could be easily ascribed to the artist, from the characters that made their way into Farrow’s writing, to the gospel-toeing, blues-leaning, pedal-steel howling offerings on Farrow’s upcoming debut. It’s not just music that’s borne the mark of the south; one of Farrow’s numerous tattoos is a large black widow spider on his forearm, a creature with which he’s had so many run-ins he’s begun to like it. “I just like to think that people have these some people walking around have these weird deep dark secrets,” Farrow continues, “and so I started writing songs like that about stories.”
Though Farrow’s early musical years involved his punk band, the transition to his current amalgamation wasn’t a far cry. “When you think about it, punk music is just folk music spend up – same three chords,” he says. “I feel like it’s just a natural progression when you are growing up like young and angry and into like aggressive things, especially like a young boy, and you’re listening to punk music and playing punk music. For me, I stumbled upon Bob Dylan and realized this is the basically same thing, he’s singing protest songs using the same chords, just on an acoustic guitar.” Rage Against The Machine and their version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Ghost of Tom Joad” may well agree. For Farrow, a growing-up soundtrack of 90’s alternative rock and The Beatles informed his early influences, and subtly infuse themselves into his music.
Farrow and his wife soon moved to East Nashville, the left-of-center, right-of-the-river home to music communities disparate from Music Row. Farrow struck up a conversation with a patron in the pizza place where he was working, a producer by the name of Dexter Green. The two began to work together – two songs became five, five became an album, which the duo wrote together over the course of four years.
“I lived like four doors down from his house where the studio was, so every day he would call me and be like, ‘Hey, I got this idea for a song, come over,'” Farrow says. “Depending what time of day it was I’d walk over with coffee or whiskey and we’d write. I didn’t allot a specific amount of time to finishing this album, which was good because we would write songs, sit on it for a little bit, figure out if we wanted to keep it, it was so loose. I think that’s part of the reason it turned out to be so different, like the whole different [feels] of the songs and different genres and everything.”
The album, Trouble Walks With Me, is due out October 28, and is indeed eclectic, sometimes blues-swaggering, sometimes folk reverent, sometimes New Orleans brash. Throughout, it’s rooted in Farrow’s smooth vocal, a soft marzipan that mellows and wails in perfect equilibrium. Farrow is joined by an all-star group for Trouble, with features from artists including Ruby Amanfu, Elizabeth Cook, and the McCrary Sisters.