JULY 29, 2025 INTERVIEWS
Logan Farmer’s <i>Still No Mother</i>
I think the best music reaches you on a subconscious level, connecting with you in a way that's not always immediately obvious – when you hear something that makes a real connection, you know it's there even if you don't quite know why. Logan Farmer's Still No Mother is, as he describes it, "A folk record that addresses climate change anxiety," so it's fitting that the first night that I heard it there was a 3000 acre wildfire burning a few miles away from my studio, along with over one million acres that were currently on fire around the state of California. To my ears and mind Still No Mother is not really folk music, though maybe my definition of folk music is too narrow. If Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back could be called folk music, then so can Still No Mother. But where It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is loud and heavy with its message, Still No Mother is quiet and seeps into your consciousness slowly. In fact, this record is probably one third silence, or at least one third very, very quiet, with much more space between the notes than the notes themselves take up. Farmer's songwriting and vocal style feels to me like somewhere in-between Nick Cave and Bill Callahan, and when he moves into his higher register, which is not too often, it evokes Jeff Buckley and even Thom Yorke a bit.
