Seeing Far tomorrow night at the Troubador, really stoked for it!
FAR “Are You Sure?” At Night We Live, 2010
Next Tuesday, Far will release their first album in twelve years. I remember being at Far’s last show back at the Metro in Chicago, in 1998, and feeling like they were on the precipice of either greatness or disaster; I’ve been in that place before and I know what it looks like. They broke up shortly thereafter.
A few years later, I started a band called New End Original with their singer, Jonah Matranga, and despite the severe lack of material that we left behind, he and I have maintained some sort of connection that won’t seem to let up. Like the way I played in his last band, Gratitude, for a two-month tour in 2006, or how just this past January, I remixed one of his songs on a lark. I’m really proud of that. But on Tuesday, Far will have a new album, and perhaps inevitably, I make a spectral appearance on that record, too.
I wrote the music for “Are You Sure?” near the end of New End Original as a response to “Lukewarm” — which was, at the time, the only uptempo song we really had. In my head it was called “Please Stay Together” because I was pretty sure we were about to break up, and quite simply, I did not want to; we seemed to be on that precipice. So there’s a sense of melancholy in this song for me, and it still reminds me of the second I realized our band was not going to make it — blurry-eyed in a Hamburg alley, trying to get away from the video cameras that were following us for a documentary film that later aired on German television.
There are ghosts in this song, not the least of which seems to be the man in that alley. I’m not him anymore, so listening to this recording is kind of surreal. But I feel grateful that Far chose to give this song the life it deserved.
