Album Review: Pokey LaFarge, ‘Rent Money’
By Ian Pickus for Folk Alley:
If you’re still grooving to the dusty, Bacardi-scented party that started with 2021’s ‘In the Blossom of Their Shade’ and continued on past dusk via ‘Rhumba Country’ three years later, don’t stop: Pokey LaFarge is back with a new record, the mood’s still loose, and his lyrics are as wry and winking as ever. But something deeper is burbling under the surface of ‘Rent Money,’ 11 unadorned tracks that mark LaFarge’s first full-length release on his own label, Boxer Boy Records.
The atmosphere remains airy and sun-soaked on this record, produced by Elliot Bergman in a woodsy Chicagoland studio. With his brand of blues/honky-tonk/country guitar mastery and gospel-twinged vocals, LaFarge — not for the first time in his idiosyncratic career — has released a batch of songs that speak to an America limping through its 250th birthday.
It may not be not a one-to-one comparison, but I’ve been thinking about what LaFarge said about his pathway into music during a blistering March performance at Cohoes Music Hall in upstate New York. It was the Grateful Dead at first — and more than two decades in, the similarities are apparent. Both are shapeshifters, moving between traditional music, rock, blues, and more. They can easily riff through a long jam and also write a tight pop song. They’re also uniquely themselves, honing a tone until it’s a sonic trademark.
Along with the title track’s focus on the anxiety of making monthly rent, LaFarge here muses on “Work,” scratching out a living on the road, the futility of playing a rigged game, and the relative merits (in his eyes, few) of material things. We’re still having fun, but Woody Guthrie would sing these timeless tunes, too.
As LaFarge acknowledges in press materials, these songs serve as a rumination on a country with a growing wealth gap and a restive population, one where pressed vinyl seems essential even when the price of everything keeps going up.
“Got the world whistling the tune of his song,” LaFarge sings, sometimes moving to falsetto, on “Big Boss Man,” a story song suggestive of the devil. “You hate it and then you find yourself singing along.”
So where to turn if capitalism isn’t working for everyone?
This is also an album informed by LaFarge’s firm faith in Jesus and first-class ticket to the afterlife. On stage in recent years, sober, saved, and into his 40s, LaFarge has painted a picture of a veteran artist at the height of his powers who has finally figured out the personal life part of spending most of the year on the road. Now married to the singer Addie Hamilton, a game presence on stage and on this album, not to mention the mother of their new daughter, LaFarge says he has found peace among the plants on the family’s Maine homestead.
“Everything can be bought or sold, but you know you can’t save your soul/Can’t take it with you when you go,” he reminds us on the jaunty “Can’t Take It With You.” The closer, “On And On,” is an elegiac bop, but it also recalls the revival tent world depicted in the 2020 drama “The Devil All The Time,” in which LaFarge has a small role. “If you don’t want to hear me singing/you can’t stop the news I’m bringing/When the chariot comes swinging low/You know your time’s up/On and on and on, after the lights go out/We all gotta go on and on and on.”
You don’t have to be receptive to the message to feel its power in this music. Have you heard the good news? Pokey LaFarge has god-given talent, and he’s making the most of it.
