Andrew Farriss

NEW SENSATION, NEW DIRECTION

Andrew Farriss Finds Inspiration in the Old West

BY LEE VALENTINE SMITH

ANDREW FARRISS IS BEST known as the co-founder, main songwriter, keyboardist and guitarist for Australian rock band INXS. He now splits his time between his home country and Nashville, Tennessee, playing his new hybrid country-rock and folk music, tinged with Old Western imagery. His debut EP Love Makes The World is a taste of a full-length album scheduled to be released early next year. The extended play disc relies heavily on themes of current events as filtered through a sepia-toned lens. It’s a startlingly different approach than the soulinjected rock of his former band, but the gritty country metaphors are a suitable platform for the earthy rocker’s new compositions. Farriss released a debut country single, “Come Midnight” late last year and followed it up the raucous “Good Momma Bad” in January, setting the tone for his rootsy new direction. Last month as the new EP launched, the multi-instrumentalist spoke with INsite from his farm down under.

Music in the time of pandemic is a strange thing to behold. You’re right. I was working on some stuff in Nashville when the shutdown began and they said, ‘Hey Andrew you can keep working, but we’re all going home.’ It changed a lot of plans. Then one day, I was working on my farm and I realized that some of the songs I’d already done were strangely appropriately perfect for these times. I had a body of work that I’d recorded between Nashville, Australia and in London so now here we are talking about it.

Even though you have an album and a half of material now, a solo project has been a long time coming. Well I’ve always been a songwriter but after Michael Hutchence passed away, we kept trying to do things and to be who we were but that group of people formed a nucleus of sound that was very hard to replace. No disrespect to anyone. People I admire have done that but for us it wasn’t the same. For us, we tried to make it work. But I’ve always been a songwriter so I’ve continued on.

Much of the material we both grew up on came from unsettled times and now here we are again. Yeah, a lot of things I hear in pop music, for example, is about alcohol and party time and all that. I like to party, too. But that’s just not what’s going on right now. It’s time to sort of look at thing a bit more sober terms.

That’s especially understandable coming from you, because unlike a number of your peers, you don’t live the typical rock and roll lifestyle. You seem to be literally grounded. Yeah, I’m a farmer. I have cattle and I’m very much a part of the farm operation. As a songwriter, I’m not afraid to say or talk about the big concepts. It’s kinda funny, I know. Here I am, I played with this huge, internationally famous group called INXS and now I’m doing country-rock folk music. My subjects are of the moment. Things changed in March and April. There’s other stuff going on now.

That’s the essence of the folk tradition, to hold up a mirror to what’s going in the world at any given moment. That’s exactly right. It’s actually a great time to find out the people who care enough, who have some grit, to want to talk about the world right now. Write songs about it.

The Beatles took that charge and went from yeah-yeah-yeah to “Revolution” in a relatively short period of time. Absolutely. They’ve always been an influence because that was the first band I saw.

I read you were five years old when you had that moment. Yeah, my dad took us to a variety show and the next thing you know, here are The Beatles. My brothers and I, who were all in INXS, we saw them. We said later, ‘Dad did that really happen?’ He said, ‘Yeah and you went to talk to them afterwards, too.’ Boy I’d love to hear that conversation, all these years later!

But thanks to INXS, you were able to meet just about everybody. Probably the biggest, in my opinion, was Ray Charles. INXS was recording in Paris and in ’93 or ’94 and Mr. Charles was downstairs recording. Michael and I, because we’d written over 300 songs together, we had a couple of songs that we thought would be good for him. Somebody said, ‘Why don’t you send them down to him?’ But we were like, ‘Oh he’s not gonna want to do one of our songs, are you crazy?’ But we did it anyway. The message comes back, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ We did a video for “Please” and we even played it live on David Letterman with Mr. Charles. One of the spookiest moments of my life was playing live piano and singing in front of Ray Charles. Now that was interesting! Well it was a horse-riding trip with my wife at the Mexican border. It was a real education down there. We rode the old stagecoach roads and routes and we saw the abandoned forts and Tombstone and all that. Went back several times. We even took the kids down there. Then when I went back to Nashville to write, somebody said, ‘What do you want to write about now?’ I said, ‘Well you’re probably not going to like this, but I’d like to write about the Old West, actually. That culture.’ I’m just not that interested in sounding like an ‘80s record, because I’ve been on ‘80s records. I really want to talk about where country music came about in the first place.

The Old West is decidedly cinematic. Yeah but it’s not Hollywood, it’s real. It’s dirty, it’s nasty. There are things out there that’ll bite ya. It’s dangerous. It’s all the things that modern country music isn’t. It wasn’t until I’d been there a few times that I fully realized the real grittiness of that part of US culture. I developed a huge appreciation for it and it began to inspire me and direct my style of writing.

You mentioned being there in the ‘80s. The INXS catalog still doesn’t sound dated like so many of your colleagues’ output from back then. I would agree with that. What’s weird is, I’ve had a few influential people who came along after us - Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20, Brandon Flowers from The Killers and Pat Monahan from Train - they all said to me, individually, that INXS does their heads in. They can’t believe how our music is still relative and still played on stations around the world. I told them all that I wish we knew what the magic formula was, but we just did what we wanted to do. I guess whatever we were doing, we got it right. Now I’m still at it. Then somebody asked the other day for some advice. I said, ‘It’s pretty simple: be true to who you are, be true to what you believe in and don’t follow the train. It’s already left the station.’