Exclusive Premiere | Goodnight, Texas – Uncle John Farquhar
By Scott Bernstein Aug 2, 2014 • 12:20 pm PDT
To give a little background, the band’s name comes from the unincorporated Texas town halfway between songwriters Avi Vinocur and Patrick Dyer Wolf’s hometowns of San Francisco and Chapel Hill, NC; while Uncle John Farquhar is named for Wolf’s great-great-great grandfather. A sermon Farquhar delivered on the occasion of Abraham Lincoln’s death graces the record’s liner notes. “In my eyes, he serves as kind of the first entry in the scrapbook that is this album concept,” said Wolf in a press release announcing the LP. “I was thinking of the album as a scrapbook -a collection of clippings over the course of the past century and a half,” added Wolf. “The oldest entries of the album package relate to John Farquhar, who was my maternal great-great-great grandfather, a minister in Lancaster PA: the cover of his Abraham Lincoln sermon is the cover of the liner notes booklet. Inside the booklet a letter that he wrote to his cousin in Massachusetts during the Civil War after visiting makeshift hospitals right outside the battle of Gettysburg. These documents are sort of the anchor of the work, so we’ve got this familial link to a seminal point in America’s history and an example of both his (John Farquhar’s) public and private voices.”
Vinocur and Wolf’s passionate vocals and spot-on harmonies are impeccably captured on Uncle John Farquhar as is the band’s throwback instrumental work. Most of the songs on Uncle John Farquhar tell stories that leave us wanting to learn more about the weary characters featured within. Take a listen to the new album, which is currently available for pre-order via iTunes:
