Nick Govrik live at Grimey’s!
Join us on Friday, July 18th at 4:00 pm for an instore performance and album signing by Zac Farro! He’s releasing Operator, a new solo album—the first release to bear his name—and will be celebrating the record with us and all of you! The following day, Saturday July 19th, Zac will be playing a release show at The Blue Room, but this will be your chance to see him perform some of his new songs in the intimacy and sunshine of the record store in the afternoon. For more information about the album and to preorder a copy on crystal clear colored vinyl, visit our site here. You can also preorder the album in the record shop. All who preorder for local, event pickup will receive a wristband for Zac’s album signing and that guarantees entrance to our event. (And FYI, you can enter to win a pair of tickets to the Blue Room show in person in the shop through Thursday, 7/17.)
Operator is Farro’s most personal record. He describes it as “an entire inner dialogue with myself, within myself…. So it felt right to cut out the middleman and go ‘This is Zac Farro’. It’s exciting–and it feels a lot more pointed. The record explores timeless, but endlessly fascinating, questions: What goes on in those heads of ours? Why can the simplest interactions lead to a total freakout? Is someone else at the controls, a tiny person flicking a switch to “anxiety” every time we get a paragraph-long text?” Across the record, Farro interrogates anxieties, family issues and communication breakdowns in hope of working out, fundamentally, why we’re all like that
Working with trusted friends and collaborators, Josh Gilligan and Chancey Pierce, Farro, for the first time in his life, let vibe and intuition guide him, without an overarching influence or theme in mind. “We said, let’s show up at the studio and see what happens. I’ve always had such a vision, even sometimes the name of an album, before I go in,” he says. “This one was like, if we’re together, the magic will reveal itself. And it did.” The only imperative, says Farro, was playing from the heart. You can hear that in Daniel Kadawatha’s rich, funky Wurlitzer on “Second Chance”, in Farro’s intuitive, subtly complex drum patterns, in Gilligan’s richly emotive pedal steel on “All I Really Want Now”, in the way Chancey’s sturdy bass lines undergird the entirety of Operator. Farro’s gift as a producer and bandleader is in letting his songs breathe; even as these songs interrogate the passing of time (“Gold Days”) or reflect on loss (“I Need You”), they feel open and lived-in, richly explorative and never maudlin.
At its core, Operator’s central idea is universal: how can we better connect with other people? The album’s opener and title track sets the tone: “Finally got the message / You’ve been trying to send me / But I keep on missing the point,” sings Farro, over lush production that splits the difference between Laurel Canyon and exotica. Operator is an album length quest to engage in a stronger, deeper way, and the title track acts like its mission statement, finding Farro wishing he could stop all the noise rattling in his head and just focus on the people around him.
We are happy to be some of the folks who can surround and support Zac as he launches Operator into the world. We can’t wait to connect with him and all of you, here in the shop as we both celebrate and enjoy with our lovely Nashville music community. See you soon, Music City! You can preorder a copy of Operator on limited edition colored vinyl or CD on our site here or at the shop on the day of the album release & our event. All who preorder will receive in advance of July 18th will receive an email on the 17th with preorder pickup and event details.
Zac Farro Operator album