To hear Mike Farris sing - an experience a bit like being pinned to the seat of an accelerating Porsche Taycan - is to believe that he was born to the stage, motivated from childhood, and destined for soul/gospel glory. Yet in Episode 327 of The String, we learn that A) Mike is lucky to be here at all and that B) a singing career was not remotely on his own radar until he was approaching his 20th birthday. And the two are related. In his teens, Farris almost died from drug abuse. Music was part of his rescue. And I’ve never heard him go as deep on these subjects as he does in this hour.
The proximate cause of our conversation is a bold and dynamic new record called The Sound Of Muscle Shoals, cut at the iconic FAME Studio with a host of Alabama hotshot sidemen. FAME’s founder, the legendary Rick Hall, and his son Rodney, have been long-time believers in Farris, including inviting him onto the anthology album Small Town, Big Sound, released in 2018 with elite artists like Willie Nelson and Alison Krauss. Rick Hall died in early 2018, but Rodney and Mike have remained close, and eventually, Hall agreed to back this latest in a string of exciting recordings by Farris, including his mighty Shine For All The People, which won the Roots Gospel Album Grammy Award in 2014.
“They've been a big supporter of mine for years,” Farris says. “And throughout that time, all the guys, the players down there, we've become pals too. And we've always talked about making a record. And it just all came together.” He calls it the best sounding, most complete, and most fun album he’s ever made. “It fits where I am in my life. It fits the way all of my musical influences have kind of converged with this group of songs.”
The 11 tracks include early memories of a bucolic youth in middle Tennessee before things went sideways in the opener “Ease On,” a sweet country rock number about the thrills and trappings of the fame he enjoyed in his 20s with “Bright Lights,” a gorgeous if sorrowful number called “Bird In The Rain,” and a couple of love songs about his longtime wife Julie, including the song we close the episode with, “Before There Was You And I.” Also here are covers of Tom Petty’s “Swingin’” from his 1999 Echo album, and “Slow Train” by soul icons William Bell and Steve Cropper, recorded first by the Staple Singers in 1968.
Farris grew up in various rural parts of Franklin Co. Tennessee, and he says his life really started when he and his mother moved to the county seat of Winchester, just west of Chattanooga. There, he had a bike and a bit of freedom to enjoy “the big city.” His first musical inspiration came from his dad’s tiny country record collection and a school bus driver named Miss Levona, who played the radio nice and loud.
“I would just stare out and get lost in this radio,” he says. “Everything from the Staple Singers and Al Green, and then they turned around and played, you know, Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. It was all over the place, and that was really the window to the world for me when I was a kid.”
But he didn’t make music his own thing until he found himself recovering from a near-fatal overdose at his father’s place in Murfreesboro in his late teens. One source of solace was his dad’s old guitar. “While he worked, I'm sitting in this house, and he's got a guitar in the corner, and I'm like, I'm going to teach myself how to play this guitar,” he says. “And I started teaching myself, playing Van Morrison songs.”
The gospel overtones of Morrison’s music would come in handy later, but when Farris discovered that he had songs - personal, cathartic songs - spilling out of him, he was drawn to some Nashville-based collaborators. His songs and uncommonly gifted singing met their guitars, bass and drums, and a band was born that seemed to need to exist. The Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies (name adapted from a Far Side cartoon) became Music City’s hottest rock band, packing clubs and attracting attention. Next thing he knew, Farris was in New York with a deal on Atlantic Records, source of a lot of the music he’d heard on that school bus.
You’ll hear how the band gave Farris a purpose in life while also re-igniting some of his darker habits. It was a fast and furious run that ultimately petered out (though the band has reunited for some recent shows). Long story short, that led to a stretch when he got sober for good and looked to new musical horizons, manifested in the album that broke him out with the Americana world, 2007’s Salvation In Lights. The story of his dear friend and manager dying of cancer and their pact to pursue the music that sat deepest in his heart, old spirituals and church house soul, and to find his magnificent voice for real, giving it wings, is told vividly here.
Mike is playing 3rd & Lindsley on July 30 and the Caverns in Pelham TN on Aug. 3, then touring the UK and Europe in October.
